Novice in the Archive

Gearing up for our project with the Whitman Archive this week, I've spent some time checking out the British Library's Online Gallery. Here's what I see so far:

The home page of the archive is minimalistic, with a lot of white space and not a lot of text or buttons. The focus is on a few images the center that scroll across the page much like the feature of iTunes that lets users virtually flip through their music collection (as though in a jukebox). Each image represents a content area that you are invited to explore...

There's also a box with popular searches (the more popular the search, the bigger the font).

Some images allow zooming, rotating and other manipulation. All images have contextual notes about dates, authors, and how the image came to be in the collection.

A few other archives that caught my eye are:

The Book Cover Archive, which is pretty much what it sounds like. This is a design eye candy, with a literary bent. I suspect it has potential as a tool for talking about print culture, design, selection, etc....

And, Revolution and Romanticism and The Word on The Street, both of which feature street literature from the 18th and 19th centuries (broadside ballads, penny dreadfuls, chapbooks and other tales of dastardly deeds or derring-do). By the by, chapbooks could make an interesting pairing with New Media, as they were popular before and while copyright laws were getting formulated; they were cheaply made, intended for a mass audience and were often mash-ups of many styles, stories, and genres - and they were very often rip-offs (or appropriations?) of other authors' works....