Recap: Scope and Reasons of the Rewrite

musdb as a tool has been around since sometime around 2009 or 2010 – soon after the wider inception of museum-digital. Back then, its scope was to provide an input interface for the recording of publishable museum object data. Since then, the basic architecture to the user interface has remained largely unchanged. While the scope grew to musdb aiming to be a full-featured collection and museum management system, many features that were added were only added “on top” – far enough out of the way to not disturb legacy users or to break existing workflows. In a nutshell: musdb in its current form is quite good, but it’s an application whose user interface has grown without a clear roadmap and a systematic reconsideration and streamlining of the user interface for over a decade.

Since 2009, web development has changed. We do not need to worry about the Internet Explorer anymore, browser compatibility is much better, and web applications can be much more interactive with modern browsers and hardware. To fully make use of these larger advances in the development of musdb, a general change to its architecture is necessary however.

As the architecture changes from a traditional web site with many independent pages to a single page application, the rewrite is indeed that: Instead of generating pages on the server and only displaying them in the browser, musdb’s user interface will be fully generated in the browser, with only the relevant data being queried from the server using dedicated, documented APIs. Even to keep the same functionality, we would need to re-implement its presentation. This means that the rewrite is also a perfect opportunity to streamline the user interface and to reconsider previously unused or overseen functionalities.

On the other hand: With the new user interface changing everything display-related on a technical level, that does not mean that much has to change on a conceptual level. The rewritten musdb will feature the same basic division of pages – lists, editing pages, and pages for adding new entries -, it features the same idea of a tabbed editing pages and – with few exceptions – the same data fields and order thereof.

A Sneak Preview

Where much stays the same, taking a small glimpse into things that will change might be in order. In the following there are a few such previews with small screen casts. Most of these focus on overview / list pages, which are already in a release-ready form.

Navigation

New Filter Options

Display Modes of Overview Pages

Batch Editing On All Overview Pages

Interactive Overviews

Timeline

Now, when will the new UI be done? And when will it be released?

As of now, the development is progressing smoothly and the required building blocks for almost all functionalities are there. Depending on what features one uses, the new UI can already replace the old for most common use cases. To fully do so for common use cases means that at least object editing pages need to be implemented fully. This should be the case as of late September. In the following, seminars and a time period where both versions can be used side-by-side will be had to ensure a somewhat smooth transition from the old to the new UI.

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(Post image generated using Anima Base v1)

Over all that time however, the basic architecture of musdb remained basically unchanged, with new functionality fit in or added on top where it seemed suitable. Additionally we have been struggling with the duplicate implementation of several functionalities at different times, where one implementation offers a very simple access to the respective data (e.g. a free text field), while the other offers a representation of the same data in a much more fine-grained, precise, and more interlinked way, whose requirements are however harder to fulfill during imports and that requires a more thorough documentation generally.

We routinely get very positive feedback from colleagues working in museums, that musdb is comparatively easy to use and logical. The age of the architecture as well as the many small inconsistencies in terms of the user interface that have crept in over time however suggest that it is time for a more radical reimagining of what musdb looks and works like.

This post is a first small preview to what musdb should look like starting in the third quarter of 2026. After a more thorough discussion of the reasons for rewriting significant parts of the publications, some first glimpses into the new version are provided at the end of this post.

Reasons

Technical

musdb is primarily a PHP application. As such, the internal logic as well as most of the user interface rest on the server. Almost all of the user interface is rendered into HTML on the server and then sent to the browser to generate what a user can view. Some functionalities that require additional interactivity, are presented in overlays, etc. are implemented in JavaScript and processed directly in the browser, with the JavaScript drawing its data both from the HTML as well as APIs (some internal, some documented for internal and external use).

Speaking in modern web development terms, PHP covers model, view, and controller on the server, with JavaScript extending the view somewhere half-way. Logically, this is problematic. In brutal practicality, it means that musdb’s JavaScript components are a collection of small scripts always dependent of some external (PHP/server-side) preparation and not logically interacting with each other. This prevents lots of the benefits of a more structured programming from being used altogether.

Our aim with the technical architecture of a reimagined musdb is to design musdb as a modern single page application with all data being provided by clearly documented APIs. This will come with several benefits:

• The view layer is entirely processed entirely in the client, providing a clear logical division between the different tasks
• With a modern build infrastructure, code can be reused much more than thus far, providing a better maintainability in the long run
• musdb will come with barely any browser-level page reloads. If an API is queried, the application can clearly communicate what is being loaded and for what purpose.
• As musdb’s UI will be entirely built based on the same API as can be used by external developers, that API will be fully feature-complete by the end of the process.

User interface

The general structure of musdb’s user interface has proven itself to be quite good. However, as musdb has grown over the years, a lot of small inconsistencies and opportunities for improvement have crept in.

Take the navigation alone:

• To access object groups, one can always hover over the three dots sub-menu of the navigation section on the very top right. If one enables the menu option “object group” in the personal settings (accessible by clicking on one’s name), one can also quickly access it via the quick access navigation (the second line of the navigation). As such, simply accessing a central part of musdb is spread over three different sections of the navigation.
• There are two question mark icons in the navigation. One, in a speech bubble, links to communication channels and contact persons that one can use to seek help. The other provides links to the handbook. On the one hand, there is a clear logical differentiation between the two. On the other, both look similar and follow rather similar aims. That the two sub-menus are divided rather than being merged into a single sub-menu is not intuitively apparent.
• Clicking on the page title or the colored circle at the right of the navigation opens the context-independent search function. Both bear no resemblance to an icon associated with searching and actually follow entirely different primary aims by themselves.

Many similar issues exist around musdb. In most cases, these somehow make sense and are logical in themselves – but they still contradict a seamless, intuitive use of the application.

