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One year of WhichMuseum: updates and expansions
At the end of 2015 we launched WhichMuseum, your place for museums, exhibitions, reviews and sharing cultural experiences. And wow, time flies! We have been around for more than a year now and much happened behind the scenes at WhichMuseum.
The plan
In our previous blog post, we described the direction we wanted to go with the project. Our future plans were roughly:
- Maintaining and expanding museum contacts.
- Making it possible for (museum) users to make direct changes to the platform.
- International expansion
Museum contacts
We have succeeded in the first plan - maintaining and expanding the museum contacts. There are now hundreds of museums that have registered with us and that make changes to their own page or add new content, such as new images and new exhibitions. Because of these contacts and the willingness of museums to make updates, we can keep offering accurate and up-to-date information to you as a visitor.
Museum Management
In order to simplify and streamline the process of making changes, our second goal was to make a feature that enabled (museum) users to make direct changes to the platform. We also succeeded in this and we call it ‘Museum Management’!
With the free Museum Management, museums can now see all their data in a structured overview and can easily make changes, most of which are directly implemented and visible on the site. As a result, we hope to be able to attract more museums to keep their data accurate and up-to-date.
Museum Management is currently only available to users with a museum account, but will in the future also be available for our normal users.
Internationalization
The actual expansion of the website of course also got some of our attention. We have added all of Belgium, with a total of more than 1000 Belgian museums! The Belgian version of WhichMuseum can be found on WhichMuseum.be, but the museums can be viewed on any version of WhichMuseum.
Search has been improved with an additional field. The destination (place) can now be selected first, after which various pages with overviews, exhibitions or specific museum pages can be selected. In addition, it is now possible to search for any place in the countries we have available (currently the Netherlands and Belgium). If there are no museums in that place on WhichMuseum, we show you museums in the neighborhood.
Future plans
Now that these three steps are taken, there is immediately enough to do next. For example, we want to expand our community. We want to make the experience for you as a visitor better by developing new features and making the platform more interactive and social. And as previously mentioned, another goal is to expand Museum Management so that everyone on the site can make suggestions for updates and can change general information.
In addition, we want to expand the contacts we have established with museums in the Netherlands and the new contacts with museums in Belgium. We understand that good cooperation with museums is very important for us and that we must cherish these cooperations.
However, our biggest goal is to put the platform literally and figuratively on the map in Europe. We have been working on the integration of various European countries and cities behind the scenes. Step by step we will add new countries, regions and cities to the site so that you can always use WhichMuseum for your most beautiful, cultural European city trips! Stay tuned!