Fan of Full Fathom Five? Be sure to check it out at its new home!

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Do you have feedback for nmmimages.com?

If you missed it, Douglas McCarthy, Picture Library Manager at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, took the time to post a comment on my nmmimages.com post that is so thoughtful that I wanted to give it its own post. (Those of you who saw this already in the comments to the previous post can move on!) He provides his contact information, so if you have feedback on the site, please send it along--nmmimages.com has such potential that it would be wonderful if the user community responds to the staff's openness for comments.

I'm delighted to hear that I was wrong about the lack of searching instructions; Douglas very kindly points out their location, under the "Help" menu, and here's a direct link.

And do check out the Help section--the picture there is fantastic. I want a pair of sunglasses like the woman in the black & white print dress is wearing.

Douglas McCarthy's post:

Hi there

Thanks for featuring our new website and for your comments - this kind of feedback is invaluable. I am the Picture Library Manager at the NMM and have developed nmmimages.com from conception to launch over the last 14 months.

If I may respond to your points in order:

1) a "switch-off slideshow" button for slower connections is a great idea I'll investigate.

2) content: another good point made here. NMM has developed several on-line catalogues since the internet was born, featuring a variety of content presented in different ways. With nmmimages.com, we're trying to present concisely and consistently in terms of caption length and format, for example. This takes longer (we spent 3 months editing 15,000 captions last summer!) but will be worthwhile, I feel.

3) search: this is an area we're working on and improvements will come during 2009, such as keywording. The site does offer phrase (and other flexible) searching. The 'how to' guide on this is in the 'Help' area, but I'll look at making this more prominent.

4) Google is king and likely to remain so!

We have an exciting plan of development for the site, so please keep an eye out for new collections and features this year.

Do feel free to reply here or email me (douglas.mccarthy@nmmimages.com) with further comments if you wish.

Best regards

Douglas McCarthy
Picture Library Manager
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Heather

Thanks for setting up this post - we feel honoured! I've bookmarked this page and will come back to see any comments left by your visitors.

Glad you liked the Help picture too - there are more images of this kind in our Cruising collection here

Best wishes

Douglas

Heather said...

No problem, Douglas! Please let me know any time MaritimeCompass can help! We're very interested in promoting fantastic research tools like nmmimages.com.

And the Cruising collection is wonderful--there's so much there--I especially like the Barbary macaques.