Research Collection Viewer

The Research Collections Viewer aims to be a general solution for providing access to public institutional archive collections, special collections, and other digitized content in the Getty Research Institute’s digital preservation system, including collection-level metadata, object-level metadata, and digitized images. It is part of a larger project to redesign how our special collections are searched, accessed, and viewed.

Project ongoing: page will continue to be updated.

• The UI is dated and does not match the new Getty brand guidelines.
• It is impossible to search seamlessly across collections.
• Context is crucial, not only functionally, but also for understanding the materials.
• The workflow for requesting and viewing digitized objects is complicated.

• The data is messy and varies between dense and sparse across collections.
• There is a substantial cognitive load on users to understand the organization and presentation of materials and how the UI functions.

The Research Collections Viewer should be an open-source application that allows researchers to delve into archival collections and create their pathways through the material. Researchers require tools and systems that enable them to search, browse, navigate, display, use, aggregate, and reuse extensive digital archives.

• Discover and use collection materials
• View and interact with media
• View object-level descriptive and organizational collection metadata
• Browse the archival hierarchy
• Easily identify what materials have been digitized and are accessible
• Search across space and time
• Download data and media