Dynamic Explorer Interface for “The Unveiling of Britain” (BLL2015 demo)

[The Library of Congress regrettably discontinued the 6-year-old Viewshare service on 4/20/2018.  I did make a rough video to document this project shortly before it was turned off.  The metadata and assets are platform-independent, perhaps I’ll recreate this project on another platform at some point. – AT 5/18/18]
In April 2015 I developed a new Viewshare-driven faceted browser interface which revitalizes The Unveiling of Britain (“UoB”), an online exhibition created by the British Library in 1999 (link).

The UoB “Collection Explorer” interface (click to open) enables users to dynamically explore the UoB exhibition’s 422 historical map assets for the first time using semantic categories developed based on the legacy metadata records.  It was built as a demonstration project to accompany my BLL Competition 2015 application proposal entitled Unveiling the Exhibition: The British Library Collection Explorer.  [Note: this was my second Viewshare-driven project, the first being American Furniture, 1635-1900].

My proposal was that the British Library develop it’s own customized “instance” of the LOC’s open-source Viewshare platform (GitHub site) over the contest’s six-month period. At the same time we worked on this, I would be creating “Collection Explorer” interfaces for BL Collections which could be beta-tested by BL-Labs internally using the Library of Congress’ live Viewshare platform.  By this two-pronged process, collection processing and platform development would proceed simultaneously and allow for a quick roll-out of content when the BL-specific Viewshare instance was ready to launch.

Semantic categories/facets utilized by the Viewshare-driven UoB interface

Creating my demo UoB interface was a complex, user-oriented metadata project. I had to dig into the 16-year-old UoB.xml metadata file (generously shared with me by the British Library) and completely reorganize and optimize it for import to the Library of Congress’ Viewshare platform (developed for the LoC by developer Zepheira.com using technology first developed for  MIT’s Simile Project).

Creating this demo interface required

• html-driven customizations of the metadata to optimize Viewshare’s display (utilizing “tooltip” floatovers to display long text strings),
• normalization of the  UoB metadata (which had a lot of duplication and many inconsistencies),
• selection and implementation of 8 semantic categories (right) allowing the collection to be explored dynamically .  There were other potential facets, but these were the most intriguing.

Even though my proposal wasn’t selected by BL Labs, I’m very happy with how the UoB demo itself turned out (thanks go to the BL Labs team for their tremendous support throughout the application process).
Some caveats:

•  my demo utilizes only the 422 cartographic images from the UoB exhibition, but not the original exhibition’s many pages from written manuscript (these also related to locations in the United Kingdom). I believe the full UoB exhibition has about 380 written pages drawn from roughly 24 manuscripts, and that the combined item total came to 813 assets.
• In some cases the floatover text descriptions (orchestrated by BL Maps Curator-emeritus Peter Barber) are cut off due to html interference by special characters (e.g., smartquotes) left over in the legacy metadata.
• Tooltip floatovers do not work on iPads, as there’s no cursor to activate them.  For a real interface implementation I would create multiple instances and open the appropriate one based on screen size (which usually corresponds to a particular platform).

I am no longer developing this project, but I hope it makes this great BL exhibition more easily accessible to a new generation of users.

I expect to do more Viewshare- (or similewidgets.org-) driven projects in the future, some of which will not even use images at all, only data. – Andrew Taylor, 9-22-15

The Unveiling of Britain BLCE
a demonstration project created to accompany a BLL 2015 Competition submission, April 2015 –
422 cartographic assets
[link to original British Library Project: The Unveiling of Britain, 1999]

Using the Collection Explorer Interface

• Make selections from the categories on the left and right and the central column will return results that match those specifications.
  You can deselect your choices by clicking (Reset all Filters) at the top of the central column.
• Click the item’s thumbnail image to bring up a larger image as a floatover. To close the larger image, click anywhere outside of it.
• Mouseover the Title to view a longer title as a tooltip floatover
• Mouseover Description to read descriptive commentary as a floatover tooltip. [please note that implementing tooltips is my own customization, it is not native to Recollection – AT]
• Click “Webpage”  to visit the full British Library webpage for a specific item.

When the mouse icon is over the “Description” text,
the full description displays as a tooltip floatover

Clicking on a thumbnail image immediately brings up a larger image as a floatover, clicking outside of the floatover image closes it

Clicking on “Webpage” beneath an item opens its original British Library webpage (containing larger image files)

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