The Visible Archive is a research project on the visualisation of archival datasets, by Mitchell Whitelaw, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.
The “Series Browser” breaks up the collection in Agencies and Series. An agency corresponds to the organization responsible for some or all of the functions or legislation documented in records. Given that there are some 9,000 Agencies involved, the visualization uses their ID codes to color the squares: low Agency numbers have low hue values (red), while high Agency numbers have high hue values (blue to purple). The area of the inner (brighter) square is proportional to the numbers of items, while the area of the outer (duller) band is proportional to shelf meters used. The result is that Series that are physically small, but contain many items, appear with very thin borders. It also shows how that using Agencies offer a useful way to break the huge collection up into manageable-sized subsets: the vast majority of agencies record to fewer than 100 of the 57.5 thousand series.
