Accessing the Collections of an English County through Themes, Time and Space

This paper describes ideas developed in the specification and outline design of a multimedia distributed system (ORION). completed by the authors under contract to Oxfordshire County Council. Department of Leisure and Ans. The system specified will make multimedia representations of items in collections in the care of the County Council available and easily accessible to the community. We describe our concept (VECTIS) of a system that enables users to explore different themes across the history and geography of the County of Oxfordshire. The interface design is innovative in that users can explore the topography of the County by traversing 2-d and 3-dmaps-zooming in on areas of interest-and focus on, or travel across. specified time spans using a timeline. At any stage. the system is able to retrieve details of those items across all of the Department of Leisure and Arts' collections that are relevant to the time. place and theme the user is currently focusing on, in the form of images, video, audio, text. etc.. through integrated indexation of a set of widely different collections (museums, archives, natural history collections. etc.) Users may then examine multimedia representations of items that are of interest to them through appropriate viewers.