Additionally, there are some functionalities that in themselves contradict a more streamlined use of musdb. One such example also accessible via the navigation is the option for users to set their preferred page to be referred to right after they log in. musdb has been built more and more on the premise, that users will start their use of the application on the dashboard, and thus some features – like requiring users to enable two-factor authentication for regional administrators – can be bypassed by selecting any non-dashboard start page. The option to select a non-standard start page will hence almost certainly be scrapped in the new version of musdb.

Preview

For now, only the basic scaffolding, most of the navigation and some of the overview pages have been implemented in the new version. Screenshots of these can be seen below. Importantly and yet missing, each different section of musdb is planned to come with an icon representing it in the navigation (top left).

Note also, that nothing about the new UI is set in stone. These are first drafts. More will follow soon.

musdb

Object overview

In the default tile view of the object overview page, hovering over an object image thus far revealed the object’s name. As object names are often too long to display fully and inventory numbers are the primary means of identifying an object in most museums, this preview text has now been extended to include the inventory numer.

User management

New Options for Managing User Accounts: Disabling Accounts & Setting Account Expiry Dates

Two new options on user editing pages allow disabling logins on an account and setting an expiry date for the account. Both can be useful for administration: If a new worker joins the museum for a project with a clear-cut limitation on funding and time, one can now set the account expiry at the beginning of the project to the end of it. The accounts will then automatically be deleted when the project ends. Similarly, colleagues that leave service temporarily but for a prolonged time (e.g. for a sabbatical) and will not need to use their accounts for that time can have their accounts disabled.

List of Terms of Use

A new tab on a user’s (own) account settings page provides the option to list all usage agreements / terms of use a user has agreed to in the context of their use of museum-digital / musdb and when they agreed to them.

Imports

Limiting Report Mail Size

When a user runs imports themselves using the WebDAV upload, the end of the import process – no matter if it is successful or fails – is marked by the sending of a report via mail. This report usually contains a list of noteworthy operations that happened during the import, e.g. which objects of which inventory number were imported to which object in musdb, identified by its ID. As imports grow, this list of operation grows. To not encounter issues sending the report, it is henceforth limited to a maximum of 2 MB or 10000 lines.

Dry-run Mode

Sometimes it is useful to try running an import to see if it will actually work but not actually process any data. This option has been available in the importer command line interface for a while, among others powering museum-digital:qa. It is now available in the import configuration for self-run imports as well using the setting dry-run. Enabling the setting accordingly stops the importer from actually writing the data into the database and changes the behavior if values that need to be mapped to values in controlled lists at museum-digital are encountered. Usually an import stops the moment such data is to be imported and not yet mapped. During a dry run, the error is collected and the import proceeds. All unmapped entries are listed together at the end of the import, allowing for a simpler mapping (possibly aided by concordance.museum-digital.org).

Dashboard

The first page of the dashboard, which for almost all users also means the start page of musdb right after the login process, was significantly reworked during the last month. The almost entirely unused notetaking features and discourse integration were removed in favor of a feed of recent blog posts. See also the section “Communications” in the respective blog post.

Annotations for the Vocabulary Editing Team

Each event, displayed as a tile on object editing pages, featured speech bubble icons behind each time / actor / place to provide additional comments and hints for the central vocabulary editing team. This positioning of the annotation feature led to confusion over the years, with some users using the feature to comment on the relationship between the entity and the object (for which the event notes should be used). We hence repositioned the links and moved them to the respective entity’s page (e.g. a place page for giving hints and comments on a place entry). The hinting / commenting feature for times has been altogether removed, as providing comments to clarify the meaning of e.g. a year never made much sense.

Smaller Updates and Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in the HTML generated for listing other objects linked to an object. Links to the other object were broken and are not anymore.
• Image editing pages now embed the image directly instead of using the IIIF API. This reduces resource usage and increases stability at no cost.
• Removed option to manually trigger the rewriting of EXIF and IPTC metadata of object images. Rewriting takes place in the background whenever an image or a linked object is updated, making user-triggered updates obsolete.
• Re-introduce option to repeat linking to the last used linked object
• Updated Swagger UI to version 5.30.3

Frontend

As stated above and lengthily described in the previous blog posts (here, here, and here) we struggled with stability over the last month. This means that most changes in the frontend are aimed at improving stability.

Reworked Default Image Page

Thoroughly described in Updates, AI scrapers, and Resilience, we replaced the default view for single object image pages. While the default view was previously built around the IIIF viewer Mirador, the new default view uses OpenLayers and the unmediated image file for capabilities such as zooming. The new view also brings with it some new features, such as an option to reference specific sections of an image.

Serving Resource-Intensive Pages / Functionalities Only When Resources Are Available

PDF generation, the IIIF Image API, and the suggestions for alternative search queries on failed search pages are now limited to reduce their impact on the overall system stability. This follows two strategies:

• Suggestions on failed search pages and PDF generation will only appear if the overall load on the system is low. The threshold for when or when they are not provided is influenced by the user’s browser language: If a user uses a browser set to the primary language of a given instance of museum-digital (e.g. German in Hesse, Hungarian in Budapest), the threshold is much higher, meaning users will be able to access the pages at a medium server load. In the case of PDFs, high server load will forward users to the print dialogue for object pages instead of receiving a PDF generated on the server side.
• PDF generation and the IIIF Image API are served with a different PHP configuration and set of processes than the rest of the frontend. This configuration significantly reduces available resources for these two functionalities.
• The option to generate PDFs featuring all images of an object with between 10 and 40 images has been entirely removed. Given its constraints, the feature was hard to explain and rarely accessible anyway. The primary “users” were noticeably AI scrapers.

Image Search

The image search feature was refactored and reduced to further separate it from the primary object search. The number of available search options has been reduced to be more easily explainable and reduce possibilities for very resource-intensive queries.

