The Human-Computer Interaction Lab worked with a team for the Library of Congress (LC) to develop and test interface designs for LC's National Digital Library Program. Three iterations are described and illustrate the progression of the project toward a compact design that minimizes scrolling and jumping and anchors users in a screen space that tightly couples search and results. Issues and resolutions are discussed for each iteration and reflect the challenges of incomplete metadata, data visualization, and the rapidly changing web environment.
Legislation enacted by the U.S. Congress in December 2000 allocates funding to the Library of Congress to lead the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The collaborative initiative is focused on materials created primarily in digital form for which there are no analogue representations and which users experience as digital products, sometimes known as "born digital". The investigators have consulted with numerous parties in public, private and not-for profit entities and have defined the "infrastructure" as having two major components: a preservation network of individuals and a technical architecture that provides coherence to localized efforts to archive digital works but is able to accommodate change as technologies advance and organizational needs evolve. This article describes the progress of the initiative and its implications for near and long term research. A striking feature of the research is the integration of technology and organization. The program emphasizes collaboration among a wide range of partners, looking toward solutions that can accommodate multiple and disparate requirements, and communication and outreach to many communities and the public.
Abstract. This demonstration of the Recollection project of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress will showcase a prototype platform, tools and environment for sharing and access to diverse born-digital collections. As the Program has addressed the development of distributed preservation through a national community of partner institutions, the challenge of access and interoperability has become more urgent. The network needs to be able to strategically bring collections under stewardship and keep an inventory without excessive burden on the collecting organizations. The data under stewardship is very diverse and follows standards acceptable within each content domain. These circumstances require an infrastructure that enables the community of NDIIPP Partners to share their collections and data on an ongoing basis. This allows NDIIPP to maintain the benefits of a distributed network of partners and also take advantage of the collections speaking to one another.
DescriptionThe 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 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 datasets; geospatial information; websites and blogs; e-journals; audiovisual materials; and digital government records [1].These diverse collections are held in the dispersed repositories and archival systems of over 130 partner institutions where each organization collects, manages, and stores at-risk digital content according to what is most suitable for the industry or domain that it serves. This practice is necessary in a federated network of heterogeneous infrastructures but creates challenges in providing meaningful access across collections. However, it is clear that digital content grows in value exponentially as it is
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