Platform Manifesto
Archival search environments for finding digital cultural heritage artifacts are typically boring, outdated, and confusing. They still reproduce the logic of the physical archive: provenance first, inventories first, record groups first—everything except what everyday users actually look for.
These traditional archives create long lists of unrelated items and tiny thumbnails that force users into repetitive and disconnected "open-view-close-repeat” viewing scenarios that frustrate users. They provide lists of cultural artifacts, often hundreds of pages long, isolating them from one another. The overall traditional search experience lacks aesthetics and joy, and forfeits many opportunities for greater public engagement.
We believe this must change.
We want search platforms to be beautiful, accessible, useful, creative, purposeful, and absorbing places for exploration and organization.
We want chronology (timeline and grid views) and location (map views) at the forefront of search. This is how people intuitively organize family photo albums and scrapbooks: Users naturally gravitate to time, place + theme.
We want cultural heritage search platforms to be go-to places for creativity and interpretation, with built-in digital storytelling and rephotography tools, play, and engagement zones.
We want CHI search platforms to work as distribution platforms, offering immediate embedding of organized artifacts so they can be repurposed on multiple online platforms (but always leading back to the original source).
We want platforms to provide compelling ways to display a selection of cultural artifacts (full-size autoplay for screens or projections) so CHIs can make engaging public exhibits and art projections in three clicks, without the outdated steps of having to download and paste images into a separate slideshow.
We want to interlink our many digital cultural heritage creativity platforms into a federated network (much like Wikipedia, but for image files) so that cultural artifacts currently siloed within a single archive can automatically find their relevant audiences and appear to users in a single platform.
We call for platforms that act as cultural commons engines, not gatekeepers: platforms that encourage reuse, empower creativity, and interconnect people across borders and communities.We call for platforms that challenge the monopoly of commercial stock-photography markets and return visual heritage to its rightful owners—the public.
We want to easily attach traditional knowledge notices and labels onto cultural heritage artifacts so that all indigenous communities can have a voice in how their cultural heritage is used and interpreted.
OPAN members have developed platforms like those described above. We have put users first, and created cultural heritage environments that excel in public engagement. Next steps: combine our code, share it with others, and promote better visual search for all.