Bringing treasures to the surface: previews and overviews in a prototype for the Library of Congress National Digital Library

Abstract

We worked with a team from the Library of Congress (LC) to develop interface design components for LC’s American Memory collections of historical multimedia materials. Our prototype illustrates the benefits of previews (such as samples, collections of thumbnails, and video previews) and overviews (such as timelines and automatically generated tables of contents) to facilitate the browsing of search results, or of entire unprocessed collections.