Viewshare User Stories

The following user stories illuminate the ways that various cultural heritage institutions are using Viewshare to enhance, interpret, and enable access to their digital collections. Viewshare not only allows digital collection managers and curators to provide dynamic visualizations of, and interface to, their digital materials, but it also allows both content stewards and users to analyze and better understand the nature of those collections. These user stories illustrate how different institutions are utilizing Viewshare to create and manage access to their digital collections.

Gloria Gonzalez and the John Elon Phay Collection

The John Elon Phay Collection

Gloria Gonzales is a former junior fellow at Library of Congress and had worked at the University of Mississippi's archive prior to her tenure as a junior fellow. She immediately recognized the potential of Viewshare to enhance use, access, and interpretation of the collection she had worked with at Mississippi, the John Elon Phay Collection and was instrumental in getting her former co-workers in the archive to adopt the tool. Pamela Williamson, Curator of Visual Collections at the University of Mississippi, and director of the digitization of the Phay Collection explained how the Recollection views supplement the existing online collection. “Recollection really picks up where our digital collection management system leaves off. It allows the information presented by the collection to be seen and manipulated in a way that builds and expands our online Phay Collection.” Read more about Gloria's and the University of Mississippi archive's use of Viewshare.

Desegregation of Virginia Education (DOVE) Project	Fulton Street Trade Card Collection
The Desegregation of Virginia Education (DOVE) project needed a free, easy-to-use tool to provide graphically appealing interfaces to its catalog of primary source material. The customized displays and navigation aids provided by Viewshare support both increased use by the public and researches and give the project "added credibility" for granting agencies and potential collaborators. Read more about DOVE's use of Viewshare.	Brooklyn Public Library's Fulton Street Trade Card Collection contains advertising cards, handbills, and trade advertisements for late 19th and early 20th century merchants along Brooklyn's Fulton Street retail corridor. Building Viewshare Views allows users to interact with the collection in novel, dynamic ways, such as seeing where certain types of businesses were located on the map view or by using the pie chart to analyze business types and advertising subjects. Read more about how Viewshare enhances the Fulton Street Trade Card Collection.

California Wildfires 2007 Web Archive

California Wildfires Map

In response to the Southern California Wildfires of 2007, the California Digital Library began a web archiving recording "California State Agency sites, federal government sites, news, blogs, social networking sites... to provid[e] lasting access to the web’s coverage of the fires." The view at left shows web archiving data from this collection. The data that built this view was in a very raw state and the contents were largely unknown. With about 20 minutes of clean-up Viewshare revealed the collection contained documents from around the world and that it contained Flickr images and tweets.