Batch Export of Object Metadata / OAI

Updated the LIDO API to almost entirely match the LIDO as generated during exports from musdb

Smaller Updates and Bugfixes

• Improved performance of object search by tags and places by filtering searched entities to those who are actually linked in the given instance of museum-digital.
• Object groups with only one object are henceforth not displayed and linked on object pages anymore
• Fixed link in footer: Clicking on “museum-digital” should lead to the home / start page of the given instance of musdb.
• Updated Swagger UI to version 5.30.3

nodac

• User-provided comments / hints have been removed for times (see above)
• Tooltips for linked objects now display which institution an object belongs to
  • This is particularly important for vocabulary editors who do not have access to the museums’ data. This way they get a limited preview with the required information for unpublished objects despite their otherwise lacking permissions.

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In the last post, I detailed how we severely restricted the availability of the public PDF generation functionalities in museum-digital according to available system resources. That, as it turned out, was not enough to bring reliable stability to our systems. After the server fell over on December 26th once more, we hence moved the IIIF Image API into the same PHP setup used for PDF generation – meaning that any user/IP can only request the API 10 times a minute and that for any instance of museum-digital, only one PHP worker serves it. This allowed us to severely reduce the maximum available resources per worker for the frontend outside of those two use cases (where the IIIF Image API may use up to 80 MB of RAM, no other part of the frontend will go beyond 5). Since then, the system runs as smoothly as if AI scraping had never become an issue.

A Limited Goodbye to IIIF & Server-Side Image Manipulation

Now, what does that mean in practice? On the one hand, we have not fully removed the IIIF image API. All links generated using it remain valid and will be served, even if comparatively slowly.

On the other hand the user experience with viewing the images in a IIIF viewer will be significantly worse, even though this strongly depends on the IIIF viewer. The most popular “full” IIIF viewers being Mirador and Universal Viewer, significant problems (or a complete inability to use an object’s images) are to be expected with Mirador. Mirador in its default configuration loads multiple segments of an image separately to then assemble the displayed image from those – with the creation of the segments happening on the server, thus consuming resources centrally. It also seems to set extremely low limits on accepted response times, which museum-digital’s IIIF Image API now regularly exceeds due to the aggressive rate limiting. Simply looking at the demo installation of Universal Viewer, the software seems to be much more targeted in its API calls and might still work well despite the restrictions.

As far as I know, there are no published numbers on the market share of the different IIIF image viewers. And about whether IIIF viewers external to whoever provides the API are actually regularly used or not. The most jaded – and likely true – assumption would be that the share of users who use IIIF without a viewer hosted next to the API is miniscule and that most users will use one of the abovementioned. Our experience, once again, seems to support that hypothesis: We released our implementation of IIIF 2 in 2020, but essentially nobody noticed before we also started hosting a IIIF viewer.

As we do use Mirador as a viewer, assume the “visible” IIIF image API at museum-digital to be more or less broken. Developers and those making direct use of the API without our installation of Mirador can still benefit from the API. But those are comparatively few.

The radical restriction of resources provided to the IIIF Image API is thus likely indeed a goodbye to IIIF, if a limited one. The basic idea is great – to create a unified way to reference parts of an image (or later a wider media file) and annotate it. In times of significantly increased bot activity, reduced funds, and foreseeably rising hosting costs, our example may be an early sign that the decision to realize that aim by specifying an API to be implemented by the data providers restricts the ability to fully support IIIF to very well resourced institutions. And as funds are shrinking, that is less and less institutions. Let’s hope that the most basic need IIIF wished to fulfill can be achieved in a different way in the future; one that is accessible to anybody. Realistically this means that computing would need to happen on the client PCs, not on a server.

To end the saga on a more positive note: Since we limited the IIIF Image API, our systems run wonderfully smoothly again and we were able to reduce the overall rate limiting on the rest of museum-digital’s portals. We will monitor the situation and increase the limit slowly to allow more simultaneous API requests without risking stability.

Communications

Second, the whole ordeal posed a challenge to our communication channels. If any significant error occurs anywhere on museum-digital, I personally am sent an encrypted error message via mail. Usually. In this case, the primary component falling over was the PHP server, which is also responsible for managing the sending of mails. If a service fell over, the primary way to learn of it was receiving mails about that instead. Reaction times were thus worse than they needed to be. This means that we need to improve our monitoring.

On the other hand there was the issue of explaining what was going on. We had a thread about it in the forum, which few people read. We had the blog posts. Which few people read. We lack (or lacked) a unified source of information about current events that we can assume people to read. The blog could and should be exactly that.

At the top right of the login screen of musdb, the two most recent blog posts from the respective region as well as from the “development” category of the blog have been shown for years. Then we turned on the “remember me” feature by default, which means that people only very rarely see the login page at all anymore.

The first page most users see upon logging in or opening musdb while logged in is the dashboard, the default subsection of which previously offered a summary of the database contents a user has access to, a tile for writing personal notes to oneself, a tile with messages from the respective regional administrators, a tile for the integration of a discourse forum, and links to the museum elsewhere on the web.

The summary of database contents and the links to the museum elsewhere are certainly useful. The other features not so much. Checking their actual use revealed that barely anybody used any of the note-taking features (likely also because musdb itself offers better alternatives elsewhere), while the discourse integration has not been in use for years. The very first features one sees when opening musdb were thus largely unused, wasting space that could be filled with a feed of relevant blog entries.

