Related to this morning’s post about Content as Raw Material, my friend, Glenn Wiebe, posted a link and description this morning for Digital Vaults, a new service of the National Archives. It’s an incredibly useful, visually appealing, and addictive collection of photos and documents from the archive, organized by tags and navigated using Ajax (I assume).
Read Glenn’s post (Digital Vaults: Social Networking for Primary Sources) to get a social studies educator’s perspective. I especially like how you can build your own collection and then mix the documents together into a video. Very Cool!
As I commented on Glenn’s article, what is most intriguing to me about these tags-based collections is when we, the audience, starts to contribute our own tags, which I think is the way of the new partnership between The Library of Congress and Flickr.
Tags: warlick, education, technology, digital vault, digital content
I had the tremendous opportunity to have a private tour of the Archives last week–it was AMAZING…they are working on making the public vaults fully accessible and interactive–the Digital Vaults are just the beginning of the incredible plans their education and museum staff have for the near future! So happy to see others are aware of and using the site!
I am mystified at the praise for this National Archives site. The tagging feature is all well and good, but the site is confusing, lacking in fundamental features (such as an effective search engine and document descriptions) and not very useful. I blogged about it here: http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2008/04/flash-over-substance-national-archives.html
I agree with you, Larry, that the site leaves much to be desired, and I agree, especially, that it is about as useful as my first attempt to shuffling playing cards.
But the same could be said of our first attempts at building motor vehicles, the printing press, lighter-than-air travel, etc. Lots of missteps, each with a jewel from which someone else will learn.
I continue to believe that our information access in the future will look a lot more like this than the card catalogs drawers I grew up with.