Skip to the content Back to Top

Andornot believes strongly that it’s not enough for an archive or museum to simply have a fascinating collection and excellent software for managing it and making it publicly accessible. Drawing the public to these resources is equally important, something larger museums and some archives do well of course. For smaller organizations, that means the curator or archivist has to put on a marketing hat from time to time. However, this need not be a painful experience.

For example, a couple of months ago we wrote a blog post about using Wikipedia as a means of increasing the exposure of your organizations and your collections. This can be a quick, easy and fun afternoon task.

And today we're announcing a new feature in our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to also help attract the public: an automatic site map generator.

A site map is an XML file placed within your website, listing all available pages or resources, to help search engines such as Google and Bing index as much of your content as possible. While search engines will crawl links they find, such as on your home page, to help them discover records, this site map file can be provided to guide them to the full set.

e.g.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://search.yoursite.org/Permalink/descriptions281616</loc><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://search.yoursite.org/Permalink/descriptions281617</loc><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://search.yoursite.org/Permalink/descriptions281618</loc><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://search.yoursite.org/Permalink/descriptions281619</loc><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://search.yoursite.org/Permalink/descriptions281620</loc><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>

 

Within AnDI, the sitemap lists all available records that can be found in the search engine, using the permalink URL.

This file is not seen by the public and has no impact on the site, but will be used by Google and others to index more of the records in an AnDI site. And thus, when people search by keyword in Google for records that happen to be in that collection, especially ones with unique names, places and words, these records are more likely to appear in their Google search results, drawing more traffic to the site.

This feature has been rolled out to all the clients who participate in our Managed Hosting service, and is available to our other AnDI clients (just send us an email to request it).

There are many ways to spread the word online about your collections and resources, some requiring very little effort. Stay tuned to our blog and newsletter for more!

Let Us Help You!

We're Librarians - We Love to Help People