ViewShare.org: Create and Share Interfaces to Our Digital Cultural Heritage

 The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of  Strategic Initiatives.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new site, Viewshare.org, a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving.

If you have been following us for a while you might realize that this looks and sounds a lot like Recollection. That’s because it is! Viewshare.org is the new domain name for our instance of the open source Recollection software. The transition to the new domain name represents a more significant commitment to this project. While we are still going to be actively refining, developing, and improving the software, putting it on its own domain name makes it easier to find, use, and share.

What is new for the Viewshare Launch? The following are a few features that we quietly rolled into the latest version of the software. We wanted to take this moment to highlight some of the exciting new features that the launch of Viewshare.org brings with it to the underlying Recollection software.  

1. Streamlined User Experience: Thanks to invaluable feedback from users we were able to isolate a series of improvements to the user interface that make it both easier to use and take out a number of steps in the process of importing, augmenting, publishing and embedding views.  

2. Ingest Dublin Core data via OAI-PMH: Users can now directly ingest Dublin Core data via OAI-PHM. This means that hundreds if not thousands of digital cultural heritage collections can now be directly imported into the software. 

 

 3. Public and Private collection data and views: One of the most requested features for the software was the ability to 1) only share views and data sets with specific sets of individuals and 2) to be able to keep saved drafts of their data sets and views before sharing them with the world. We are thrilled to announce that we now have a robust set of options for marking datasets as public and private, limited sharing of data sets through a shared key system, and the ability to change any data set back and forth from public to private. This means that you can start playing with the software today and not worry about anyone else seeing what you are up to until you are ready for them to.  

 

If you have already used our instance of Recollection then you are already set up to use Viewshare.org. Further, any old URLs should still work for the site, but you can now also reach any of those pages through the viewshare.org domain name. Visit the request an account page to get started building your views.

Open Source Tool Speeds Up Web Archive Scoping

This is a guest post from Kathleen Kenney, Digitization Specialist, Digital Information Management Program, State Library of North Carolina. The State Library of North Carolina, in collaboration with the North Carolina State Archives, has been archiving North Carolina state agency web sites since 2005 and social media since 2009.  Since then, we have crawled over …

Read more »

Exchange of Best Digital Preservation Practices in Lexington, KY

The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP. I recently attended the Best Practices Exchange 2011, held October 20-22 in Lexington, KY.   The meeting focuses on the work of state archives and libraries to preserve state government digital information, although practitioners from other kinds of memory organizations are welcome.  This was …

Read more »

E is for ecology

A continuing series of digital preservation topics organized alphabetically.   I have always wanted to write something entitled, Everything I know about digital preservation, I learned in my garden.   I think it is because I have always perceived the practice and development around digital preservation to be organic.  A garden is the interaction among insects and birds, microorganisms, weather conditions, soil chemistry, …

Read more »

Early Returns on Web Survey

Guest post by Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead and NDSA Content Working Group Co-Chair. As announced earlier this month, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance is sponsoring a survey of organizations in the United States who are actively involved in or planning to archive content from the web. The goal of the survey is to …

Read more »

Information or Artifact: Digitizing Photographic Negatives and Transparencies, Part 2

The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. This is the final blog on the topic of informational and artifactual values in the digitization of books (and other documents) and photographic negatives and transparencies.  Here are links to the book-related blogs: Part 1 and Part 2. Part …

Read more »