National Archives of Australia: Archives Viewer
"Say hello to the Archives Viewer (naming things isn't really one of my strengths). Instead of rewriting my existing script I decided to create a completely new web application. Why? Mainly because it gave me a lot more flexibility. I could also make use of a variety of existing tools and frameworks like Django, Bootstrap, Isotope and FancyBox. Standing upon the code of giants, I had the whole thing up and running in a single weekend. The code is available on GitHub.
What does it do? Simply put, just feed the Archives Viewer the barcode of a digitised file in RecordSearch and it grabs the metadata and images and displays them in a variety of useful ways. It's really pretty simple, both in execution and design.
Yep, there's a wall. It's not quite as spacey and zoom-y as the CoolIris version, but perhaps that's a good thing. It's just a flat wall of page image thumbnails with a bit of lightbox-style magic thrown in. But when I say just, well... look for yourself. There's something a bit magical about seeing all the pages of a file at once, taking in their shapes and colours as well as their content. This digital wall provides a strangely powerful reminder of the physical object.
Of course you can also view the file page by page if you want. Printing is a snap - just type in any combination of pages or page ranges and hit the button. The images and metadata are assembled ready to print. No more wondering 'which file did this print out come from?'.
But perhaps the most important feature is that each page has it's own unique, persistent url. Basic stuff, but oh, so important. With a good url you can share and cite. Find something exciting? Tell the world about it! I've included your typical social media share buttons to help you along."
(Tim Sherratt, 29 August 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Annotate That! content commentary and sharing application
"Annotate That! is a free unique annotating service. Share web pages, images or documents with others and add your comments using annotations. Simply click on the web page or medium to make your annotation."
(We Create Digital)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Open Archives Initiative
"The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.
The OAI-ORE Executive provides overall leadership to the project and holds primary responsibility for the project budget and the ultimate success of the work. Carl Lagoze - Computing and Information Science, Cornell University, Herbert Van de Sompel - Digital Library Research and Prototyping, Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library.
Funding and Support: Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906)."
(Open Archives Initiative)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Network: our identities revealed through our network traffic
"Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network."
(Michael Rigley)
Fig.1 "Network" by Michael Rigley.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Negative: Adobe's publicly available archival photo format
"Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats - the specifications for which are not publicly available - which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.
The solution to this growing problem is Digital Negative (DNG), a publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.
Within a year of its introduction, several dozen software manufacturers such as Extensis, Canto, Apple, and iView developed support for DNG. And respected camera manufacturers such as Hasselblad, Leica, Casio, Ricoh, and Samsung have introduced cameras that provide direct DNG support."
(Adobe Systems Incorporated.)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