And so we removed the unused features and replaced them with a more prettily designed feed. This feed now contains the two newest blog posts from the development feed in the user’s language, the regional or national feed (again in the user’s language) as well as – importantly – the English-language development feed. None of the most recent development-related posts were translated to any language other than the original English, mainly because the time was better spent trying to alleviate or fix the issues than describing them in yet another language. Besides, most people know enough English to grasp the posts. And for those who do not: Community contributions to the blog – also translations for those who do not – are always welcome.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Background

Scrapers

There were (or are) two factors simultaneously pushing our servers to their limits and requiring changes. On the one hand, scraping of museum-digital has gotten even more aggressive. Where we usually has something around 10-30 requests per second across all of museum-digital a year ago, we had around 300 two weeks ago. Right now it’s often between 500 and 700. This number excludes any access to static files.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the scrapers are mostly noticable by coming from IP ranges in Asia or (to a lesser extent) the US. On the other hand, the IPs change constantly and user-agents etc. resemble regular users. Likely they simply use an actual chrome browser for scraping. Which is to say, attempting to block them is futile. Worse yet, attempts to block scrapers would likely also impact some real users.

Fortunately museum-digital is run on dedicates servers paid by time rather than by compute. The onslaught of scrapers thus has no financial impact on us. But the scrapers still use resources, and as they try to scrape as many different pages as possible, it is much harder to optimize for them than it is to optimize for actual human users (see this article on a similar issue at Wikimedia).

Either way, AI scrapers can result in improvements. Viewed positively, they essentially act as a free stress test on a service and enforce efficiency in all aspects. If most pages are optimized for performance already, scrapers will find the unoptimized ones and bring down a service by overusing those. Which is to say, they help to identify yet unoptimized scripts/pages/classes and enforce that necessary changes are made. At museum-digital, there are three main weak spots that are hard to optimize: timelines, image manipulation (including the IIIF API), and PDF generation.

PHP

On November 20th PHP 8.5 was released. Thus far, museum-digital had been running on PHP 8.3 for web hosting and PHP 8.4 on the command line. When we attempted to update to 8.4 last year, the server fell over. This was mainly caused by the IIIF API (and thus, image manipulation via libvips).

Dependencies at museum-digital are (like pretty much universal with PHP) handled using the package manager composer. Setting up a new instance of museum-digital, composer (managed on version 8.4) required PHP 8.4 or later to run – the new instance was thus unable, being stuck on version 8.3 for hosting.

That leaves two options: Either to set up composer using PHP 8.3 again, or to simply update everything to the current version. While PHP 8.3 will be supported until 2027, it is generally advisable to update when possible. So updating it was.

Importantly, PHP at museum-digital is run via PHP-FPM. Before the update, we had one socket running per subdomain. This means, that if a PHP process serving the frontend stopped working for any reason, users in musdb were impacted as well.

Upgrading PHP to version 8.5

Once we upgraded the PHP version to 8.5 on Thursday, the same problems we faced with PHP 8.4 appeared again. The server would run rather smoothly for some hours, then more and more PHP processes would die and PHP-FPM would fall over for a given subdomain, and users would get a 504 gateway timeout error. Again, the IIIF API and image manipulation were the main causes of PHP-FPM getting stuck. Of course, the number of AI scrappers continuing to use the site did not help.

PHP-FPM settings

A natural first point to consider was the configuration of PHP-FPM. PHP-FPM knows three basic modes for running an application:

• ondemand You define a maximum number of processes the application may use. When a new request is made, idle processes get used. If there is no idle process, PHP-FPM starts a new one. After a specified number of requests or a given number of seconds, an old process is closed. This is primarily aimed at being able to scale way down – if there is no requests, there will be no processes (which is to say, less resources used). On the other hand, starting new processes takes time.
• static You define a number of processes that should always be running for the application. This means that there should always be processes already started and ready for usage, but it also means that those processes take up resources even when they are little used. Which is to say, this is useful if one has a high and constant stream of users.
• dynamic You define a maximum number of processes, as well as how many processes should be always running for immediate use, and a (minimum and maximum) number of spare processes to keep running. PHP-FPM then manages if more processes should be started or if one of the already running ones shall be used. This, in theory, is useful if one wants to reliably and quickly serve users, expects some use all the time, but wants the server to dynamically scale up and down as needed.

With museum-digital spread out over around 80 subdomains, we had thus far used the ondemand mode for most subdomains. Only the largest and most used instances / subdomains of museum-digital were run using dynamic mode. With the update to PHP 8.4 and then 8.5, the behavior of the ondemand mode seems to have changed. If one process dies, the whole subdomain goes seems to go down with it (I have not found a documentation on this, but it’s evident from the last two weeks).

We hence moved critical subdomains impacted by the errors (which is to say, any “regular” instance of museum-digital) to dynamic mode. As dynamic mode enforces stricter limits on how many processes can be run respective to the available hardware (which is to say, dynamic mode requires a better-written configuration), this also meant that we needed to adjust the specified numbers of processes per subdomain according to their use.

To actually grasp real use of a subdomain including bots, we turned to the logs we keep for about a week (and then rotate out). In server logs, usually one line corresponds to a single request. With a small script, we loop all the different subdomains and check how many requests were made. To be really sure that only requests to relevant PHP scripts are processed, we filter them by the presence of the substring “php” before counting. The result for today between 1 a.m. and 4 p.m. looks as follows:

