Website for Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
Education
Case description
The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies is an Icelandic university organization with a specific focus on linguistics, preserving Icelandic language and literature. With the relaunch of the site we created a platform for the large amount of available researches and publications about Icelandic language and to present both the legacy of old Icelandic and the modern language as well.Case goals and results
The Institute has various databases that collect documents, so there is a lot of information available for those who are interested in Icelandic linguistics. One of the main goals of the site is to present the works of researchers of the institute.Since we are talking about a lot of written data, we needed to aggregate this information. The website connects to 4 databases to pull in the publications and researches from the researchers and display them for the users. Publications can also be downloaded or purchased.
It was also very important that the editors can easily create customized pages, where they can decide both the structure and the layout easily. Academic rules are very strict about displaying information of publications, so we needed to adhere to these regulations as well.
The most exciting part of the site is the search - we integrated the site with DMII, The Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection (BÍN in Icelandic). This database is a collection of paradigms accessible on the Árni Magnússon Institute’s website, and it supports searching for terms where both headwords and inflectional words. The integration with this database and the autocomplete search makes the whole search process easy and engaging.
Challenges
It was very important to allow the editor of the website to be flexible while creating the content. For that Paragraphs were used to maximise the flexibility of the editorial experience.Content from various databases were migrated using the Migrate module and is synchronised to the website once per day.
Most important functionality of the website is the search: https://arnastofnun.is/is/leit.
On the backend we used SolR and Search API. When a visitor searches for a word, the field helps with autocomplete terms to make it easier to find, and it searches in every content type, including articles, publications, news and events as well.
One of the most exciting parts of the search is using DMII, The Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection (or BÍN in Icelandic). This database is a collection of paradigms accessible on the Árni Magnússon Institute’s website, and it supports searching for terms where both headwords and inflectional words. This means that if a headword ‘horse’ is being searched for, during the search all its Icelandic variations come up, and every article, news item or event appear in the search results where this specific words inflectional form appears.
This was achieved by using the synonyms functionality from Solr. To read more about this DMII go here: http://bin.arnastofnun.is/data/
The website was built with the the OpenEDU distribution , which is directed at providing higher education a great framework to meet the most common technical and UX needs while being fully extensible to build up to more complex technical requirements.
The site is multilingual, and it went live in spring 2019. The translation of the content to English is still being worked on, so it will be available soon.