Museo Avellonia
Outcome
The authoritative online collection for a natural-history museum — searchable and connected to global biodiversity databases.
Client Context
Museo Avellonia is Prof. Marcus Franzen's personal natural-history collection, now maintained as a structured online archive for research and public reference. Prof. Franzen is a senior systematic biologist affiliated with the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm. The site needed to serve both expert researchers and interested general readers across language boundaries.
Challenge
A museum collection of this depth — thousands of specimen records, taxonomy, localities, and media — demands a content architecture that is rigorous enough for researchers and approachable enough for the public. Keeping species data current without manual data entry, were the core technical challenges.
Build
We built a Drupal 10 site with a structured content model for museum specimens, taxonomy, localities, and associated media. Species records are enriched live from external biodiversity databases — the species_ext integration pulls authoritative data from Catalogue of Life, GBIF, iNaturalist, IUCN Red List, Wikipedia, and EOL (Encyclopedia of Life) on every page load, so the record is always current without editorial effort. The admin interface is streamlined for a solo curator.
Stack
Data Sources
Species data pulled live from six integrated sources (five live): Catalogue of Life, GBIF, iNaturalist, IUCN Red List, Wikipedia, and EOL (Encyclopedia of Life). Records are matched by species name and augmented with authoritative classification, distribution, and conservation status.
Notable
The live external-data integration is what makes this unusual for a site at this price point. Most comparable museum sites carry stale, manually maintained species records. Museo Avellonia's records update from primary sources — automatically, every time a page loads. This is the species_ext engine in production: a reusable capability that MADDev now offers to any research or archive client.
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