Trevor Owens

This is just a quick post to share the slides and links from the talk I am giving at WebWise today.

The talk starts by explaining the idea behind the tool. Specifically, how making it easy to make interfaces to cultural heritage collections can help librarians, archivists, curators, and historians both better understand relationships between objects in a cultural heritage collection and how the tool can help them communicate those ideas to audiences. After explaining the kinds of interfaces you can make, I walk through a detailed example of what one of these views can do by looking at a prototype interface created by an Archivist at the National Gallery of Art to the Samuel H. Kress Collection History Database.

I wanted to make sure that everyone had links to all the views I mention. So here are all the links.

NDIIPP Partners Collections Interface:(On Viewshare) (Embeded on NDIIPP’s site): This is an interface to a collection of collections. It acts as a kind of directory for digital collections and it was created from a spreadsheet.

Fulton Street Trade Card View: (On Viewshare)
The Fulton Street Trade Card collection features 245 late 19th and early 20th century illustrated trade cards from merchant’s along the Fulton Street retail thoroughfare in Brooklyn, NY. Using a Viewshare pie chart view, the user is able to run queries and faceted search on the cards’ metadata in ways a simple catalog or scroll would not allow. Using the facets you can limit the chart to a certain element, such as business type, and then get numbers and percentages about the subjects, format, or other elements of the cards’ content.

History of Fairfax County in Postcards: (On Viewshare): A very simple view from a simple spreadsheet. If you like, you can find the spreadsheet this is based in the Viewshare documentation and work from it to get a sense of how the tool works.

Cason Monk-Metclaf Funeral Directors View: (On Viewshare): (My View on Viewshare): (Embeded on East Texas Digital Archives & Collections Site) This is one of the most interesting datasets uploaded to Viewshare. It is a set of data transcribed from historic funeral records.

Samuel H. Kress Collection History Database Prototype View: National Gallery of Art (On Viewshare) This view allows users to explore the relationships between purchase information for a work of art and other aspects of the object, including its current location. This data comes from the Samuel H. Kress Collection History and Conservation Database. The relational database documents the art collection’s acquisition, dispersal, and conservation over time and was created by the National Gallery of Art’s Gallery Archives with funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The data shared here is not complete. Viewshare data and views are intended only for preliminary demonstration of the data and should not be cited in research.