Visualizing digital collections at archive-it

Abstract

Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows users to create, maintain and view digital collections of web resources. The current interface of Archive-It is largely text-based, supporting drill-down navigation using lists of URIs. To provide an overview of each collection and highlight the collection's underlying characteristics, we present four alternate visualizations (image plot with histogram, wordle, bubble chart and timeline). The sites in an Archive-It collection may be organized by the collection curator into groups for easier navigation. However, many collections do not have such groupings, making them difficult to explore. We introduce a heuristics-based categorization for such collections.