Welcome to our blog!

Here you will find news, happenings, and occasional musings from the Harvard Art Museums. Visit us often to see new content each week.

You may have noticed that this is one of a number of enhancements we’ve made to our site. Some are small (we refreshed the design). Others you can’t even see (we converted to Drupal). One enhancement we’re really excited about is our improved collection search tool.

Here are a few of its new features:

Refined Search Interface

We whittled down our main search fields based on the most frequently used searched categories: Keyword, Artist, and Title. (Advanced Search is available for those who want to start with a finer-detailed search.) After an initial broad search, users have the ability to refine their search criteria. In this example search, I searched for works by Rembrandt and refined it to display works that are currently on view. From there, I can further refine my results to just display prints by selecting “print” under the “Classification” heading.

More Detailed Detail Pages

On object detail pages, we’re exposing additional data to provide a more detailed history of the objects and improve searching. This includes access to larger object images, related objects, alternate/former object titles, previous artist attributions, and more. Artist names are now linked to make it even easier to find other works by that person. See Sargent’s Breakfast Table for some of these additional features. Ultimately, our goal is to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to the information you’re looking for.

User Accounts

Are you using our collection search as a research tool? You can now set up user accounts to save your searches and lightboxes. So, feel free to go on that 30 minute coffee break.  We’ll keep your research saved just as you left it.

So what do you think of the new site enhancements? We’d love to hear your thoughts.