Zepheira » Library of Congress

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.

The Art of Linked Data: Architecting Recollection

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:24:18 +0000

Uche Ogbuji has authored the column “The Art of Linked Data: Architecting Recollection” for semanticweb.com. In this article, he discusses observations, reflections and practical advice from various projects applying Linked Data and thus Semantic Web principles across diverse domains.

Exhibit 3.0 Part 1 – An Open Source Software Platform for Publishing Linked Data

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:48:53 +0000

Part one of a two-part series on Exhibit 3.0 was recently published on Semanticweb.com. The article, co-authored by MacKenzie Smith, Research Director at MIT Libraries and Eric Miller, President of Zepheira, is titled Exhibit 3.0 Part 1 – An Open Source Software Platform for Publishing Linked Data.

The MIT Simile project, a joint project between MIT Libraries, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the World Wide Web Consortium, has spent the last decade developing and experimenting with new open source software tools for Web-based data publishing. This led to the release of Exhibit, a JavaScript browser widget for searching, browsing, navigating and visualizing data. Exhibit lets Web site authors create dynamic publications of their data collections without resorting to complex programming, database or server technologies.

In the article, Eric and MacKenzie discuss the next phase of the project which provides a new architecture for Exhibit that increases scalability and addresses other limitations identified by its users. This Exhibit 3.0 project is made possible by generous support from the Library of Congress. It is a partnership among MIT Libraries, MIT CSAIL and Zepheira, including personnel who are SIMILE project alumnus.

Part 2 of this article will be released in late September/early October.

Exhibit 3 Beta Release Announced

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:16:10 +0000

TThe Exhibit3 team is proud to announce the beta release of Exhibit 3. This project is made possible by generous support from the Library of Congress. It is a partnership among MIT Libraries, MIT CSAIL and Zepheira, including personnel who are SIMILE project alumnus. View release features, where to download it and how to give us your feedback on the Exhibit 3 Project site.

The release includes both the new client and the server component of Exhibit 3, so you can see how going from a client only collection to a client/server collection will work. The new client is less functional than the current Exhibit 2 client, but will improve over the next few months. We will be posting a timeline for the rest of the year to the Web page soon, so those of you who need to wait for a more stable version or one with a particular feature will have some idea of when to expect that. Over the next few months we’ll also create a lot of new documentation, but for now we just have what’s in the code and some basic instructions for building the system.

So for those of you who’ve been waiting, we hope you’ll try it out and give us your thoughts! Bugs and feature requests are welcome via GitHub and discussions welcome on the SIMILE Widgets mailing list.

For those interested in seeing some of this work in action check out the early demonstrations of both the new client and the server component of Exhibit 3.

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”.

Linked Data at the Library of Congress

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:56:53 +0000

Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, spoke at the recent Semantic Technologies Conference about how the world’s largest library leverages semantic technology to help manage the vast resources of the LoC. In her keynote address, Ms. Campbell spoke about how the Library of Congress is leveraging linked data technologies in three key areas:

Managing existing collections
Maintaining the Library of Congress’s role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information
Fulfilling the mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a more digital collection

The keynote covered several of the key linked data initiatives underway at the Library including project Recollection, a joint project with Zepheira. The keynote in its entirety, is presented below.

To read more about Recollection and the Library of Congress, check out this recent series about the Recollections Project.

Exhibit 3 Face to Face meeting boosts the project

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:48:12 +0000

A few Zepheirans met with their colleagues on the collaborative Exhibit 3 project, building a publishing framework for large scale data-rich interactive Web pages, building on the success of the original Exhibit. Meeting in space generously provided by Google in Mountain View, CA, key project members from Google, MIT, The Library of Congress and Zepheira discussed progress, technical issues and opportunities to spread the word about Exhibit 3. This face-to-face meeting helped boost efforts, including the meeting of a key milestone, loading 100,000 records into Exhibit 3.