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

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”.

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).

Details and registration information

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.

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.

Since 2009, the Recollection platform has grown beyond its pilot phase and has begun to provide the tools and environment that will enable NDIIPP Partners to showcase their collections and data from a central point. In 2011, Zepheira and the Library of Congress will continue to partner on a new phase of the project which will bring increased functionality, a strong community focus, and expansion of the tool to a wider audience.

An example of an embedded Recollection data view can be seen on the Library’s Digital Preservation site. To learn more about the project, visit Recollection or see the recently published W3C Linked Library Data Use Case.

For more information about Recollection, visit the NDIIPP partner page, the
Recollection community page, read the W3C paper or simply view several screencasts showing Recollection in action.

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.