The Time and Place for Space and Time: Interfaces to distributed cultural heritage collections

Digital cultural heritage collections include temporal, locative, and categorical data which are increasingly enabling new interfaces to our cultural heritage. These kinds of dynamic interfaces are what end users are starting to expect of their interactions. Trevor Owens, digital archivist at the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress and a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University, will open a discussion of the way these kinds of interfaces change the way curators, librarians, archivists, researchers and general public see materials in these collections. To ground this discussion in a concrete example, the presentation will focus on one NDIIPP project, Recollection. Recollection is a free platform built by Zepheira LLC for the Library of Congress which empowers historians, librarians, archivists and curators to create and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) of digital collections. The demonstration will show how the software can import collections from spreadsheets or MODS records, augment and transform that data online, generate distinct interactive visual interfaces, and ultimately copy-paste to embed the interfaces they design in any webpage. The discussion of this specific tool will serve as a place to ground a broader general discussion of the possibilities and implications of these kinds of dynamic interfaces to collections.