Dungarvan Museum Among World's Top Five Museums

Organisation :	Déise Design Website Design
Article Title :	Dungarvan Museum Among World's Top Five Museums
Page Title :	Newspaper Article
Page Number :	1
Publication Date :	23 June 2003
Expiry Date :	Never Expires
Category :	Latest Company News
URL :	http://www.deisedesign.com/de3/web/Display/article/28/1/?lang=en

Dungarvan Museum's website at www.dungarvanmuseum.org has been short-listed among the top five research museum web sites in the world. At the sixth annual Museums and the Web conference (held in Boston) — the premier international venue to review the state of the Web in arts, culture, and heritage, Dungarvan Museum's web site was short listed in the Best Research Site, Museum Search Engine or On-line Database category. According to the Museums And The Web organisation the sites short listed support research on museum collections and provide excellent resources for researchers from any discipline. They are primarily aimed at on-line databases and search engines that provide detailed information for individuals and/ or groups.

Reviewed websites were marked according to the following criterion:

Ease of use for both experienced and novice researchers
Accuracy and depth of content
Consistency of material
Currency of links and updates
Extent of links and references to other related resources and sites

Also short listed along with Dungarvan Museum's web site were

Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators (Smithsonian Institution, American National Air And Space Museum)
Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History
EH Strickland Entomological Museum (University Of Alberta)
Tate Online (Tate Galleries, UK)

The winner of the award in Dungarvan Museum's category was the American Museum of Natural History.

It is quite an achievement for a small local museum to be able to compete with these large museums on an international stage. To make the final shortlist Dungarvan Museum displaced web sites from the Smithsonian Institute and Harvard among others.
The website was constructed at no charge by Martin and William Whelan of local website design company Déise Design as their contribution to preserving Waterford's past. The site has been constructed using a content management system called Déise Content Manager developed by the Déise Design web consultancy over a two-year period. This content management system allows Dungarvan Museum Staff to publish their information online quickly.

At the moment the site has over 1000 pages on local history. The site uses text, video, photographs, virtual tours and downloads to explore many topics of local historical interest (the Famine, the Moresby Disaster, King John's Castle, Co. Waterford Men in the Great War, War Of Independence etc.).

The website allows Dungarvan Museum to function as a publishing house for local historians. Publishing online is a cost free method for local historians to distribute articles they have written to a larger audience than would normally be available to them. New articles are added on a monthly basis. Between 800 and 1500 different people a week consult our online archive on West Waterford history and over 500 people from all over the world are members of our free electronic mailing list.
Dungarvan Museum Society is a voluntary non-profit organisation and was founded in 1982 to run the museum. In 1999 the Museum moved to a larger space in the old Town Hall in St. Augustine Street, Dungarvan, County Waterford. Dungarvan Museum is part funded by Waterford County Council.

You can read further details about the Museums and the Web competition online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/ .