Tuesday 4 November 2008

Visualising Repository Contents

Those who have followed this blog will know that I'm a sucker for a good visualisation that provides a helpful way of displaying and accessing the contents of a collection or a whole repository.


So I read with interest about cooliris, a convincing and polished implementation of the displaywall metaphor that works on media resources described in RSS feeds. Using XSLT I turned the XML export of an EPrints search result into the required MediaRSS format (making use of the eprint item thumbnails) and embedded it into a web page as a demo. The results are best viewed in their installable full-screen viewer rather than the web page-embedded Flash program, especially if the feed extends to thousands of objects!

This technique is obviously best for visually attractive items, rather than a wall full of text-based journal articles, and would probably form an accompaniment to a collection listing, rather than replacing it.

2 comments:

  1. My library school buddy, Josh Ranger, has been experimenting with visualization for digitized manuscript collections. He learned from his user studies that researchers were going quickly through folders of paper correspondence -- scanning for official looking letterhead and/or hand written notes.

    His thought was: "Why not make this possible for digital facsimiles?"

    He used PicLens -- which looks similar enough to CoolIris to make me think it's the same software with a new name.

    Anyhoo. Here's a link to Josh's Ada James set on Flickr:

    http://tinyurl.com/58v689

    Great site, keep up the excellent work! I learned about you from Dorothea Salo.

    Cheers!

    -Sally J.
    The Practical Archivist

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  2. You're spot on - cooliris is a rebranding of PicLens. Their software allows you to have an alternative view/interaction with the objects on the web page. So when I navigate to Josh's Flickr page then I can see an alternative view of the documents as a picture wall.

    I think you bring out the important application of this visualisation - it allows our natural perception facilities to quickly and efficiently search for important visual features. Any repository task that is visual in nature can benefit from this. An open access example: checking for publishers' PDFs.

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