By Anna Pacewicz | Executive Committee Chairperson
With generous ongoing support from you and hundreds of other donors, we have started the work of redeveloping our flagship Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum (KSVM) at www.Kresy--Siberia.org.
The KSVM was created in a major effort some 10 years ago with the objective to “inspire, promote and support the world-wide research, remembrance and recognition of Polish citizens’ struggles under occupation and in exile in connection with the Second World War”.
Over the years our museum has been extended and added to, often by different I.T. contractors. After all this time, the content management system is based on a now outdated version of WordPress, resulting in security vulnerabilities and obsolete, non-functional plug-ins. Several functions are also coded in an outdated version of PHP, which no longer fully works. Numerous pages also use Flash, resulting in degraded graphic display performance and limited browser compatibility.
Therefore, we are now re-building the KSVM. The objective is to create a new simplified, uniform and fully integrated design improves the user experience, facilitates website administration and fully integrates content display and cross-referencing across the various sections. The biggest task is to link the biographical entries in the Wall of Tribute with associated documents in the Hall of Images, the Hall of Testimonies, and the Historical Galleries.
Not only do we need to rebuild our newly redesigned website, but we also need to migrate all of the content from the current “old WordPress” website to the new website - over 75,000 biographical records in the Hall of Tribute; over 15,000 image documents in the Hall of Images; nearly 1000 video clips in the Hall of Testimonies; textual, graphic and sound content in 9 Historical Galleries and their 29 associated Exhibition Rooms as well as in 8 Special Exhibitions; reference information, including related research sources, weblinks, books and films in the Reference Center … and over 250,000 new data records from archival files into the Wall of Tribute.
We have been so lucky to find a wonderful I.T. specialist in the UK, Shelley Upton, who is also the daughter of a Sybirak and so has a personal interest in this project.
Shelley has started building the new museum website and migrating across all of our content. It’s still a work in progress but we can share some screen-shot “teasers” which shows the clean, new design and how the functionality will work.
We are grateful for the support that you have already given, and ask for you to please continue your support with your donations (US tax-deductible or UK gift-aidable), all earmarked for the KSVM.
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