Visualizing Digital Collections

Data visualizations can greatly enhance search in digital collections by providing information about the scope and context of a collection and allowing users to more easily browse and explore the contents. This article discusses the benefits of incorporating visualizations into digital collections based on the experiences of the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) in developing a user-friendly tool for searching and visualizing the project's complex set of historical documents. The paper concludes with a tutorial on using the free Library of Congress tool Viewshare to create visualizations based on real data from the CWIHP Digital Archive.