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The Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) in Ottawa, a long-time Andornot client, required a new version of their bilingual online catalogue and staff bibliography that would pass the strict requirements of W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Andornot helped CCI boost the requirement into an opportunity to add new features, including facets, multi-database search, spelling suggestions, and faster search performance.

The CCI Library has one of the largest conservation and museology collections in the world. The collections are regarded as an important source for conservation and museology literature on a wide variety of topics, such as preventive conservation, industrial collections, architectural heritage, fire and safety protection, museum planning, archaeological conservation, preservation in storage and display, exhibition design, disaster preparedness, and museum education. The holdings include a large selection of books on textiles, furniture, paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, and archaeological and ethnological objects.

-- "CCI Library". Canadian Conservation Institute. Retrieved 4 July 2012.

cci-results-facetedThe upgraded website uses the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI for short), a modern and highly configurable web application that tempers cutting-edge open source search technology with many years of Andornot experience in search-focused design.

It was possible to meet WCAG compliance because AnDI provides complete control over every HTML tag and CSS statement. The HTML5 structure presents a clean cross-browser template that reads well on mobile devices and has backwards-compatible support for older browsers.

The CCI Library's French and English versions were created with AnDI's built-in multilingual support, and are triggered through the presence of "en" or "fr" in the URL. Moving from one to another is a smooth transition: a user can switch the page language at any time without interrupting their experience or being redirected to a start page. Even errors and page-not-found messages are bilingual.

Facets and spelling suggestions (and many other features) are made possible by AnDI's open source search technology: Apache Solr. Solr is blazing fast, optimized for full-text search on the web, and relied on by some of the biggest names on the internet.

Every page is bookmarkable because the URL always holds the information needed to reconstruct the page. This makes the site friendly to permalinks and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The CCI Library retains its catalogue and staff bibliography collections in separate Inmagic DB/TextWorks databases that staff continue to update through its familiar desktop interface. Updates are extracted and indexed by Solr automatically on a regular basis via Andornot's Data Extraction Utility (internally we nickname it 'Extract-o-matic') from a Powershell script. The index schema is a Dublin Core derived metadata element set that Andornot helped to map to both collections.

 

andi-element-lozenge-1.0_188x188AnDI can be configured to reflect any field set from any data store or database, as well as rich documents such as PDF and Word, images with EXIF metadata, etc. Contact Andornot about AnDI for your own collection.

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