The fifth edition of the AIA Guide To New York City is in bookstores now. I own every edition of this book, and I'm very proud to say that I was involved in the creation of this edition. You may remember me writing about this last year. Co-author Fran Leadon is a close friend of mine from the bluegrass scene, and I designed and built the content management system he used to handle the many thousands of photographs, and took quite a few of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights photos myself.
The system is an illustration of several of Harmonica's core principles. First, simple is better. Second, don't rebuild what already exists. Third, build systems that work the way users already know how to work. Should we create an expensive proprietary digital asset management system for tens of thousands of dollars? And train the students to use it? Or should we use a photo management system that everyone already knows? Like, say, Flickr?
The students uploaded their photos into Flickr -- a system they all knew -- and tagged them using a taxonomy we developed. Then, using Drupal, we created a content management system that allowed Fran and the other editors to create new buildings and neighborhoods, and associate them with schools of architecture, architects, and other metadata.
The system was developed quickly, easy to modify, and allowed the editors to collaborate and work quickly to put the book together. As a longtime NYC history buff, I enjoyed working on this project enormously.
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