Hi We have finally got the new museum web site ready. It should much easier to navigate. We would be really interested in getting feedback on the changes so please feel free to e-mail us with your comments. 1. New Museum Web Site Launched 2. Donate Money On-line To Dungarvan Museum 3. Recent Donations and Events 4. New Articles Placed on the Web Site 5. Volunteers Needed For Scanning Project 6. Changing Email address for this mailing list ============================================== 1. New Museum Web Site Launched ============================================== Dungarvan Museum County Waterford have revamped and rebuilt their award winning web site www.dungarvanmuseum.org . As part of their commitment to meeting the needs of all of the community, the site now includes a version of the site for the visually impaired. People who suffer from various visual impairments (including colour blindness) and blind people (using a Braille browser to speak the sites content to them) can now enjoy 2500 pages of content on the history of Dungarvan and County Waterford. In 2002 the web site was short-listed among the top five research museum web sites in the world at the sixth annual Museums and the Web conference in Boston. It followed up this success by being awarded Best Publication for Visitors at the Irish Museum Of The Year Awards 2002, in the process beating stiff competition from the The National Museum Of Ireland, The National Gallery Of Ireland and The Ulster Museum. In 2003 the museum has focused on improving accessibility and navigation on the web site for visitors. The site now meets International web content accessibility guidelines. In addition, two major features have been added to the site to aid people in finding the content they are looking for. Web sites with large quantities of content have difficulty in 'pushing' all of the content that is contained on the site to a visitor. The information a visitor requires may be buried somewhere on the site but they just can't find it. To enhance the visitor experience the museum has added a related articles feature. If a person visits the site to access an article on the War Of Independence they will have further reading recommended to them. A similar system of 'Related Articles' is used on major news sites like CNN, BBC etc. The ability to select articles by time period has also been introduced. Now you can click on a time line or select the era from a drop down menu that interests you and all articles relating to that period will be listed. Work has also been undertaken on ensuring that the site can grow and expand into the future. Work is in progress constructing a content tree for the content management system powering the site. This will enable the web site editors to add extensive additional depth to the site. In time the site will be able to contain tens of thousands of pages of content. This content tree will also allow editors better manage categories / sub categories and automatically transfer entire branches of the tree creating a new category for content if the need arises. ============================================== 2. Donate Money Online To Dungarvan Museum ============================================== Dungarvan Museum is a non profit voluntary museum (even the web site was designed for free by Déise Design). The local council generously provides us with a home for the museum free of charge. The running costs of the museum are partly met by the local council but a large proportion of the finance we need to run the museum has to be raised by voluntary effort (book sales and raffles etc.). We would be grateful for any financial donation large or small to help us with our work. We can now accept credit card donations on-line using Paypal. Donations received in this way are used exclusively to purchase artifacts in on-line auctions. You can decide the amount you wish to donate (it can be a small as 1 or 2 euros or dollars), it will be appreciated. ============================================== 3. Recent Donations and Events ============================================== The History Outreach Program is starting to produce material from around the West of the County. We have recently received some nice material from the Aglish / Clashmore area. Also we have had donated a nice short history of Tallow that will appear on this web site in a month or so. ============================================== 4. New Web-site Articles ============================================== We have added several new articles to the web site www.dungarvanmuseum.org . Four new biographical articles have been added to the web site People in Waterford History - 20th Century People in Waterford History - 19th Century People in Waterford History - 18th Century People in Waterford History - 17th Century The Struggle For Freedom In West Waterford A lecture on the War Of Independence and Civil War in Waterford delivered by Domnall O'Faoláin in 1966. Domnall was the son of Commandant Pax Whelan C/O of Waterford No. 2 Brigade I.R.A. during the War Of Independence. Please bear in mind that this article is written from a Republican perspective. We feel it is important to place these articles online regardless of the viewpoint that they are written from. The fact that Dungarvan Museum publishes an article does not indicate that we support the views in the article. ============================================== 5. Volunteers Needed For Scanning Project ============================================== [The scanning project has not moved as quickly as we had hoped although we are making progress. I will be in touch with volunteers in the next week with details of the project.] Many out of print / out of copyright documents are in the Museum Archive. We would like to make these available on our web site but due to the constraints of staffing and time we aren't able to scan/ocr all of them. Following a suggestion from John Geary, one of our list members from America, we have had the idea of getting list members to help us scan text from these documents. Here is how we would hope the idea would work. We would post photocopied documents to a volunteer. They would scan them. They would e-mail us the scanned document. We would probably have to send a minimum of about 30 pages a time to make it worth the museums while. If you have the ability to scan documents and want to help the museum please send your e-mail address to william@deisedesign.com . We wouldn't be in a great hurry to get documents scanned. If they were sent back within a month we would be more than happy. ============================================== 6. Changing Email address for this mailing list ============================================== To REMOVE your email address from this list send an email to members-request@dungarvanmuseum.org with the following line in the body of the message. unsubscribe youremailaddress@email.com Example : unsubscribe johndoe@museumemail.ie To ADD your email address to this list send an email to members-request@dungarvanmuseum.org with the following line in the body of the message. subscribe youremailaddress@email.com Example : subscribe johndoe@museumemail.ie Deise Design - Web Site Design & Internet Consultancy www.deisedesign.com 086 2748377