Museo del Prado unveils new website

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Museo del Prado presented its new website, which replaces the one launched in October 2007. This new website aims to improve the online experience of the Museum through a new, module-based structure that allows for connections to be made between the more than 10,000 works of art and more than 1,800 artists in its collection and other elements within its knowledge store (more than 20,000 accesses to lectures, activities, exhibitions, documents, archives and more) in order to achieve greater identification with users and involve them more closely.

The presentation, which was streamed live on the website itself, included introductory talks by Miguel Zugaza, director of the Museo del Prado, and Carlos López Blanco, director general of Public Affairs and Regulation at Telefónica. Technical explanations were provided by Javier Pantoja, head of the Museum’s Department of Digital Design, and by Javier Docampo, head of the Prado’s Library, Archive and Documentation Department.

This new website represents the first use of a Knowledge Graph developed by the Prado through the combination of the principles of the semantic web and the Museum’s own body of content. This new treatment of data, which are structured semantically, has allowed for the development of one of the project’s most important features: its faceted browser. Thanks to this new and powerful browser, users of the Museum’s website can for the first time access all the information contained in it by applying personal patterns and sequences of reasoning and searching. In addition, the content recommendation systems, which are also the result of this type of data structuring, will facilitate a more in-depth use of the information requested through a complete labelling of the works and artists that make up the Prado’s collections.

Conceived as one of the Museum’s priority projects within its Bi-annual Action Plan, the Prado’s new website aims to offer digital visitors an optimum experience, incorporating for the first time the possibility of creating and saving personalised tours as well as favourite works and other search results through the design of a specific social media section called “My Prado”. This channel will house “A Journey through the Senses”, comprising ten thematic routes through works in the Permanent Collection accompanied by a selection of music chosen by professionals from Spain’s Radio 3.

From a visual viewpoint, the site uses a language created to reflect the Museum’s corporate image, adaptable to all the different devices currently in existence, with a design that defines the site’s principal axes: the work of art as starting point, the collection as the principal means of access to browsing, the contextualisation of the information offered and the creation of an internal social network that has functions essential to achieving greater identification with users and involving them more closely in this new digital experience of the Museum.