Fast forward to early 2015 The group, now at over 7000 members, is too popular for the Facebook Group platform to cope. Since the contributions were only displayed on the timeline news feed and unable to be catalogued, sorted, or effectively searched, photographs and information was getting lost. Even a few hours later it was difficult to locate ‘that photo I saw earlier’; worse it looked like some may have completely vanished. It was obvious a new solution was needed – and Recollect was it. With a kick-start fund from a generous benefactor, hours of work from a core group of volunteers, and some clever development work to extract the majority of the contributions (around 8000 images!) from the Facebook group page, the new West Coast NZ History website launched on 23 May 2015 with an article in the Greymouth Star (see attached images from paper and online editions). The new site, based on the Recollect platform, offers all the benefits of the group page (community contributions of photos and stories, image tagging, ‘liking’ an item, commenting on a contribution) but with full searchability and ongoing management of the content. This means the site offers many ways for visitors to search or browse content using subject tags, dynamic menus, map links and watching latest uploads.