| Requests count in instance                         |      Total |      musdb |        PDF | 
| -----                                              |      ----- |      ----- |      ----- | 
| agrargeschichte.museum-digital.de                  |     341508 |       1245 |        719 | 
| bawue.museum-digital.de                            |     454228 |      12559 |       6819 | 
| bayern.museum-digital.de                           |     176291 |          0 |        158 | 
| berlin.museum-digital.de                           |     223280 |      14917 |       6814 | 
| brandenburg.museum-digital.de                      |      63286 |       6927 |       3873 | 
| bremen.museum-digital.de                           |     221208 |          0 |       2026 | 
| bund.museum-digital.de                             |        261 |        167 |          5 | 
| collectors.museum-digital.de                       |     108398 |        449 |        648 | 
| hamburg.museum-digital.de                          |      35489 |          0 |         11 | 
| hessen.museum-digital.de                           |      50932 |       7962 |       2486 | 
| meckpomm.museum-digital.de                         |      94177 |         11 |        139 | 
| nds.museum-digital.de                              |     137703 |       4105 |       4134 | 
| owl.museum-digital.de                              |     427667 |       1258 |       2412 | 
| rheinland.museum-digital.de                        |      64838 |       1753 |       1276 | 
| rlp.museum-digital.de                              |     207944 |       7405 |       7532 | 
| sachsen.museum-digital.de                          |     120931 |      16117 |       6034 | 
| saarland.museum-digital.de                         |        210 |          0 |          1 | 
| smb.museum-digital.de                              |     228542 |          0 |      11517 | 
| sh.museum-digital.de                               |      21098 |          0 |         48 | 
| st.museum-digital.de                               |     317913 |       6243 |       6217 | 
| thue.museum-digital.de                             |     117893 |          0 |        495 | 
| westfalen.museum-digital.de                        |     101584 |       2033 |       3310 | 
| br.museum-digital.org                              |      43413 |          0 |         16 | 
| jateng.id.museum-digital.org                       |        211 |          0 |          0 | 
| jatim.id.museum-digital.org                        |      23410 |          0 |        159 | 
| lazio.it.museum-digital.org                        |        295 |          0 |          0 | 
| ma.pl.museum-digital.org                           |        385 |          0 |          0 | 
| noe.at.museum-digital.org                          |     906386 |          0 |        369 | 
| tirol.at.museum-digital.org                        |        537 |          0 |          7 | 
| vbg.at.museum-digital.org                          |         96 |          0 |          0 | 
| wien.at.museum-digital.org                         |     472305 |        586 |       3243 | 
| ulster.ie.museum-digital.org                       |      28869 |          0 |          2 | 
| connacht.ie.museum-digital.org                     |        392 |          0 |          0 | 
| va.srb.museum-digital.org                          |       5599 |          0 |         22 | 
| ko.rou.museum-digital.org                          |       9036 |        635 |        567 | 
| mm.rou.museum-digital.org                          |        235 |          0 |          0 | 
| ca.usa.museum-digital.org                          |       3946 |          0 |          0 | 
| ma.usa.museum-digital.org                          |        357 |          0 |          0 | 
| ny.usa.museum-digital.org                          |      19576 |          0 |        294 | 
| syddanmark.dk.museum-digital.org                   |        675 |          0 |          9 | 
| de.pt.museum-digital.org                           |       1241 |          0 |         29 | 
| zh.ch.museum-digital.org                           |     233280 |        512 |        650 | 
| ba.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      99927 |       1901 |         72 | 
| be.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     100830 |        244 |       3005 | 
| bk.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     489446 |         55 |       3985 | 
| bu.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     213616 |       6206 |       5753 | 
| bz.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     598550 |        680 |       1788 | 
| cs.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      88585 |          0 |       1054 | 
| fe.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     199812 |          7 |        215 | 
| gs.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     216680 |       4215 |        912 | 
| hb.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      61250 |          0 |         65 | 
| he.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      26312 |          7 |         26 | 
| jn.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      11970 |          0 |        131 | 
| ke.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     370219 |       2959 |       1680 | 
| no.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     119487 |          0 |       1545 | 
| pe.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     603846 |       2957 |       1446 | 
| so.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     308116 |       6151 |       6698 | 
| sz.hu.museum-digital.org                           |        116 |          0 |          0 | 
| to.hu.museum-digital.org                           |      52406 |          0 |       1229 | 
| va.hu.museum-digital.org                           |     184231 |       2839 |       1666 | 
| ve.hu.museum-digital.org                           |    1015509 |       3672 |        296 | 
| za.hu.museum-digital.org                           |        199 |          0 |          6 | 
| ce.cz.museum-digital.org                           |          3 |          0 |          0 | 
| ccc.cz.museum-digital.org                          |         17 |          0 |          0 | 
| academia.hu.museum-digital.org                     |       9158 |          0 |         13 | 
| cherkasy.ua.museum-digital.org                     |      25567 |          0 |         26 | 
| chernihiv.ua.museum-digital.org                    |       3258 |         99 |        156 | 
| dnipro.ua.museum-digital.org                       |      26725 |          0 |        109 | 
| donetsk.ua.museum-digital.org                      |         17 |          0 |          0 | 
| ivfr.ua.museum-digital.org                         |        722 |          0 |          9 | 
| kharkiv.ua.museum-digital.org                      |      12932 |          0 |         39 | 
| kyiv.ua.museum-digital.org                         |     436482 |       5967 |       1351 | 
| kyivska.ua.museum-digital.org                      |       2159 |          0 |         79 | 
| lviv.ua.museum-digital.org                         |     163358 |        188 |        274 | 
| poltava.ua.museum-digital.org                      |       7657 |        284 |          3 | 
| odesa.ua.museum-digital.org                        |         93 |          0 |          1 | 
| rivne.ua.museum-digital.org                        |      59510 |         65 |        156 | 
| sumy.ua.museum-digital.org                         |      35890 |        303 |          3 | 
| ternopil.ua.museum-digital.org                     |     150700 |         37 |        184 | 
| zhytomyr.ua.museum-digital.org                     |          3 |          0 |          0 | 
| vinnytsia.ua.museum-digital.org                    |      14229 |          0 |          0 | 
| volyn.ua.museum-digital.org                        |      16705 |          0 |        485 | 
| zakarpattia.ua.museum-digital.org                  |       2865 |          0 |         30 | 
| zaporizhzhia.ua.museum-digital.org                 |      24348 |        338 |         56 | 
| scotland.museum-digital.org                        |          0 |          0 |          0 | 
| md.museum-digital.org                              |          0 |          0 |          0 | 
| demo.museum-digital.org                            |         12 |          2 |          0 | 
| goethehaus.museum-digital.de                       |     260072 |          0 |         85 | 
| lmw.museum-digital.de                              |     326724 |          0 |         65 | 
| gedenkstaetten.museum-digital.de                   |       3474 |          0 |          0 | 
| turcica.museum-digital.de                          |      75533 |          0 |          1 | 
| nat.museum-digital.de                              |    1238860 |          0 |       4657 | 
| at.museum-digital.org                              |     631578 |          0 |         89 | 
| cz.museum-digital.org                              |          2 |          0 |          0 | 
| dk.museum-digital.org                              |       5415 |          0 |          4 | 
| hu.museum-digital.org                              |     359619 |          0 |       2827 | 
| id.museum-digital.org                              |       8030 |          0 |          0 | 
| ie.museum-digital.org                              |       2073 |          0 |          0 | 
| it.museum-digital.org                              |         78 |          0 |          0 | 
| rou.museum-digital.org                             |       8277 |          0 |        466 | 
| pl.museum-digital.org                              |        142 |          0 |          0 | 
| pt.museum-digital.org                              |          0 |          0 |          0 | 
| srb.museum-digital.org                             |        565 |          0 |          0 | 
| ua.museum-digital.org                              |     232115 |          0 |        805 | 
| usa.museum-digital.org                             |       3752 |          0 |         34 | 
| ch.museum-digital.org                              |      53417 |          0 |          1 | 
| global.museum-digital.org                          |     727690 |          0 |       2199 |

