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PADS Website

PADS

The PADS - Performing Arts Data Service - collects, documents, preserves, and promotes the use of digital resources to support research and teaching across the broad field of the performing arts: music, film, broadcast arts, theatre, and dance.

Its target audience is performing arts researchers, teachers, and students in UK Higher Education. The PADS collects digital materials to create an online resource base for research, teaching and learning, and preserves those materials for future use.

PyrusMalus collaborated with PADS to design, develop, and deliver a new website which would integrate various collections, providing an opportunity for these collections to be searched in an interoperable environment for the first time.

Browsing through the arts

Some of the newer collections within the PADS website contain large numbers of images, audio and video clips, and even virtual reality models.

The guided tour below demonstrates browsing through the Designing Shakespeare Multimedia Archive, an AHRB funded project developed by Dr Christie Carson at Royal Holloway University of London. This collection includes over 4000 images, sound files, video clips, and virtual reality models relating the the design of Shakespeare in performance in the UK since 1960.

Many databases, one interface

One of the interesting challenges was to ensure that the different collection databases could be integrated into one system, which would provide the functionality for browsing and searching.

The website was developed using WebObjects, with the collections stored in OpenBase, which proved more than able to handle the large amount of data that was needed.