Sylvia Ioannou Foundation

On their new website, one can discover a unique collection of rare books and maps with historical and travel texts related to Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The core of the Foundation is quite specialized, but the audience we are addressing is quite wide. Our visitors are mainly people of the academic community, but also students looking for scholarships, employees in other institutions from all over the world, as well as any person looking for information about books or maps that have references in Cyprus.

On the new website we created, we put content and functionality in the foreground. We designed a clean layout and defined a new typographical identity that could meet all our needs, both in terms of the individual areas of the website, as well as the applications on desktop computers, tablets, and mobiles.

For better management and presentation of the collection, we created a Digital Library. The contents of our digital library can be searched through an advanced search system, with keywords or filters, such as item, availability, or date, or place of release. Documents are presented with images, details, and descriptions. Especially when it comes to books, the visitor can see each page of the book individually, zoom in, see all the pages in a gallery and search in the manuscript using OCR techniques.

For the dynamic supervision of the website, we developed a CMS in Python/ Django that covers all our needs, whether it is the management of the books of our Digital Library or the creation of articles for the presentation of academic programs and any other dynamic page of the website.