About - Zabytek.pl
About
The Zabytek.pl website is a modern way of sharing information about Polish monuments of architecture, along with descriptions, documentation, photographs, interesting digital materials (e.g. 3D models of the buildings, point clouds, panoramas and films), and the locations of the buildings.
The Zabytek.pl website is administered by the National Institute of Cultural Heritage.
The website has been created by the employees of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, with contributions from registered users. Following the registration in and logging into the website, users can add their own photographs and descriptions, set the routes of sightseeing tours, add buildings to their favourites section and make notes.
The new version of the portal presents several new and useful functionalities:
- new data resources, covering the national inventory of immovable and archaeological monuments as well as wartime graves and graveyards,
- possibility of viewing and downloading documentation for selected facilities,
- an advanced browser that allows looking for facilities and documents by different criteria:
- grouping the structures in thematic categories (e.g. searching for Monuments of History, archaeological sites, UNESCO World Heritage monuments, etc.),
- searching by function (e.g. churches, tenement houses, castles, hill forts, burial mounds, etc.),
- browsing by document type (e.g. Sites and Monuments Record Card, Architectural Monument Record Card, etc.),
- searching by proper names (e.g. the patron of a church or the object’s proper name) or by administrative affiliation (e.g. the architectural monuments of Zielona Góra),
- narrowing down the search to selected time periods by using the timeline.
- 360° panoramic photographs of selected monuments,
- a contact form (https://zabytek.pl/pl/kontakt) that facilitates contact between users and website administrators.
The ZABYTEK.pl portal is integrated with a map portal managed by our Institute. Every piece of information about the location of an object as well as its basic features has been provided in line with detailed information from the spatial database of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage (NID).
The map view additionally employs the OpenStreetMap data that make it easy to identify all the objects included on the website. Integration with Google Maps - a popular map portal - also allows the user to set the route to the architectural monument of their interest with the use of a mobile device.
COLLECTIONS and TOURS tabs are attractive in the context of popularising monuments or planning tourist routes. The former aggregates sites in appropriately prepared thematic categories. The latter enables registered and logged users to, with the help of the website, create routes of sightseeing tours focusing on monuments included in the portal. Tours may be created for users of various means of transport (cycling, hiking, cars) and by duration. A tour prepared in such a way may be published on the portal, save as PDF file, or navigate between subsequent points along the route through the use of a mobile device with GPS.