Pleiades Wins an Award and Gets an Upgrade
Here at Jazkarta we’ve been working with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) for the past year on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to upgrade and improve Pleiades, a gazetteer of ancient places that is free and open to the public. Thus it was very gratifying to learn that Pleiades is the 2017 recipient of the Archaeological Institute of America’s Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology. Congratulations to the Pleiades team, headed by ISAW’s Tom Elliott!
Pleiades is the most comprehensive geospatial dataset for antiquity available today, giving scholars, students, and enthusiasts the ability to use, create, and share geographic information about the ancient world. It was developed between 2006 and 2008 on version 3 of the open source Plone content management system. Pleiades allows logged in users to define geographic locations and associate them with ancient places, names and scholarly references. The system remained in place from 2008 to 2016 without significant upgrades to the core Plone stack, despite the addition of a number of custom features. Over that time, over 35,000 places were added to the system – and performance degraded significantly as the content expanded.
Our most important NEH deliverable was improving site performance, which we accomplished through an upgrade from Plone 3 to Plone 4.3 and the elimination of performance bottlenecks identified with the help of New Relic monitoring. As of last September we had reduced the average page load time from 8.48 seconds before the upgrade to 2.1 seconds after. This 400% speed-up is even more impressive than it sounds because bots (search engine indexers and third party data users) were severely restricted during the pre-upgrade measurements, and all restrictions were lifted after the upgrade.
Performance improvement was just the start. Here are some of the other changes we’ve made to the site, which you can read more about in the August NEH performance report.
- Process improvements that streamline content creation, review, and publication
- UI improvements that facilitate the use of Pleiades data
- Improved citation and bibliography management through integration with the Zotero bibliography management system
- Enhanced Linked Open Data capabilities
- Comprehensive daily exports
- Bulk imports of Pleiades content
Because of Jazkarta’s high level of expertise in Plone and related technologies, we were able to deliver the Plone upgrade and related performance improvements 6 months ahead of schedule. This left more time for feature improvements than were originally envisioned. As Tom Elliott put it, “our investment in Jazkarta is paying dividends.”
Engagement Strategy, Agile Process, Trusted Partners
David Glick and I had a great time presenting at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference with The Mountaineers’ Jeff Bowman and Percolator Consulting’s Karen Uffelman (here’s a link to our session page.) We gave a soup to nuts run through of the big website project we did together. Jeff provided some context for the project and showed off the final result. Karen described the development of The Mountaineers’ engagement strategy, which was the basis for everything we did. She also explained how user experience and graphic design was integrated into the overall project. David and I described technical discovery, our agile process, and the year-long implementation of the Plone website and Salesforce.com back end. Karen and Jeff also covered how to survive project disasters (the consulting partner that The Mountaineers had carefully selected and vetted essentially went out of business after their initial round of technical discovery), and the importance of planning for ongoing support and development after the site is launched.
Through it all, we emphasized the keys to this project’s success, which were:
- A solid engagement strategy guiding what we wanted to accomplish – Percolator’s superpower.
- An agile process that minimized risk and adapted quickly to change – Jazkarta’s superpower.
- Working with trusted partners with great communication skills who understood The Mountaineers and the technologies they were adopting – as Karen put it, “Choose your project partner like you’d choose a spouse.”
How successful was this project? In addition to all the oooo’s, aaaah’s and good feelings, we have some numbers about that. In the first year post launch, the site had 69% more unique visitors, 72% more page views, and a 23% reduction in bounce rate. That trend continues through the present day.
If you’d like to learn more, you can view or download our presentation on Slideshare. You can also view the Twitter stream for our talk at #16ntcwebanatomy and read the shared document where the audience took collaborative notes. I’ll share here the most fun item on the stream – Twitter user @fulltrucker‘s artistic and amusing session notes:
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