Note that the number of requests obviously is also impacted by bots changing attention – once a scraper is done with one subdomain, they turn to the next. The elevated number of requests in ve.hu.museum-digital.org is normal, but still starkly exaggerated when compared to other days. The Germany-wide instance is persistently the most frequented one, usually the global one is second at around 80% of requests.

Now equipped with actual numbers, we could scale the PHP-FPM to a much more suitable configuration than before (we had thus far never bothered counting actual requests, instead relying on the number of objects).

A second step in the PHP-FPM configuration was to reduce the impact the problems had. Previously there was one shared configuration and socket per subdomain. On the one hand, this meant that stuck processes in the frontend impacted users in musdb (and vice-versa). On the other hand, some constraints on resource usage cannot be set on a per-directory level but must be set per PHP-FPM socket / server (see the PHP documentation on user.ini and the list of php.ini directives). As the frontend and musdb have different requirements (frontend: low maximum memory use, short timeouts, no file uploads, generally strict settings; musdb: long timeouts for uploads, generally more lenient), being able to configure them independent of each other is useful in general.

We thus separated the configuration for the frontend, musdb, and PDF generation in the frontend; providing dedicated sockets for each. The frontend has a reduced priority on the system overall, strict constraints on how it may be used, etc. The settings are stricter than they were before. musdb has an elevated priority and more lenient settings (file uploads, longer timeouts), in fact more lenient than before. Finally, PDF generation is a special case as it offers no real benefit over the browser’s print tool (see MDN on print CSS), while being resource-intensive. As such, it has a far reduced priority and very strict settings.

With the separated configuration and sockets, we can now better tailor the configuration to each application’s needs and have the added benefit of problems in one application not impacting the other.

Code

As we had already prepared the codebase for PHP 8.4 awaiting an eventual upgrade, the upgrade to PHP 8.5 only required minimal changes. Aside from the deprecation of the functions finfo_close() and curl_close(), references to which were accordingly removed from the code, the update necessitated no further work.

Scaling in Software

Improving the PHP configuration was not enough to fix the issues, especially with the now increased number of requests from bots. To get some breathing room, we adjusted the most resource-intensive pages.

Frontend

In the frontend these are, again, the IIIF API, PDF generation, and timelines. Finally, we made changes to the pages for failed searches to better handle high load situations.

Image pages

The IIIF API was used for the main image pages in the frontend. We used (and use) Mirador as a IIIF viewer. Simply opening an image page thus meant three requests to fetch different regions of an image. Zooming into the image triggered further requests to fetch the relevant parts of the image. Cropping the image to the requested region with IIIF happens on the server (which is no problem if there are few users, but is turning into a problem when you have hundreds of requests per second).

We thus changed the default of image pages: The new default image page is the old, non-IIIF one. As features like zooming into images, that Mirador comes with, are popular and useful and the old image page did not support those, we worked to improve the page. To do so, we rely on OpenLayers, a library we already use for maps. Besides including maps from tile servers, OpenLayers also supports loading simple image files – which we do here. The image is hence loaded once in full size and zooming etc. happen entirely in the browser.

Taking the opportunity, we improved the page overall. An often noticed problem of image pages thus far was, that users who opened image pages coming from external services (think Google Images) had problems identifying that the image was an object image and that there is further object data to be found on object pages. The updated image pages now come with a header stating reflecting the name of the image, the name of the object and the name of the institution. Note that many images do not feature a dedicated title, musdb uses the object name as a default image title in that case, which is why the object title will often appear twice in the header. Maybe this can be used as an encouragement for the colleagues working in musdb to more consistently set expressive image titles in the future.

Also new is a mini map at the bottom left, displaying where in the wider context of the image one has currently zoomed in, as well as the ability to link exactly the region one has currently zoomed into. To enable the latter, the URL updates as one zooms or navigates around the image. Somebody else opening the same URL will then open exactly the same image region the linking person was viewing when copying the URL. Finally, we finally set specific Content Security Policies relevant to the currently opened media. If the displayed media entry is an internally stored image, no external images need to be allowed to load. If the displayed media entry is an audio file stored on archive.org, archive.org needs to be whitelisted as a source for audio files – but only archive.org and no other page. Previously, embedding images from anywhere on the net was allowed, increasing the potential damage a potential attacker may cause.

