Viewshare: Up Close and Personal With Your Digital Treasures

“Back in November 2011, the Library of Congress blogged about a new online service called Viewshare, a web domain where cultural heritage institutions can show off their digital treasures free of charge... Now the Library and the developer of the Viewshare software, Zepheira Inc., have announced the formal launch and added some new features, so perhaps this is the moment to take a look at what this tool actually does... Viewshare grew out of the Library’s 10-year National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP, pronounced N-dip), which wrapped up in 2010. While NDIIPP identified and preserved at-risk digital collections at 185 public and private-sector organizations, making the newly preserved collections visible and accessible was an ongoing challenge. In 2008, the Library partnered with Reston, Va.-based Zepheira to create a platform where NDIIPP partners could present and share their work. After 3 years of further research and development, the same solution is now available to a broad range of institutions, allowing smaller, under-resourced participants to put their materials online, manage them according to current best practices, and create a variety of interactive interfaces, without the usual steep learning curve or expense... Viewshare is available to anyone in the cultural heritage community, and at this stage, the Library of Congress is taking a fairly broad view of qualified users—including educators and individuals with collections of interest. To sign up, a user needs to complete a short online statement of intent and wait for approval, which happens quickly. Institutions with images or other digital assets to share must already have them stored on a web-accessible platform with persistent URLs, their own or in a public space like the Internet Archive or Wikimedia Commons. For material that users don’t want publicly displayed, there are settings to limit or hide access. To create the metadata for Viewshare, users populate a simple Excel spreadsheet with descriptive information and the images’ URLs. When the Excel file is uploaded to Viewshare, metadata is extracted, indexed, and displayed in a basic interface on the Viewshare site. Users can take advantage of their own existing metadata, or adapt one of Viewshare’s sample spreadsheets. The idea is to make the process simple, and as users gain experience, to help them move toward a supported standard like MODs or Dublin Core. ‘The whole point is, you can’t expect everyone will have all their information in tidy little packets according to some unrealistic standard,’ said Uche Ogbuji, a founding partner at Zepheira and one of the major implementers of the software. ‘If they’re trying to showcase data, we can show them what can happen. When it’s attractive, you can encourage users to move toward a standard,’ because it allows them to take advantage of the features offered by Viewshare. For example, MODS—a standard that enables libraries to port certain bibliographic data to other systems—enables interactive geographic mapping, collection timelines, and the creation of tag clouds. Even if users opt to create their own metadata sets, the standards ‘live under the hood,’ Ogbuji said. As users become more accustomed to working with Viewshare, its metadata options, and their own collections, they’ll discover that incorporating the MODS or Dublin Core standards will support time-saving features. But, in the meantime, ‘we don’t have to chase them away,’ Ogbuji said... It is this suite of interactive displays that gives Viewshare users some interesting options to look at collections in new and different ways. Trevor Owens, digital archivist for the Library of Congress and Viewshare’s chief blogger and evangelist, listed some of these in his guest post in November for The Signal, the Library’s digital preservation blog. The ability to plot geographic data from a set of objects and view the mapped results, for example, can suggest patterns that may shed new light on the origins and development of the collection that users wouldn’t spot object by object. Viewshare allows users to explore other kinds of relationships among records that would be hard to render in a traditional repository interface...”