<blog / Archived entries

When we launched the Creswell Crags website back at the beginning of summer 2009 the team at the crags were busy undertaking the mammoth task of digitising and re-cataloging their entire object collection. Integrating this incredibly important offline resource with the website in order to bring the data to the masses was an opportunity to good to miss.

The Creswell Object collection contains objects of archaeological importance numbered in the  hundreds of thousands and counting. Objects found during Victorian Britain sit alongside those found in recent times providing a rich and detailed record of Creswell Crags history. Highlights from the collection include stone tools, weapons and bones from Hyena, Bear, the ubiquitous Woolly Mammoth and a 2000 year old human skull.

The Creswell Team were already well underway with the categorisation and cataloging process using the Museum Collections Management tool MODES. Jon wrote a small windows application that when installed into the clients desktop environment acted as a middleman between the internal offline database and the outside world, publishing live changes to their internal database to the public front-end of the website.

We’ve always been incredibly proud of our involvement  with this project, Creswell Crags is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe and we’ve enjoyed working alongside the Creswell Team and  Jill Cook the curator of pre-history at The British Museum immensely over the years. Now we’re excited all over again at the extension of an already record breaking and award winning learning resource and are delighted that the on-going efforts of the Creswell team can now be accessed and enjoyed by a global audience.

Search the Creswell Object Catalogue.

We love the concept of things coming ‘full circle’ here at madewithpixels. So when we were offered an opportunity to re-think, enhance and re-launch an award-winning website for a major visitor attraction that we’d been involved with more than a decade ago. We thought all our birthdays had come at once.

Creswell Crags on the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire borders is one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe and is currently working towards ‘World Heritage’ Status – a label that would see it ranked alongside historical luminaries such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

A Limestone Gorge, Cave System, Country Park, Wildlife Reserve, Museum and Visitor Attraction; Creswell Crags, it’s object collections, research, exhibitions and website are supported (most notably) by the British Museum, who’s curator of pre-history; Jill Cook had a large hand in conceiving and planning. In the early nineties I’d worked on the team that put the original site and its award winning content together. Now, more than ten years later – we’d get to improve upon the design, enhance the content and introduce some new ideas of our own.

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