Emily V - Blog 7 - National Archive Experience Digital Vaults

The National Archive Experience Digital Experience is a fancy looking site - using Flash technology lots of images swirl around the screen encouraging the user to interact with the site, explore, the archives, and play exciting archive guessing games... It all seems like a pretty good idea, but somehow it didn't really work for me. I found the Flash, while nice looking, a little annoying - it took for ever to navigate in between pages, and at least on my small-ish laptop screen I didn't find it terribly easy to see and decide which images to choose. 

PS. There is also an archive theme game to play.

Collection Principles

There are no clearly stated principles. I assume that this is just a sampling of everything that has been digitized, but I don't know this for sure... The images seems to be organized thematically and by tag words, though the archive webs can be filtered by the user.

Object Characteristics

Good scans, one can zoom in very close and still get nice clear images. (I think they must be vector images.)

Unfortunately, there is no way to take copies of the picture off the site.

Metadata

Metadata is great for these images. When one finds an image of interest they click on that image, which swirls it to the front (this is time consuming!) then you select to expand, which opens another window where one can read a small blurb about the artifact and zoom in on the image. Also at this point you can "Research the record in ARC" (though this link is not terribly visible or obvious) - this gives you all of the metadata you may need.

Intended Audience

The audience for this site seems to be primarily school children (I am guessing primary school-age and maybe middle-school). The site as links for educators, so their goal seems to be to have this Web site incorporated into history or social studies classes.