Making the use of Mirador a secondary, non-default option reduced the need for server-side image manipulation and the corresponding resource use significantly. The IIIF remains largely unchanged, but its use must now be requested explicitly.

PDF generation

As stated above, PDF generation brings little advantages to the browser’s print functionality in combination with object pages. On the contrary, the PDFs generated using the frontend’s templates feature less information. But they come with the file ending “.pdf” and seem to be extremely popular with bots. On the other hand, PDF generation means, among others, loading whatever images are to be embedded into the PDF and manipulating them fit into the PDF. The resulting files are significantly larger than the corresponding HTML files and thus also use more of the available bandwidth.

The update to handle PDF generation respective to resource usage was already introduced in the last months: publicly linked PDFs are now only generated if overall load on the server is low, if a user has set their browser language to any language different from a museum-digital instance’s default language. As most scrapers do not bother to change their browser language (which means they come with either none, English or Chinese), this means they will mostly be unable to trigger the generation of PDFs. They see an error page instead.

Failed Search Pages

If a user tries to execute a search query without any results, they will get suggestions for similar search terms – similar to how Google will ask one searching for “Berrlin”, if they meant “Berlin”. Trying to identify suitable suggestions obviously costs resources and whether the suggestions are actually what a user wanted is by nature hit or miss – it’s suggestions after all. In the case of scrapers, suggesting alternative search queries offers them a never-ending stream of possible search queries to run and keep scraping the subdomain with – to nobody’s benefit (not even the scrapers’, as they likely got the same content with other search queries already).

We thus now use the same function used to identify whether PDFs should be generated for a user to check if search suggestions should be provided. It a user comes with a non-default browser language and resource use is high, no suggestions will be provided.

Timelines

Timeline pages as implemented in museum-digital’s frontend offer another source of endless links and search queries, as they link to further and further specifications of the time searched by. Again, an improvement already introduced months ago, was to better parse queries by time: If a user searches for objects that are linked to times “after 1920” and “after 1930”, the latter already includes the former. “After 1920 and after 1930” means exactly the same as “after 1930”. Which is one join instead of two – half the resource usage.

A minor improvement we noticed on the side was impact of automatic redirects in the timelines. Say, a user searches objects by their link to a given tag and then generates a timeline for said objects. If all objects were created in the 20th century, the timeline will automatically redirect so as to “zoom” into a more appropriate time scale than from the big bang to now. Until the last weekend, script execution was not stopped when that redirect happened – which means that all database queries for time time from the big bang to now were still executed even though the user never got to see them. That is now fixed.

The Anti-Climactical Solution

All of those changes got the frontend more or less stable. Problems with uploading images remained however. Finally, the only thing that helped was uninstalling libvips (which we use for image manipulation) and reinstalling it. That seems to have fixed the issues.

Especially as the number of requests from scrapers continues to increase, the current strategy outlined above seems to be fruitful. By reducing the use (and sometimes the availability altogether) of especially resource-intensive and – depending on the context – little useful functionalities, much stability and can be gained.

The update seems to finally be largely completed (aside from maybe some further fine-tuning of the PHP-FPM configuration) and museum-digital is stable despite the bot problem, while we haven’t had to take more drastic or costly actions yet – such as blocking or adding additional servers.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

• On source / reference pages, linked objects are now sorted by the position within the source work on which they are referenced or which they do themselves reference
• The target URL of the regular / unspecified search bar for objects now follows the new, prettier URL schema
• Support for an OAI-PMH API for object metadata
  • Standardized endpoint for aggregators seeking to retrieve data in batch
  • Metadata formats thus far supported:
    • LIDO
    • OAI-DC (mandatory)
  • See also: Blog
• PDFs are only generated for users with a browser set to a non-default language if load on the server is low
  • The resource use caused by AI bots scraping museum-digital has been growing and growing. Generally, we see bots included in our mission to enable access to cultural heritage. On the other hand, nobody is served if the service is bogged down by bots. One functionality that is commonly used among bots and resource intensive is the generation of PDFs for object pages. The same information can be loaded from the object page itself and printed to a PDF using the browser’s print option. There are thus rather few downsides to limiting access to PDF generation to timmes, when server load is low. So that’s what we did.
• Collection-specific ISIL identifiers are now also used in the LIDO API
• Alternative numbers of an object can now be displayed on object pages
  • This includes tooltips for types of alternative numbers, that can be set by the museum on the institution-wide settings pages of musdb

musdb

• Search for objects
  • Type-ahead search for languages (of the object’s content)
  • Search by object’s revision status (open, read-ony, archived, etc.)
• Batch editing of objects’ revision status
• Parameters of the full text search index were updated to improve the search of word compounds in German

Importer

Core

• The dry-run mode now does not abort an import anymore, if an unmapped value is encountered. Unmapped entries are collected and displayed together afterwards.
  • This means, that unmapped entries can now much more easily be copied to and mapped in concordance.museum-digital.org
• Support for the import of alternative numbers (of objects)
• Support for the import of space hierarchies

Parser

• AdlibXml
  • Support for importing objects’ alternative numbers
• CsvXml
  • Support for importing objects’ alternative numbers
• CsvLocations
  • New parser for csv-based imports of space hierarchies
• ImageByInvno
  • New setting: append_chars (Adds suffixes, that exist in the inventory number, but not in file names)

