Zepheira » Digital Preservation

Viewshare User Stories Emerge

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:42:06 +0000

The Library of Congress has launched the Viewshare User Stories page, and it already has compelling examples of curators maintaining digital collections in the areas of education (University of Mississippi and Desegregation of Virginia Education [DOVE] project), preservation/display of cultural artifacts (Brooklyn Public Library) and environment (California Digital Library). Viewshare continues to grow and evolve, and we look forward to seeing what new user stories will be added in 2012.

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, launched Viewshare.org in November 2011. Viewshare is a free platform for National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) partners to generate and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience their digital collections.

Viewshare named one of the Top Ten Digital Preservation Developments of 2011

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:18:38 +0000

Library of Congress has named Viewshare as one the most memorable digital preservation happenings of 2011 on their blog The Signal. Other developments recognized in 2011 were, the National Digital Steward Alliance and the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Program.

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, launched Viewshare.org in November 2011. Viewshare is a free platform for NDIIPP partners to generate and customize views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience their digital collections.

Library of Congress launches Recollection as Viewshare.org

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:01:14 +0000

The Library of Congress, in partnership with Zepheira, has launched its latest version of Recollection as a newly branded site called Viewshare.org. Viewshare.org is a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving.

The transition to the new domain name represents a more significant commitment by the Library to this project. The Library and Zepheira continue to actively evolve the project and improve the software and putting it on its own domain name makes it easier to find, use, and share.

Read the Library’s announcement or watch the screencast to learn more.

Open Source Release of Recollection Platform

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:54:28 +0000

Zepheira, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, is pleased to announce the full open source release of the Recollection software platform. Recollection is a web application that enables librarians, archivists, curators, and historians to create dynamic interfaces to cultural heritage collections. To learn more about Recollection, visit the site or watch the screencast.

View the Library’s release announcement or to access the code visit the Library’s project page on Sourceforge.

Library of Congress NDIIPP Partner Meeting: Highlights and Presentations

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:07:35 +0000

The Library of Congress held its annual NDIIPP Partner Meeting in Washington, DC from July 20 – 22. The meeting is a showcase for the innovation which is taking place among the Library’s digital preservation partners. Martha Anderson, Director of Program Management for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, gave an overview of top developments in this space in her closing presentation.

In addition, presentations from the conference program entitled “Make It Work: Improvisations on the stewardship of digital information” have now been posted and are available for those who were not able to attend the meeting in person. Zepheira was in attendance and co-presented “Exhibit3@MIT: Lessons learned from 10 years of the Simile Project for building library open source software”.

Fast Company highlights Project Recollection

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 18:48:11 +0000

Tim Carmody of Fast Company magazine introduces Project Recollection to a broader audience in the article “Recollection: A Collaborative Tool For Sharing And Visualizing Cultural Data” (8 June 2011). His overview of the system, which Zepheira is developing in partnership with the U.S. Library of Congress, has the following subtitle:

A new service from the Library of Congress lets you build maps, graphs, timelines, and trees from the collective digital and digitized history of an entire nation.

Carmody discusses the usefulness of Recollection for digital preservation, archiving and education, summarizing its benefits.

The idea behind Recollection is simple: it allows the LoC and its cultural heritage partner institutions to easily pool and visualize their collections. What was a giant, unwieldy database can be easily transformed into an interactive timeline, map, tag cloud, or a range of other highly readable interfaces. Then you can embed the tool back into your own organization’s site. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for museums (or amateur historians).

Library of Congress Hosting Recollection Workshop on 19 April

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:18:15 +0000

The NDIIPP Program at the Library of Congress will be hosting a free online workshop for digital preservation partners next Tuesday, April 19th at 1ET. Trevor Owens will demonstrate how preservation partners can use this free Library of Congress-sponsored software to easily create intuitive interfaces to their digital collections.

Details and registration information

Zepheira and Partners to speak at 2011 Semantic Technology Conference

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:29:21 +0000

Zepheira team members and partners will be speaking at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference to be held in San Francisco June 5-9.

