Digital collections democratize access to culture, history, and education. With the right design, they can bring your experience to the visitors who can’t make the trip, or extend an in-person visit for your most engaged patrons.
Equally, online archives are an insurance policy; a means for institutions, organizations, libraries, museums, and galleries to create a digital footprint of their most important assets.
From preserving to sharing and collaborating, your collections are better online.
STQRY Collect stands out in this space as a comprehensive solution designed specifically for cultural and heritage institutions. Let's explore how this platform can revolutionize the way you manage, preserve, and share your valuable collections.
What is STQRY Collect?
STQRY Collect is a user-friendly platform designed to help you create, manage, and showcase digital collections online. Whether it's images, books, oral histories, or other media, STQRY Collect allows you to build a visually appealing and powerful website to display your collections with ease. It’s built to be simple yet robust, offering an accessible solution for sharing digital content in a beautiful and organized way.
What are the benefits of STQRY Collect?
More than a collections website, STQRY Collect is a dynamic tool that creates stunning digital repositories for a wide range of content, from individual images to intricate oral histories. Its design is simple but powerful, allowing no-code teams to upload, configure, publish, and share collections with ease.
- Customized Configuration: We believe your digital interface should be an extension of your destination. With STQRY Collect, you can customize your metadata, storage options, themes, and publishing settings to align with your identity and needs.
- Seamless Population: Our platform simplifies the process of populating your digital archive with multiple avenues for content integration. Use the API for easy uploads, go manual, or leverage the bulk import feature for efficient data migration.
- Global Publication: Expanding your user base has never been easier. STQRY Collect offers versatile publishing options, enabling users to share their curated collections online via API integration or syndication feeds.
- Content Reusability: Go beyond the limits of a single platform. With STQRY Collect, your assets can be repurposed across your platform ecosystem, including your mobile app, kiosks, website, smart TVs, and aggregators.
What sets STQRY Collect apart?
STQRY Collect stands out in the digital collection management landscape by offering a unique blend of simplicity, community-focused features, and powerful tools to bring collections to life online. Here's a detailed breakdown of what sets STQRY Collect apart from other digital collection management platforms:
- Digital Design: Whether a single image or a full collection, we believe your digital home should be as stunning as the real thing. STQRY Collect makes it easy to build beautiful collection websites, complete with powerful search capabilities, custom layouts, and support for all content types.
- Online Asset Repository: Fundamentally, STQRY Collect operates as a robust digital object repository. Safe and powerful, it’s a crucial part of preserving and sharing your digital property. Our powerful API connects your collection to your website, mobile app, kiosk, and more. With flexible storage options, you can access our cloud-based solution or opt for your own storage strategy.
- Community Connection: More than curation, STQRY Collect makes community engagement easy with user comments, tagging, collaborative article writing, and file uploads. We designed the platform to promote a sense of access, ownership, and contribution among your users.
- Responsive Layouts: STQRY Collect's design is completely responsive, guaranteeing an optimal viewing experience on both desktop and mobile devices without any specialist knowledge.
- Multimedia Support: With support for diverse content types, including images, audio, video, and animation, the platform caters to all creative mediums.
- Download Options: Users can download high-resolution copies of images while adhering to licensing restrictions.
- Search Engine Optimization: Each content item is assigned a clean URL for better search engine indexing and shareability.
- Sharing Tools: Integration with popular social media platforms and sharing options encourages content dissemination.
- Standards Compliance: STQRY Collect adheres to HTML5 and the latest web standards, enhancing compatibility with search engines and social networks.
STQRY Collect Real-World Use Cases
STQRY Collect, while versatile, finds strong application in several real-world scenarios, particularly where community engagement and public access are key:
Museums and Galleries
Museums worldwide use STQRY Collect to manage everything from fine art to natural history specimens. The platform adapts to diverse collection types while maintaining consistent documentation standards.
A modern art gallery streamlined their exhibition planning by using STQRY Collect's customizable fields to track installation requirements, artist contacts, and loan agreements alongside digital representations of artworks.
Archives and Libraries
For archives and libraries, STQRY Collect provides the perfect balance between preservation and access. Special collections become discoverable through carefully controlled digital access points while the physical items remain protected.
One university library uses the platform to manage their rare book collection, linking digitized pages to comprehensive bibliographic records that scholars can browse remotely before requesting physical access.
Cultural Heritage Institutions
Indigenous cultural centers use STQRY Collect to document traditional knowledge and artifacts with customized fields that respect cultural protocols. The platform's flexible access controls allow communities to determine who can view sensitive materials, while still making general information available for educational purposes.
Historical Societies
Local historical societies with limited staff find STQRY Collect's intuitive interface particularly valuable. Volunteers can contribute to collection documentation without extensive training, expanding the organization's capacity while maintaining professional standards.
Case Study: Taking Palmerston North Libraries Online
Located in Manawatu-Wanganui, New Zealand, Palmerston North Libraries and Communities has a mission: to inspire people to explore the pathways of the world. Their original online collections site was holding them back. Without mobile-friendly, intuitive navigation and the capacity to index across individual items, their digital collection was falling behind.
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By pivoting to STQRY Collect, the Palmerston team opened a new pathway for their audience to explore.
The Manawatū Heritage now lives on a STQRY-powered website. Users can explore individual items, browse by collection, or log in to start their own curatorial ‘scrapbook’ experience, collecting their favorite items, organizing them by sets and collections, and opting to share their groupings with a public audience or keep them private.
The Palmerston team took user engagement one step further with the ‘Contribute’ segment of their web app.
This page allows users to upload their own media, including any interesting artifacts to add to their library or to submit articles in conversation with the community.
These features redefine immersion as it relates to art and history and allow users to be more a part of these experiences than ever before. The Manawatu Heritage app offers a choice between English and Māori in the dropdown menu, and a ‘Using the Site’ page walks any user through the experience in both languages.
Transform Your Digital Collection Management Today
Ready to elevate your collection management capabilities? Schedule a personalized demo of STQRY Collect and see firsthand how this powerful platform can transform your digital preservation and access strategy. Our team of collection management specialists is standing by to answer your questions and help you discover the perfect configuration for your institution's unique needs.