A decoupled WordPress + Next.js collections platform that leverages the museum’s collections management systems while giving researchers and the public lightning-fast, faceted access to one of the world’s finest collections.
BACKGROUND
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, set on a 1,000-acre estate in Delaware, is the premier museum of American decorative arts, home to more than 90,000 objects made or used in America since 1640 and displayed across a magnificent 175-room house. Founded by collector and horticulturist Henry Francis du Pont and opened to the public in 1951, Winterthur is also a leading center for scholarship, home to two University of Delaware graduate programs in American material culture and art conservation. Its online collection is a primary touchpoint for researchers and audiences around the world, making a fast, modern, and accessible digital experience essential to the museum’s mission. Winterthur partnered with Urban Insight to reimagine that experience from the ground up.
CHALLENGE
Winterthur’s previous online collection, launched in 2012, relied on Axiell’s IMu web service to pull data directly from EMu, the museum’s collections management system, every time a visitor made a request. That architecture had become a liability: IMu was prone to timing out and crashing, and the EMu server was handling public web traffic and staff data entry at the same time, putting the museum’s core system of record under constant strain. The site itself was no longer mobile-friendly, fell short of modern accessibility standards, was difficult for staff to update, and lacked the functionality audiences now expect, including logins, favoriting, sharing, and faceted search. Winterthur needed to fully decouple its public collections experience from EMu while delivering a striking, brand-aligned site that would let staff, researchers, and the public quickly discover, organize, and share objects across its deep collection.
THE SOLUTION
Urban Insight designed and built a modern, fully decoupled collections platform that cleanly separates the museum’s collections management system from its public-facing website. WordPress, with Advanced Custom Fields and a purpose-built “Museum Object” content model mapped to the museum’s schema, serves as the content layer; a Next.js front end delivers the public experience; and OpenSearch powers discovery. A custom, automated nightly sync pipeline pushes changes from EMu into WordPress, handling bulk and incremental updates, image extraction to Amazon S3, high-resolution and IIIF image delivery, metadata reconciliation, and failure alerting, so the public site always reflects the latest records without ever placing live traffic on EMu.
On that foundation, the team built the discovery and engagement experience the museum envisioned: a lightning-fast search page with faceted filtering by category, creator, place of origin, material, technique, date range, on-display status, and image availability; rich object detail pages with a full-screen image viewer and related works; and a decoupled user profile system with logins, Favorites, groups, and Saved Searches. Visitors can share objects and searches to Pinterest, Instagram, and email, while sensitive collection data stays protected behind credential-based access. The platform was engineered to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards, optimized for performance and technical SEO, and built on a data schema designed with federated collections in mind.
The result is an elegant, high-performance collections site that safeguards Winterthur’s source systems, empowers staff to keep records current with minimal effort, and opens one of the world’s greatest collections of Americana to a far wider audience.
Visit the Winterthur Museum Collection.
"We are so very pleased to celebrate the launch of this new museum collections website. Your team has been a wonderful and responsive group to collaborate with.”
