Contextual Presentation and Navigation of Historical Artifacts in a Digital Library Design

摘要

A digital library has been designed to present a historically significant collection of World War Ⅱ letters in both temporal and geographical context. Working closely with historical scholars, over 800 WWⅡ historical records have been made publically available for the use of researchers and historians on the web. Digital library design issues encountered as part of this effort dealt with the development of a website from original artifacts and the rendering of this historical content in a visual, geographical, and temporal context, increasing and extending the reach of information previously available only to on-site historical researchers. The current digital library prototype can serve as a model for other developers that are interested in multimodal presentation of varied content.