The British Library has used new technology to develop Caribbean Views, a digitisation project about life on the plantations.
Located at www.collectbritain.co.uk, Caribbean Views includes over 1000 images, alongside maps and text from the 18th and 19th centuries, depicting life on the plantations. Historian Mike Phillips provides a virtual tour, about the highs and lows of colonial life.
Developed by System Associates, g-Media is a digital media library and g-Serve a content management system, used by the library for labelling and managing the information used in the project; including photographs and sound.
Incorporating an automated process, g-Media is workflow driven, so workers at the library can control the digitisation of an image from its creation to classification. Intuitive metadata tagging ensures the data doesn?t have to be inputted manually and data fields can be edited, deleted and duplicated as required.
A user-registration facility ensures nothing can be posted onto the website before a selection of pre-determined checks are performed by authorised users.
G-Serve supports a range of file formats. Incorporating a pan-zoom facility, the program can display images in a variety of different media, and create variations based on size, colour, resolution and file type, which the user can then select.
Russell Watkins from Collect Britain comments: ?An online collection of this kind allows users to cross-reference and contextualise material and hopefully provides very meaningful information and lessons to learners that visit the site.?