The New and Improved Hirshhorn Audio

A few months back, we set out to ingest the Hirshhorn Museum Library Audio Archive from our old site into our new, Drupal-run site.  The collection include audio clips of interviews with artists as well as lectures and other events held at the museum from 1969-2004. With the use of views and panels, we were able to set up the Hirshhorn audio page in a similar layout to the old site.  With the use of feeds import, we were able to ingest all of the information about each and every lecture. We converted the links of the media files to audio players so that you never have to leave the page you are on in order to hear the supporting audio. It was a great opportunity to flex my Drupal muscles.

We created a special content type within Drupal to handle the Hirshhorn audio library and then we used a combination of rules and taxonomy terms to ensure that everything came up in the right place and with all of the necessary and matching information. You are able to search the audio library by author, title, date, etc. In order to do the searches of the library within the confines of Drupal, we used exposed filters in views. It was actually really awesome and worked remarkably well! I was impressed with the accuracy of the searches.

The project itself was a long time coming. We have been working on it for the past couple of months, on and off, perfecting it and importing all of the correct data; ensuring we had all of the audio file in DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) and double and triple checking everything, making sure we didn’t miss anything. We had a few different imports that we did in order to make the content type fill properly and still enable the special features that were desired (like Authors pages, subject additions, and pop up dates, etc)

If you get a chance, you should check it out! It is brand new and we are really excited about it! You can view it here!