British Library's 'Caribbean Views' made possible with System Associates technology
February 3, 2006
System Associates has developed the internet technology behind a new collection launched on the Collect Britain website, an e-project offering an eclectic showcase of digital sounds and images from the British Library.
The collection, called Caribbean Views, offers more than 1,000 images, maps and texts from the 18th and early 19th centuries and reveals the contrasting experiences of life on and around plantations in the former British colonies. A virtual tour with narrative by historian and writer, Mike Phillips, brings the artefacts to life and offers learners a diverse perspective on colonial Britain, from idyllic scenes of colonial landscapes to text extracts about the horrors and hardships witnessed by slaves in the sugar plantations.
This is one collection of many available on the Collect Britain website, which is an ambitious online programme involving the digitisation of more than 90,000 sounds and images. System Associates has provided an innovative digital media library and content management system that has enabled an in-house team to swiftly and effectively label, describe and manage large quantities of information and present it in themed online collections.
g-Media, the digital media library system is workflow-driven, so that much of the process is automated. It allows the British Library team to effectively govern the digitisation of an image from its creation and its classification, to the application of metadata and quality assurance. Metadata tagging is intuitive, so that users of the system do not need to key metadata manually, although this option is still available. The system is also scaleable, so that new data fields can be created, edited, duplicated and deleted as the collection continues to evolve.
A built in user registration facility ensures no content can be posted to the website, before a series of pre-determined checks are carried out by authorised users. Content is administered through a browser-based interface and the content management system used - g-Serve, supports most file formats. Original images can be displayed in a variety of media and can automatically generate variations based on colour, size, resolution and file type, so that visitors to the site can extract information in their preferred format. A pan-zoom facility also allows users to scrutinize images in detail.
Russell Watkins, project manager for Collect Britain, comments "Unlike most of the other material presented by Collect Britain, Caribbean Views is not drawn from a single British Library collection. It has been developed by picking out the best examples of text and images that are scattered throughout the Library's vast collections of maps, manuscripts, printed books and newspapers. An online collection of this kind allows users to cross-reference and contextualize material and hopefully provides very meaningful information and lessons to learners that visit the site."
You can see the Caribbean Views collection by visiting the Collect Britain website