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Frontend

• Significantly reworked the display of transcriptions on object pages
  • Titles of transcriptions are now displayed
    • If none is set, the type of the transcription (original or translation) is used as a replacement
  • Transcriptions are sorted by their titles
  • Improved the display of transcriptions in tiles
    • Problems with vertical scrolling are now solved
    • If only one transcription has been recorded, it will be displayed on the full width of the page
    • If there are more than two transcriptions for an object, they are folded in by default and can be unfolded later on
• Batch export of object metadata via the API
  • Thus far available in JSON & LIDO
  • API documentation
  • See also
• Dots as a separator in floating point numbers for object measurements are replaced with a comma in languages that require that
• Collection-specific ISIL IDs are used in the LIDO API

musdb

• Added a field for recording titles / names of transcriptions
• Added the option to set collection-specific ISIL IDs
• Setting object type tags via the improvement suggestions now correctly classifies the thus created link between object and tag
• Additional shapes are now available
  • E.g.: round, square
• Object groups can now be filtered by whether they have a superordinate one or not

Dissemination

• 2025-10-08: Presentation at the Autumn Conference of the Working Group Documentation of the German Museum Association: “Interoperabilität schaffen – Geschichten aus 1001 Importen”
  • PDF
  • ODP
• 2025-10-14: Talk on a workshop of the project CiVers (Citation of Versioned Web Pages by PID)
  • PDF
  • ODP
• 2025-10-17: museum-digital Usertagung 2025

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Frontend

• Objects that are linked to a source as referencing the source or being referenced in it are now listed on the source’s page
  • Example: “Novalis Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Erster Band: Das dichterische Werk. 3. Auflage”
• The object page now displays the new transcription fields for notes, status, and type of the transcription
• New types of classifications for the link between an object and a tag
  • Taxon
  • Topic
  • Mentioned subject (similar to the existing “display subject”)
• Dependencies
  • Updated OpenLayers to Version 10.6

musdb

• Renaming vocabulary entries to blacklisted terms is now impossible
  • Someone managed to create an actor “unknown” by adding a different actor and renaming the new actor entry to “unknown” afterwards.
• Added a sidebar to object group overview pages for additional filtering options
• New types of classifications for the link between an object and a tag
  • Taxon
  • Topic
  • Mentioned subject (similar to the existing “display subject”)
• New APIs for listing all vocabulary entries linked to the objects of a museum
• Dependencies
  • Updated OpenLayers to Version 10.6

Importer

• Core
  • Deaccessions are now covered by the import tool
  • Recipients of deaccessions are linked to the address book / contact list
• Parser
  • CSVXML: The CSVXML parser now covers deaccessions as well
  • ImageByInvno: Added an option to ignore any characters before a given starting combination of characters (if there is a consistent start of the inventory number).

CSVXML

• New fields
  • tag_related_identifier_type
  • tag_related_identifier

Dissemination

• Presentation “Von museum-digital zum eigenen Online-Katalog” for the Working Group Digitization of the State Museum Association of Rhineland-Palatine
  • Slides: PDF
  • Slides: ODP

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Development

musdb

• Added a tool for the AI-aided detection of displayed subjects in images for tagging
  • Has to be explicitly turned on on a per-collection basis, as it makes sense only for certain types of objects (like paintings, drawings, photographs)
  • Usable within the tagging overlay on object editing pages
  • See also: blog post about the feature (German)
• The maximum length of contents in the data field “edition” of literature entries has been extended to 50 characters
• Uploaded PDFs may now be up to 40 MB large
• New command line option to reset all permissions of a user account to the default provided by their user role
• New event type: “Changed”

nodac

• Added AI-generated suggestions for tag definitions and translations of tag names in a sidebar
  • This is also re-used to identify duplicate tags

Dissemination

• Poster presented at CoRDI 2025 (Archived) on August 27, 2025, in Aachen: “To Educate or to Enforce – The Case for Underhanded Methods to Improve Research Data”
  • PDF
  • Abstract / Zenodo

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Generally, the pace and type of development seems to have changed this year. Rather than doing many small improvements all over the place, there is less but larger and more labor intensive changes and new features. See for example the versioning in musdb (January), the tool for automating imports based on what others call a “hot folder” and the sort option to sort objects by their images’ aesthetics score (both presented here in March), and the new tool for suggesting formulations for object descriptions using large language models (June).

July

Frontend

• Translation of the software to Hindi and Telugu
• Grouping of tags by their relation to a given object
  If an object is linked to more than 10 tags, the tag list of object pages quickly starts looking unorganized and messy. In such cases, the tags will now be displayed grouped by their relationship to the object (thus far: general tag, material, technique, object type, display subject)

musdb

New Features

• Export option for the specific LIDO as expected by the German Digital Library’s “colonial contexts” portal

Improvements & Changes

• The minimum length of fulltext search terms for object search parameters is now visibly enforced in the extended search user interface
  To not overly burden the fulltext search server, any term in a full text search in musdb needs to be a minimum of two characters long. Thus far, shorter full text search parameters were simply ignored. This certainly was confusing at times. Since June, attempting to perform search queries with shorter search parameters is made impossible by a check in the extended search overlay.
• Reception history of objects: Statements of the relevant position within a source can now be 40 characters long
• Transcriptions
  • May now be up to 4000000 long
  • New fields: Notes on the transcription, status, aims

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in the batch editing of specific visibility flags for data fields on the addendum tab

Juni

Frontend

• Performance improvements
  • Object search now runs without a connection to the full text search server if no full text search parameter is set
  • If multiple search parameters for an earliest / latest time have been set, they are parsed and combined before being forwarded to the database
• Improvements in the deletion of temporarily created PDF files (PDF export)
• Navigation has been translated to Tamil

musdb

New Features

• Recipient of deaccessed objects can now be linked from within the address book
• New tool for AI-aided formulation o object descriptions (based on existing other metadata)

Improvements

• Object search now runs without a connection to the full text search server if no full text search parameter is set

Importer

• The CSVXML parser has been extended to cover new event types and markings
• Object groups automatically generated to group all objects of an import can now receive a description as set within the import configuration

nodac

The list of selectable languages for the navigation of nodac has now been restricted to those in which there is actually a complete translation