Specify WebportalThe Specify web portals provide a quick and efficient method for both our researchers and the outside world to search the Museum’s public collections data.  The web portals, therefore, are foundational to fulfilling the Museum’s objective to enable the sharing of data and community engagement.

Specify recently released a major version upgrade of the Specify web Portal, bringing it to version 2.0.  This upgrade introduced a completely new method for data ingestion and updating, eliminating the need to restart the backend services after each update.   OMT has successfully retooled our data production pipeline to utilize the new, optimized process and upgraded all of the web portals to v2.0.

Perhaps the most unexpected but significant change was that in Advanced Search mode, the web portal now searched in a case sensitive fashion.  Feedback from the Museum’s collections personnel indicated that this change was undesirable and required too much explanation to outside users.  OMT is pleased to report that, in response to this feedback, a solution has been authored and put into the pipeline.  Searching the web portal is now case-insensitive and more permissive in its query analysis.  Searching is now more natural and intuitive, enabling a much more useful experience.

A brief rundown of using the Specify Web Portal search functionality can be found in the linked pdf document below.  This may be useful to distribute to public users that ask the collections staff for instructions.

Using-the-Specify-WebPortal