Datavisualisation for local studies

What is datavisualisation for local studies?

In 2012 the State Library of NSW commissioned Dr Mitchell Whitelaw of the University of Canberra to develop prototype image explorers for public library picture collections, one for individual library collections, and the other one using the entire image collection accessible from Trove.

Library specific discovery

ManlyImages displays your library photographs giving title or decade discovery.  You can see the example site using images from Manly Library.

This version of display is specific to an individual library, and the images can be viewed on Trove or on the library’s own database. The source code for the project is available on github and can be used and modified by anyone with coding experience. Libraries simply have to source a code expert to do this work for them if there is no inhouse expertise.

Dr Whitelaw has written about his work on the visible archive blog.

Trove wide discovery

TroveMosaic searches all of Trove images for a given keyword.  Results are limited to 500 in this example in the interests of speed.

Please note: TroveMosaic does not work with Internet Explorer. You will need to access through another browser.

The results can be grouped by title term, collection or decade and viewed in compact or expanded form.  The search returns a mosaic of images.  Clicking on any of these images these takes you to the image on the site of the original collection.

This gives a different way to look at the results of searches for photographic collections, enabling a discovery rather than a search based method.  The TroveMosaic can be linked to from any website.  You may want to use it as a way for showcasing your library collection on Trove. 

Searching TroveMosaic can also highlight which towns and suburbs are under represented on the national database and may encourage people to digitised their images and make them available on Trove.

Both of these discovery tools were made possible thanks to the Trove API.