The revitalization of the Ukraine SIG website
15
JULY
2012
Getting JewishGen’s Ukraine-SIG website to a new era.
Part of the year-long revitalization project of JewishGen’s Ukraine-SIG involved overhauling the website both in its looks and structure. On the old website, data was spread in a myriad of different web pages and Excel files, navigation was difficult and users frequently got lost, unable to locate information they sought.
The new website greatly improves navigation with an intuitive, visual interface featuring clickable maps that lead to “all-in-one town portals”. The restructuring is completed by two big indexation projects: The Master Index of Document Collections and the Master Index of People.
Each town portal displays basic town information, describes projects for the town (including all known document collections) and provides links to projects and document collections for the town.
The site is fully “hyperlinked” and there are several ways to access the same information: (1) clickable maps allow geographic navigation, zooming from a Ukraine map to a province (guberniya), from a province to a district (uyezd), and from a district to a town; (2) a browsable alphabetical list allows direct access to a town page; (3) a search box allows soundexed town name searches; and (4) wherever a town is mentioned, a link to the town is available. We use similar navigation aids for provinces, districts, projects and document collections.
The complexities and challenges of the project were not only technical but also concerned the data. Indeed, the information available in the different pages/files of the website (and in several ongoing projects) had to be “normalized” (i.e. town names had been standardized) and “linked” together in order to build a structured and consistent database.
We will discuss the technical and data aspects of the project, and demonstrate the new website.
| Speaker | Location |
|---|---|
|
Ariel PARKANSKY |
Miles Davis A & B |