Nowadays, GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutes have no shortage of content management systems (CMS) to choose from. But GLAM institutions face unique digital challenges. These challenges also include, oftentimes, needing integration with Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, handling extensive collections of diverse media types, facilitating advanced search and discovery capabilities, and supporting complex metadata and archival standards critical to ensuring proper cataloging, preservation, and accessibility. Moreover, digital strategies frequently involve organizing and presenting content based on detailed archival metadata standards, including RDF and OWL frameworks, and conforming to protocols like OAIS (Open Archival Information System) and OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
A solid Content Management System (CMS) that can support these specialized needs is essential for effectively managing, curating, and displaying GLAM collections. WordPress is one such popular platform that many industries use to build websites because it is simple to use and comes with a large community for support. However, for Glam institutes, WordPress might not be the best fit. For example, it doesn't handle metadata as well as other CMS options, and it lacks strong, maintained integrations crucial for organizing and labelling digital archives, which are likely requirements. Moreover, WordPress might not offer the required functionality to manage and protect digital collections.
On the other hand, at Chromatic we believe Drupal is an ideal CMS for GLAM institutions. This is owed to being widely respected for its flexibility, robust architecture, high level of security, and extensive capability to integrate with specialized digital tools essential for archival management. Drupal excels particularly with:
- Out-of-the-box integrations and well-maintained modules: Drupal supports seamless integration with major DAM systems, including OrangeDAM (we should know, we built the module!), Bynder, Islandora, just to name a few.
- Advanced metadata and archival management: Drupal easily handles complex metadata schemas such as Dublin Core, MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema), and EAD (Encoded Archival Description), and offers powerful support for RDF and linked data, aligning perfectly with GLAM archival standards.
- OAIS and OAI-PMH compatibility: Drupal offers support for vital archiving standards out-of-the-box. Its design makes it compatible with OAIS principles, which assist organizations in managing their digital content packages efficiently. This includes handling preservation metadata and overseeing the lifecycle of digital assets. Additionally, Drupal provides modules for OAI-PMH, which facilitates the collection of metadata. As a result, collections easily become accessible and discoverable to a broad audience.
- Custom Content Types: Drupal allows the creation of custom content types and taxonomies from within their admin UI. Users can quickly define content types for artifacts, exhibits, and events with custom fields per content type. In contrast, WordPress out-of-the-box revolves around a simpler content model--pages and posts. This usually requires either the help of a developer to set up and/or the use of third-party plugins to achieve similar complexity, like CPT UI and Advanced Custom Fields.
- Entity References and Relationships: Drupal’s built-in entity reference capabilities make it easy to create relationships between content types. For instance, a library can link individual artworks or documents to specific collections or exhibits. This provides a rich contextual experience for users, and leaves editors with a single source of truth, in case information needs to be updated.
- Scalability and security: Drupal positions itself as an enterprise-level CMS and it shows. It's built from the ground up to power large-scale institutional websites, handling significant traffic without compromising performance or security.
- Advanced User Roles and Permissions With Drupal, you can set access control to a granular level by default. and allows the creation of detailed user roles and permissions. For example, an archivist can have permission to manage digital assets, while researchers may have read-only access.
- Multilingual capabilities: Robust translation and multilingual support are critical for international reach, a necessity for many museums and galleries operating on a global scale and this also comes out-of-the-box with Drupal.
- Translations: Drupal also provides fine-grained control over what gets translated on a site, if need be. This feature allows institutes to manage translated content efficiently without duplicating work. Once again, this is dependent on finding a plugin for this or writing custom plugins.
- Built-in Workflows: While Drupal has held the lead for a while, WordPress has a roadmap to improve and revamp its content workflow via Workflows and Real-Time Collaboration. However, this is still a work in progress. In contrast, Drupal has some existing content workflows in core.
- Revision Control: Both CMS are over 20 years old and have robust revision control. Drupal, though, sees all content (images, blocks, and content types) as "nodes" and thus more types of content come pre-built with revision control. With WordPress, revision control comes with pages and posts but would require a plugin to include revision history for widgets and media.
We migrated the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum from its legacy DAM, EMC Documentum, to OrangeDAM and Drupal. It was a great choice for the project as we were handling many different forms of digital archival material and large quantities as well. Besides a successful migration, we were able to enhance the user experience by redesigning their search functionality with Solr. Read more about the process here if you are interested!
We highly recommend Drupal for GLAM projects due to its robust architecture and suite of GLAM-focused modules. If your organization plans to build a new digital presence, improve an existing site, or move your collection to another platform, we believe Drupal is an excellent choice. To learn more about how Drupal can address your GLAM institution's needs, feel free to check out our GLAM case studies or reach out to us to discuss your project in detail.