Talks will highlight practical applications of linked data technologies in collaboration with the Library of Congress and MIT:

Closing Keynote: Semantic Technology at the Library of Congress: Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives and Chief Information Officer for the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is utilizing linked data and semantic technologies in several current projects including Project Recollection and it’s Digital Preservation Initiative. Laura Campbell, CIO of the LoC, will describe these efforts and the reasons for choosing to enable them with semantics.

Presentation: Exhibit3: Publishing Framework for Large Scale Data-Rich Interactive Web Pages: MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at MIT Libraries and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira

In January 2011, MIT and Zepheira began work on Exhibit 3.0, a new project funded by the Library of Congress to redevelop the popular Exhibit tool from the MIT Simile Project. Exhibit was originally developed as an ambitious collaboration of the MIT Libraries, the MIT CSAIL, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to explore applications of the Semantic Web to problems of information management across both large-scale digital libraries and small-scale personal collections. This presentation will discuss the new architecture and features, highlight work done to date, demonstrate some of Exhibit 3.0 capabilities and gather input from the audience on how to build interest and involvement from the community in this work.

Presentation: Recollection: A Linked Data Platform of America’s Memory Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist at the Library of Congress and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira

The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. In 2008, the NDIIPP partners shared content through a simple web page. In order to explore more useful tools and processes for sharing diverse content across partners’ collections, the Library began the Project Recollection Pilot in 2009 with Zepheira to develop a proof of concept that can be used to collect and explore information about digital collections. This presentation will discuss the architecture and features of the Recollection platform, highlight work done to date, discuss future directions of this work and gather input from the audience on how to build interest and involvement from the community.

For more information on times and locations of these sessions visit the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference Agenda at a Glance

Zepheira Case Study: Recollection: Serving Local Preservation Partner Needs through a National Linked Data Platform: Part 2

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:53:33 +0000

The Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program works to catalyze and sustain a national network of digital preservation partners. From the beginning of the project one of the key ideas has been that the partnership, now with 185 partner organizations across 45 states, needed to work toward a distributed architecture. To that end, NDIIPP has worked with its’ partners to connect different platforms for storage and verification, data and metadata management, and access and discovery of preserved digital materials.

This national network of partners has already preserved a substantial amount of our digital cultural heritage, including among other things; geospatial information, web sites, audio visual productions, images and text, and materials related to critical public policy issues. As this set of preserved materials continues to grow it has become all the more apparent that we need tools that provide ways for users to discover and access those distributed collections.

To this end, NDIIPP has collaborated with Zepheira to create Recollection, a free platform for generating and customizing views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow NDIIPP partners and their users to better explore and understand these growing digital collections.

Read Part 2 of the case study which describes the way in which Recollection supports the NDIIPP community and the future role Recollection will serve in the Library’s digital preservation strategy.

For more, read Part 1 of the case study which describes the Recollection platform and its use of linked data principles to empower curators of digital content.

Zepheira Case Study: Recollection – A Linked Data Platform of Digital Collections: Part 1

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:56:33 +0000

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress is an initiative to develop a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the burgeoning amounts of digital content for current and future generations. It is based on an understanding that digital stewardship on a national scale depends on active cooperation between communities. The NDIIPP network of partners have collected a diverse array of digital content, including social science data-sets, geospatial information, Web sites and blogs, e-journals, audiovisual materials, and digital government records.

In 2008, the NDIIPP partners shared content through a simple static web page constructed manually by Library staff. In order to explore more dynamic and useful tools and processes for sharing their collections of diverse content, the Library began a pilot project in 2009 with Zepheira. The result is a software platform called Recollection.

Read Part 1 of the case study which describes the Recollection platform and its use of linked data principles to empower curators of digital content.

For more read Part 2 of the case study which describes the way in which Recollection supports the NDIIPP community and the future role Recollection will serve in the Library’s digital preservation strategy.