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ViewShare.org: Create and Share Interfaces to Our Digital Cultural Heritage

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The following is a guest post by Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist with the Office of  Strategic Initiatives.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new site, Viewshare.org, a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving. (Editor’s note: the Viewshare program was retired in 2018.)

If you have been following us for a while you might realize that this looks and sounds a lot like Recollection. That’s because it is! Viewshare.org is the new domain name for our instance of the open source Recollection software. The transition to the new domain name represents a more significant commitment to this project. While we are still going to be actively refining, developing, and improving the software, putting it on its own domain name makes it easier to find, use, and share.

What is new for the Viewshare Launch? The following are a few features that we quietly rolled into the latest version of the software. We wanted to take this moment to highlight some of the exciting new features that the launch of Viewshare.org brings with it to the underlying Recollection software.  

1. Streamlined User Experience: Thanks to invaluable feedback from users we were able to isolate a series of improvements to the user interface that make it both easier to use and take out a number of steps in the process of importing, augmenting, publishing and embedding views.  

2. Ingest Dublin Core data via OAI-PMH: Users can now directly ingest Dublin Core data via OAI-PHM. This means that hundreds if not thousands of digital cultural heritage collections can now be directly imported into the software.

 

 3. Public and Private collection data and views: One of the most requested features for the software was the ability to 1) only share views and data sets with specific sets of individuals and 2) to be able to keep saved drafts of their data sets and views before sharing them with the world. We are thrilled to announce that we now have a robust set of options for marking datasets as public and private, limited sharing of data sets through a shared key system, and the ability to change any data set back and forth from public to private. This means that you can start playing with the software today and not worry about anyone else seeing what you are up to until you are ready for them to.  

If you have already used our instance of Recollection then you are already set up to use Viewshare.org. Further, any old URLs should still work for the site, but you can now also reach any of those pages through the viewshare.org domain name. Visit the request an account page to get started building your views.

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