Why collecting history online is web 1.5

If you're with an organization interested in using one of our collections items in an exhibition, please see the Exhibition Loan Services page. Our digital collections include over 35, digitized books and manuscripts available in either our Digital Library or as part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs.

Many of our physical collections have not yet been digitized. Some of the resources listed below - such Trade Literature and Art and Artist Files - are portals for searching the inventories of those collections. Skip to main content. Digital Collections. About Our Collections The Libraries' physical collections comprise 1. Additional details of the collections housed in the various library locations can be found on the branch web pages.

Collection online has been completely redeveloped, making it much easier to find what you want. It allows access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records. The search is more intuitive and now offers suggestions as you type.

High definition images can be enlarged and examined in detail which will enable you to view the incredible workmanship on the Royal Game of Ur , the intricate carving on this African hunting horn , the amazingly preserved deerskin map from North America, or this delightful drawing by Raphael of an old man's head — just a few of the thousands of highlights to discover. Enjoy exploring the collection — from some of the earliest objects created by humankind to works by contemporary artists.

Or choose from the curated collections below, which reveal the fascinating stories that transcend time. Inner coffin of Hornedjitef - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Brass head of an Ooni king of Ife - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Goddess Tara - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption.

Raphael cartoon for 'Virgin and Child' - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Lewis Chessmen - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Shield from West Papua - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Ancient Greek black-figured amphora wine jar - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption.

The Lycurgus Cup - opens in a modal which shows a larger image and a caption. Stay connected and receive all our latest news, stories and ways to explore the British Museum from home. We remain convinced that we and others are building archives of the future. It just turns out that achieving our goals requires more work than we thought and several of the core principles of Web 2. Unlike Wikipedia, for instance, our collecting work could not succeed in an entirely digital and editable mode.

For this reason and others, we have concluded that collecting history online floats in a world between the uneditable, didactic Web 1. We demonstrate how you can create a digital archive and encourage public participation without losing the integrity of evidence collected or compromising the privacy of a contributor.

Soon after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, , the staff at CHNM quickly realized that we were witnessing a very significant moment in American history. Television and newspaper coverage of hurricane victims stranded on rooftops, houses blasted from their foundations along the Mississippi coast, the displacement of tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents, and the subsequent failures of all levels of government convinced us that we needed to act quickly to begin collecting the history of this terrible disaster.

Our experiences with the September 11 Digital Archive had taught us a lot about collecting history online and so we expected that like the very successful earlier project, the HDMB would take off quickly and would rapidly become a central digital archive of original sources, many of which disappear almost as quickly as they are created.

First, we needed to design a site that was easy to navigate, loaded quickly in a variety of browsers, and made contributors feel comfortable sharing their personal stories and images.

The homepage explained our mission and provided the basic site navigation to browse, contribute, and learn more about the project.

Without that ease and comfort of use, we knew the number of contributions to the project would be limited. Our target audience was anyone who was affected by the hurricanes: survivors, volunteers, concerned citizens.

We asked them to contribute their first-hand accounts of the storms, the aftermath of each storm, and how their lives had changed as a result of the fury of the two hurricanes that summer.

Drawing on our experiences in other collecting projects, we created a short and simple process for contributors to share and upload on-scene images, podcasts, or other born-digital files they might have, or to copy blog postings or emails and submit them to our archive. Using a mashup of GoogleMaps we also asked contributors to geolocate the content of their submission by entering a zip code or street address into the contribution form.

Because this disaster forced the relocation of so many people, we thought compiling geolocation data would be a critical component for contextualizing this evidence in the future. Finally, we designed the site to W3C standards to be as accessible as possible to a variety of visitors.

Once the database and design were ready for public launch, we needed to drive traffic to the website. Our publicity efforts followed a process similar to one we used with great success in the September 11 project. In that earlier project we learned that potential contributors visiting the website wanted to see other contributions before they shared their own stories or uploaded other content. So, we seeded the archive with a number of detailed personal reflections and images submitted by University of New Orleans students and their families.

We then developed a series of relationships with local partners, asked those partners to promote the project far and wide, and then did our best here at CHNM to promote the project as well—writing about it on our various blogs, talking about it at conferences, posting notices on listservs, contacting bloggers and the conventional news media, sending out mailings, and so on.

We also understood that while we could reach more people with a web interface there were still plenty of people who were unwired for various reasons. To combat that, we did two things. These digital audio files were then uploaded directly into HDMB. Second, we printed postage paid reply cards so that someone could pick up a card, write their story, and mail it in. We would then scan and upload it to the archive.

With these efforts combined with the broad publicity campaign, our outreach team sent more traffic to the HDMB site. Up until that moment, everything had proceeded according to plan. But to our surprise, all the national media coverage of the storm aftermath and the combined efforts of our staff here in Virginia and of our many partners along the Gulf Coast did not result in anything like the flood of contributions that we expected when we launched the project in a publicity push during Mardi Gras To be sure, the lack of a flood is not the same thing as a flop.

At this writing the HDMB database contains almost 1, personal reflections, more than 13, digital images, and more than 7, other files everything from newspaper articles to PowerPoint briefings given by the National Guard units. With more than 25, digital objects in its archive some not available for public browsing , the HDMB project is one of the largest repositories of sources on the hurricanes of One reason our collecting work has been harder than we thought it would be is that our first big project—the September 11 Digital Archive—worked so well.

As of this writing, the September 11 project contains more than , digital objects, including more than 40, personal stories and 15, digital images. Although the first 10, contributions to this project were hard to come by, by September 11, , contributions were rolling in of their own accord.

Of course, we knew that September 11 was a unique moment in American history—one that seemingly touched everyone living in America at the time—but even so we thought that other major national events would generate similar, albeit smaller, flows of contributions to our servers.

Moreover, we thought that as the average person became more connected to the Internet, the average person would be even more inclined to contribute something to HDMB. Imagine for just a moment the differences between and In , plenty of people were still using film cameras, only a small fraction of the population had a camera in their cell phone, and blogging had not yet become ubiquitous.