Árni Magnússon Institute - Relaunch with OpenEDU

Industry
Government agency
Solution
CMS solution
Technology
Drupal, Apache Solr

The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies is an Icelandic university organization with a specific focus on linguistics, preserving Icelandic language and literature. The goal with their relaunch was to have a platform for the large amount of available researches and publications about Icelandic language and to present both the legacy of old Icelandic and the modern language as well. 

The Institute has various databases that collect documents, so there is a lot of information available for those who are interested in Icelandic linguistics.

The website’s structure was redone by the client and our task was to create wireframes, UX and web design with a focus on showing both legacy and contemporary language, and modernizing the site with the use of APIs available for content.

The pages can have different looks based on how the authors want to structure them. Different types and designs of paragraphs can be added to display dictionaries, publications, events and news about the institution. 
Custom separators are available to present different types of content and the layout of paragraphs can also be specified to make them stand out and to match with the information they contain. APIs are used to collect and present data.
Users can give feedback on different pages and can share them on social media. 

Events can directly be added to the user’s own calendar, and they also are connected to other related events and news items.

Academic rules are very strict about displaying information of publications, so we needed to adhere to these regulations as well.

Search and using DMII

On the backend we used SolR and Search API. When a visitor searches for a word, the field helps with autocomplete terms to make it easier to find, and it searches in every content type, including articles, publications, news and events as well.

One of the most exciting parts of the search is using DMII, The Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection (or BÍN in Icelandic). This database is a collection of paradigms accessible on the Árni Magnússon Institute’s website, and it supports searching for terms where both headwords and inflectional words. This means that if a headword ‘horse’ is being searched for, during the search all its Icelandic variations come up, and every article, news item or event appear in the search results where this specific words inflectional form appears. 

Special approval was needed to use DMII special approval, and it’s not available yet for global usage, although it is on the roadmap.  

The website was built with the  the OpenEDU distribution, which is directed at providing higher education a great framework to meet the most common technical and UX needs while being fully extensible to build up to more complex technical requirements. 

The site is multilingual, and it went live in spring 2019. The translation of the content to English is still being worked on, it will be available soon. 

Publications and researchers

One of the main goals of the site is to present the work of researchers of the institute.
Since we are talking about a lot of written data, we needed to aggregate this information. The website connects to 5-6 databases to pull in the publications and researches from the researchers and display them for the users. Staff members and researchers have their own pages that displays their job experiences, education and researches, including bibliography appearances and related content on the website. Publications written at The Institute can be either downloaded in PDF, or purchased in book form, linked directly from the website. 
Some of the publications and linked articles can also either be downloaded from the site or be visited on an outside webpage. 

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