Following on from last week’s Henry Stewart event on DAM Collections and Heritage Collections, the above webinar explored more deeply the following three important areas:  

The benefits of unrestricted access

After looking at the changing landscape of heritage collections, and the increasing demand for these collections to be made accessible online, it was suggested that the ideal vision and one that allowed organisations to build for scale with all of their assets in one place - from data ingest, to collection management, to discovery and access. In simple terms, this vision would see your metadata organised through the likes of collection trees and intelligent structures, bringing everything together, to work in harmony. The very thing that PastView was created to do. 

A flow chart was used to illustrate how collections, sub-collections, tags, items, entities and attribute sets are connected, working back and forth to draw content, data and story together in one place, ready to be delivered as a highly interconnected experience to your audiences. 

The beauty that is innovation

To this end, we looked at the available PastView viewing features, making use of detailed zoom and page-turning functionality to mimic the physical, complementing rather than seeking to replace the archives we know and love. This sees an enhanced front-end platform that concentrates its focus on the user experience. We also looked at how transcription enables your users to search content, even AV content, and how we can learn a lot from the online retail shopping experience that has become second nature in our day-to-day lives, offering related content to supplement the user's search and add depth and quality through breadcrumbs that serve to tempt them even further on their quest for new knowledge and information.

We also talked about the importance of storytelling and referred back to James Mortlock's presentation of the new HSBC History Website, which masters the concept expertly through 'recent additions', 'snapshots' and 'exhibitions', showcasing their corporate brand heritage and the story as it relates to time, person and place. 

Opportunities for monetisation 

The motivation behind monetising your collections is a financially prudent one; it's about promoting and ensuring collection sustainability. It takes time and money to organise, protect, share and grow a collection, but remarkably, it actually has the potential to help sustain itself! This includes a growing number of revenue-generating features, such as physical prints and digital downloads of your images, subscriptions for your journals and magazines, offline copies that allow your users to return and search whole volumes wherever they like, online shops that take your physical shopping spaces beyond their brick and mortar limits, and VR Tours, where items can be discovered and then linked back to the features that enable them to generate the revenue that will help them to support themselves. All of this is enabled via innovative technology, shopping carts and paywalls. 

Would you like to try PastView for free?

If you would like to try PastView for free, join our PastView Playground and enjoy the following benefits;

• Free access to explore PastView
• Upload and manage a selection of your digital collections
• Publish these items to a website
• Try some of our most popular publishing features
• Sign-up here: pastview.townswebarchiving.com/playground