Digital Art Library
About
OBJECTIVES
Equip the online community of art professionals and enthusiasts with a digital library that offers an instant access to the digital versions of such art publications as rare art monographs, museum collections and catalogues raisonnés.
CHALLENGE
Aiming to publish academic and art-related content that has never been available online previously, our Client requested to design, develop and implement a digital library. The main request was to bring under one roof the unique collection of digital catalogues of art in its most diverse and international contexts: museum collection catalogues, books on art history, museum studies monographs, art magazines, auction houses’ archives, etc.
The other request was to enable the Client’s publishing partners to share the reading rights to their art-related publications with the platform’s reading audience in return for relevant royalty.
SOLUTION
The platform we discovered together with the Client makes rare art publications accessible worldwide. This in turn adds to the fact that the platform’s publishing partners benefit from the opportunity to earn profits by publishing their collections of art publications via the digital library. These platform’s partners are equipped with user-friendly tools to go online with their manuscripts instantaneously. The platform calculates their royalty automatically.
The platform’s subscribers have a sophisticated search tool with numerous filters to browse the resource even for out-of-print or copyright-free editions, museum exhibition collections or upcoming auction sales. Specialized plugins for viewing and working with electronic versions of books enable end users to apply no additional tools for the reading purposes of any resource. All in one, we conversed a massive offline data base of authors and art publications into a digital resource, realized the library with flexible search options, and made our digital art library publication format agnostic.
Our engineers integrated Stripe payment system to the platform. This enables end users to pay for their access to the paid content within the platform. Special algorithms we’ve configured make custom plans possible. These configurations allow end users to pay non-flat fees, which is paying for the exact amount of the service consumed. We also realized the Client’s request to implement so-called ‘private cabinets’. This is another tool designed both for the reading audience and the platform’s publishers that logs the history of their chosen and/or published content and the amount of relevant fee and/or royalty.
Technology choice
- Frontend development – Twig
- Backend development – Symfony PHP framework
Team and Duration
- 1 backend engineer
- 1 frontend engineer
- 1 project manager
- 1 QA engineer
- 1 year for the end-to-end solution
RESULTS
The online platform we have realized equips the owners of the rights to art-related publications with a set of intuitive tools to go online and earn royalty. On the other hand, our digital library allows its reading audience to get an instant access to the digital content on all aspects of art: art books, exhibition catalogues, architecture manuscripts, visual culture publications and other art-related content.
