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The University of Illinois developed an open-source collections management software program and in August 2006 began making it freely available to archivists, curators, and special collections librarians. This program gives those with limited technological resources and knowledge the ability to easily mount a variety of on-line access tools to their historical collections using ISAD(G)1 and DACS2-compliant standards for description. Archon was created with robust interoperability using a single web-based platform for the management of collections of documents and artifacts held by archives, museums and libraries. It was developed as a "plug and play" application for easy installation on any web server or on any web hosting service. It uses common web-browser input mechanisms and SQL data storage to produce dynamic data output in the form of searchable collections websites, MARC bibliographic records (Smiraglia 1990), EAD finding aids (Pitti 268-293), and long-term preservation TXT data files. The article discusses the design concepts that lead to the University of Illinois' creation of Archon, the challenges faced by the archives community when providing descriptive access to large bodies of historical papers and records, and describes Archon's public and administrative interfaces as well as future plans for additional developments to this software program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a brief overview of a number of experimental interface design projects being carried out collaboratively by teams of researchers at the University of Alberta and elsewhere. One goal of this interface research is to explore the principles of rich-prospect browsing interfaces, which I have defined (Ruecker 1) as those where some meaningful representation of every item in a collection is combined with tools for manipulating the display. Often this manipulation is for the purpose of carrying out some portion of a research task: the interfaces lend themselves to exploratory and synthetic activities, such as knowledge discovery and hypothesis formulation. The projects summarized here begin with a browsing prototype originally designed for the task of pill identification (Given et al.). This prototype was subsequently extended into a prototype for browsing conference delegates and other groups of people (Ruecker et al.). Another direction is represented by a nuanced system based on the mandala (Cheypesh et al.) intended for examining any collection that has been encoded with an XML schema. The Mandala Browser uses combinations of "magnetic axes" selected by the user from the available tags. Next is the set of specialized interfaces for the Orlando Project (Orlando Team), intended to provide a set of discrete entry points into the deeply-encoded electronic history of women's writing in the British Isles. Our project on tabular interfaces provides a variety of spaces designed to assist the user in using thesauri for multilingual query enhancement (Anvik et al.). The final project described below is NORA (Unsworth), which relies on the power of the D2K data-mining tools at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The goal of NORA is to give humanities scholars a workspace for exploring the system-identified features of common documents and further documents that have been recommended by the system. Each of these projects is discussed within the framework of visualizations involving browsing through dynamic grouping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]