Developing online access to the Zandra Rhodes Archive

The photography of 500 garments has now been completed, and the project team is currently working on putting the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection online!

1. Developing a trial version
The images and metadata have been uploaded to the private test website for VADS.  This initial version of the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection has been tested in-house and several adjustments were made to the interface at this stage.  For example, we’ve doubled the default size of the thumbnail images on the search results pages, and a ‘zoom’ feature was also introduced for the Zandra Rhodes images.

Close-up of jacket from The African Collection by Zandra Rhodes, 1981

2. Student interns provide their feedback
A student focus group was held at UCA’s Rochester campus in November, with student interns from BA Fashion Design and BA Fashion Textiles who have already assisted us with the photography and documentation stage of the project at Zandra Rhodes Studio in London.  The students were given a series of tasks to complete using the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection, and were then asked to discuss their experiences of using the site.  This has provided us with lots of useful feedback about the website functionality, from which we’ve created a list of further enhancements to make.

Browsing The Mexican Collections by Zandra Rhodes, 1976-1978, on the VADS test website.

3. Developing the next iteration
We are currently working on making these enhancements to the website in December, and we’re also working towards compatibility with the variety of different web browsing devices. The next step will be to demo the site and get feedback from Zandra Rhodes herself!

Reblogged from the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection project blog.

We love the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection project blog. Firstly, the Zandra Rhodes collection is fantastic and the blog really helps to show this off, but the blog also provides a unique and useful insight into the processes of archive cataloguing and providing online access, as well as the trivialities and potential problems that might occur when dealing with textiles and textile designs specifically.