RICHES™: SEARCH. ANALYZE. VISUALIZE. LEARN

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Connie Lester

RICHES™ (Regional Initiative for Collecting the History, Experiences, and Stories) of Central Florida introduced RICHES Mosaic Interface™ (RICHES MI) 2.5 at THAT Camp Florida in February 2014.  We provided a survey for THAT Camp participants to evaluate the site and make suggestions for changes before going live.  We listened to your suggestions and incorporated several changes that improved the searchability and presentation of the site.

RICHES MI is an interactive database for historical research and also serves as a platform for students, museums, and community members to publish their digitized data and create digital exhibits.  RICHES MI connects students developing classroom projects, museums and archives, and private collectors to the larger digital world.  Class projects can become multi-semester endeavors as the work of one class can be expanded by the next.  The work of each individual student is credited and provides a digital publication for future resumes and vitas. Museums, archives, and collectors create greater awareness of their collections for research purposes and encourage visits to their repository through the “Search Source Repository” feature installed at the suggestion of a THAT Camp Florida participant.  Finally, RICHES MI offers an array of tools to enable researchers to analyze their search results and see the connections between items housed in the database.

Join us for a presentation of RICHES MI 2.5 and discussion of the following topics:

  • How to create user communities
  • Using RICHES MI for student projects
  • RICHES MI as a research tool
  • Using Google Analytics to understand site usage
Categories: General |

About Connie Lester

I am a historian of the American South, specifically agriculture in the period 1870-1945. I am the editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly and the director of RICHES of Central Florida.

2 Responses to RICHES™: SEARCH. ANALYZE. VISUALIZE. LEARN

  1. Micah Vandegrift says:
    April 23, 2014 at 7:10 pm

    I’d not heard of this, so I’m interested in learning more. There’s a similar sounding project ongoing here at FSU, but not focused on cultural heritage collections. Not knowing anything about it, I’d be interested especially in hearing how the platform functions next something like DPLA or HathiTrust as a research tool, and how it might compare to Omeka or Drupal as a digital publishing tool.

  2. Connie Harper says:
    April 23, 2014 at 7:21 pm

    Hi Micah,

    We actually use Omeka to house the data. Please see richesmi.cah.ucf.edu/projects/#technical
    for some info about how RICHES MI works with Omeka.

    I’d be happy to tell you more about it at THAT Camp.

    -Connie Harper
    RICHES programmer

Comments are closed.