RECOLLECT is the latest hosted solution for digital collections from NZMS. It’s designed to store, describe and share your collections, but our real aim is to transform how your Community interacts with them.

Designed for Community Participation

However you define your Community there are valuable stories, research and knowledge that they can share if you give them the tools. RECOLLECT provides direct tagging into images and video files. User stories, annotations and translations can be typed or recorded live (audio and video annotation is coming!) RECOLLECT also enables community validation and monitoring of user contributions. Facts can be confirmed or corrected by others in blog format. Misuse can be flagged directly to the administrator. Users can also bookmark their results and favourites for sharing via social media. (Creating, annotating and publishing personal albums is next on our list)

Sound, Video, Images & Text

RECOLLECT manages digital collections of photographs, maps, books, journals, newspapers, video and sound recordings. It will also automatically OCR printed material; converting the pages into searchable text. End User Focussed We believe it’s the system not the user that needs help if you can’t find your way around it. RECOLLECT uses visual prompts for navigation and is structured to keep finding results and new connections. Result sets are relevance-weighted and the search is faceted. Thumbnail ‘ribbons’ show related images and pages in context and it returns maximum size images. The Pan and zoom view works to a very high level of detail on huge files. 1.5 GB is our test file! And for books and documents RECOLLECT will convert PDF files for ‘page turning’ like a book reader. RECOLLECT is cross browser compatible and smart phone enabled.

Centred on Knowledge

Digital collections are all about preserving and sharing knowledge but we often lose the richness of what we ‘know’ because there’s nowhere to capture it. Data in RECOLLECT is organised around Asset and Knowledge ‘Nodes’ which are connected by a web of relationships. Asset Nodes describe your digital items, Knowledge Nodes describe the things that give them context e.g. people, places, events, organisations, families, collections, subjects, language. These can be described and enhanced independently. Language can also be turned into knowledge nodes and linked to printed and spoken examples in your collection.

Interconnected ‘Web’ Structure

RECOLLECT has a graph database structure which manages complex relationships and associations between these nodes, e.g. who are the people in this photograph? How are they related to each other, what other connections do they share with people, places, events, families etc. The data schema is not prescriptive or rigid. RECOLLECT supports current standards like Dublin Core (which aid interoperability) but also manages ad-hoc and evolving schemas. The web of relationships can also extend beyond your ‘boundaries’ if you want to share knowledge nodes with other RECOLLECT sites.

Precise Controls over Access

We have built very granular levels of security into RECOLLECT as access is never a case of ‘one size fits all’. You determine who your community is (as individuals and groups) and decide exactly what they can see, do, and contribute down to the item or even field level. A rights statement or creative commons license can be added to each item. Your full-size assets (or original PDF/TIFF files) can be restricted and secured, and access to high quality copies can be stopped. Every transaction and change to the data is logged and alterations or deletions can be rolled back effortlessly.

Open

RECOLLECT is built with solid, proven open source tools. There is live access to the system (via API’s) as well as the ability to extract data from other open systems. E.g geotagging will connect your content to Google maps. Data is dynamic, so searches are always based on current data, not a cached version. When a new record is added, or made available, it is found instantly.

RECOLLECT will be released in March this year.

Contact Janine to receive updates or request a preview.