Cocoanut Grove Fire Website
Introduction
From Wikipedia:
On November 28, 1942, it was the scene of the deadliest nightclub fire in history, killing 492 people (which was 32 more than the building's authorized capacity) and injuring hundreds more. The scale of the tragedy shocked the nation and briefly replaced the events of World War II in newspaper headlines. It led to a reform of safety standards and codes across the US, and to major changes in the treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims internationally.
Home page of original cocoanutgrovefire.org
Project Goal
The website was created as a clearinghouse for all information and primary source artifacts related to the Cocoanut Grove Fire. The primary work was to be done by the NFPA Library, with the primary source and research materials coming from different partners, including: The Boston Fire Department, Boston Fire Historical Society, Boston Fire Museum, Boston Public Library, City of Boston Archives, Massachusetts General Hospital, and The National Fire Protection Association.
Users
The site was being designed to help 2 primary sets of users: the General Public, and Researchers.
I spent time interviewing a few of the world leading experts on the fire, including an author, a fire protection engineer, and a fire chief. Their insights into the content allowed me to develop an understanding of the users to create a structure for the content that needed to be developed.
Team
The immediate team consisted of 3 librarians at the NFPA Library. My primary role was with the website Information Architecture, organization, content generation, and digitization of materials (historical photographs, a medicaljournal on burn protocols published about the fire victims, and blueprints of the building).
Information Architecture
The information and structure of the site needed to be developed for all ages and skill levels (because the Cocoanut Grove Fire was a common topic in middle and high school projects). Because of this, the information needed to be at a high level, easily findable, but still cover a wide range of topics within the context of the fire’s impact.
But, the researchers needed that same information, but at a much more detailed level. These researchers include fire historians, authors, students, and subject matter specialists (e.g. medical professionals specializing in burns).
Because of the two very different user needs, there are high level summaries and information for all parts of the fire, but there were also detailed primary sources that could be accessed.
Content
Most of the content that was going to be on the website came from the NFPA archives. It needed to be gathered together, digitized, backed up on site, and then arranged for consumption on the website.
Along with finding all of the materials, I wrote introductions and summaries of high level topics to be added to the pages. My job was to make sure users could navigate to all of the content, and understand the context in which they were looking.
The NFPA Library also had a copy of the original blueprints, which I had digitized and preserved, and could then be shared with the public on this website. This was the first time these blueprints were seen by anyone that had not visited the NFPA Library.
Technology
The website itself was built on Google Sites in house, nothing too fancy. The difficulty of building it was having a publicly accessible (but still safely stored) option for all of the primary source materials. All of these were stored in Picasa, and then the images and citations were all embedded or linked respectively.
Having the two types of content separated allowed for a place to manage all of the materials, and a user friendly front end, with content summaries, to allow access for users.