Stories and Topics

As Miranda develops, we are integrating curated content and multimedia-driven narratives as means of navigating Miranda and the Folger's collections. These are our Topics and Stories sites.

Both sets of sites are built in a WordPress multi-site environment that has been customized for this purpose, with our partner Sites by Coop. The template is modular, composed of modules for a variety of formats of text blocks and media elements. With the multi-site capabilities, we can make it easier for Folger staff to share knowledge in a technically sustainable and efficient manner, and to ensure we can maintain these sites over time.

Topics

Topics briefly introduce readers to an area of the collection, and to items which can spur a user on their quest for information. We begin with an initial set of short Topic pages on popular Shakespeare plays. We will expand the Topic pages beyond Shakespeare's works and into different aspects of the Folger's holdings, common reference questions, and more.

Stories

Stories contain longer narratives that offer a thematic tour of subjects related to the Folger's collection and sometimes with the collections of other cultural institutions. Stories sites can either stand alone or complement physical exhibitions presented on the Folger's campus.

Featured Results

Featured Results promote certain Folger content pages to the top of broad search results. Searches for "king john" or "king john shakespeare," for example, will lead to a first-ranked Featured Result that leads users to the Topic page for Shakespeare's play King John. As we build more Topic pages over time, we aim to expand Featured Results to orient online visitors to information that may be interesting to them.

WordPress Plugin

We are in the process of completing a Miranda WordPress plugin, using the IIIF-produced Universal Viewer. Once it is installed on WordPress-powered sites, the plugin allows Wordpress site managers to insert digital images from Miranda along with their descriptive metadata using a simple shortcode and the alphanumeric Miranda ID. We will be installing the plugin first on Topics and Stories sites, and then will release it to the public by the time the project concludes.