Drupal or Bust: The hazards of mixing technologies

Sharon Grant

The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

About the Field Museum

• 16th September 1893: The museum is incorporated in the State of Illinois as the Columbian Museum of Chicago.

Purpose: "accumulation and dissemination of knowledge, and the preservation and exhibition of objects illustrating art, archaeology, science and history."

- 4 departments (Anthropology, Botany, Geology, Zoology).- 3 in EMu 4th started this summer

- 24 million specimens(ish)- 0.01% available on the web

• 1905, the Museum's name was changed to Field Museum of Natural History to honor the Museum's first major benefactor, Marshall Field, and to better reflect its focus on the natural sciences.

• 1921 the Museum moved from its original location in Jackson Park to its present site near downtown where it is part of a lakefront Museum Campus that includes the John G. Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium.

The Grand Plan

“Replace the Museums 12+ year old website and integrate the 9 year old emuweb pages with the new site.”

Drink the Koolaid!

“the world's premier collections management system for natural history museums, cultural history museums, art museums, herbaria, botanic gardens, archives and special collections.”

“Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.”

This time last year

What the users said they wanted.

What the interns built for free.

What the software company thought.

Fund hunt.

What the budget would allow.

What the project manager negotiated.

What the users secretly hoped for.

How the technical lead designed it.

What the programmer coded.

What was delivered to the testers.

AndySowards.com Project Management Cartoon

But maybe we can do this?The future?

wb-pavlov.fieldmuseum.org/sarnia4/