We recently switched to our new search experience. 

The new search is useful because it provides an effortless way to narrow your results.

It does this by using an approach commonly referred to as “guided” or “faceted” navigation specifically tailored to your search results.

What does that mean for you? It means that clicking on any facet, like a Title or Collection, will always give you results. Many might think this is an easy feature to implement, but it is not. It requires a lot of smart software, better metadata and lots of computing power.  But instead of reading more about it, why not check out this 4-minute introduction:

Last week we made some updates to the site. In addition to fixing bugs and cleaning things up, we added a few new features that we hope will make the site easier to use. Here are some of our favorites:

Image Adjustment
We do all we can to get the best quality images on the site, but sometimes the condition of the source images we have (microfilm, microfiche, paper) leaves us with digital images that are hard to read. In some cases, there isn’t much that can be done, but with most of these images, inverting the image or adjusting the brightness or contrast can bring out details that make all the difference.

Here’s an extreme example of an image that is difficult to read:

Here’s the same image with some adjustment to the brightness and contrast:

Here it is again with the colors inverted and the brightness and contrast adjusted:

These image adjustments aren’t magic and can’t make every image readable, but they can make a big difference if you are having trouble making out a word or some other detail from a document. Invert is particularly handy when the original image is a negative, like this example from the Marine Corps Vietnam photos.

In addition to the image adjustment tools, we’ve improved the “Find” tools for searching text within an image and updated the filmstrip to make it clearer where one document ends and the next begins.

Improved Navigation
One other change worth noting is the update we made to the headers across the site. The new design should make it easier to get around the site, use search and browse, access your account and profile items and remember the last 4 images you viewed (”Your Recent Activity”).

As always, we hope you’ll try these new features and let us know what you think.

The Footnote team and special guest Dick Eastman will be in Arizona March 18-20, gathering feedback on Footnote. The team will visit people in the Mesa, Tempe, and Scottsdale areas.

We are looking for volunteers who are willing to let Dick Eastman and six Footnote employees into their home for an hour or so to ask some questions and observe how they use the site. Visits like these provide great feedback for us as we try to improve the site experience for our members.

If you live in one of these areas and are interested in being a volunteer (whether you use the site every day or have never used it before), please contact Elizabeth.

We’re pleased to report that we rolled some more updates to the site this morning. We hope they will make your time on Footnote more pleasant and productive.

Updates to the site include:

• A completely revamped viewer
• More improvements to Your Gallery
• One small step in our progress toward a new search

The Viewer
The big change with this update is an overhaul of how the viewer works. We’ll post more detailed information soon, but the short version is that the viewer is now faster, smoother and can support much larger images.

In addition to the behind-the-scenes changes, we’ve added:

• the ability to connect images in the viewer and to see connections other users have made.
• the ability to share images you find. If you are an All-Access Member, you can share premium images and the folks you share with can see them for free.
• a find feature for images that have been indexed using optical character recognition (OCR).
• an option to save an image straight to a collection in Your Gallery.

The Gallery
You can now rearrange the images you add or upload to Your Gallery. To do this, simply click the “arrange” button and then drag and drop the images into the order you’d like. After you’ve arranged Your Gallery, you can always find recent additions to Your Gallery by sorting your images by the date you added them to Your Gallery and then return to “Your Arrangement” using the drop-down menu.

Search
We’re working hard to make searching Footnote easier. The first step, the one we took with this update, is to get the current search working on our new platform. You won’t notice too many changes just yet, but we have changed the default search to AND, so the search will now return results that include all the words you search. You’ll find updated search tips here.

There’s much more to come for search, but this first step will make it possible for us to get moving on the larger things we have in mind.

As always, we hope you’ll send us your comments and suggestions. If you’ll let us know what you want the site to do, we’ll do our best to make it work for you.

Last week we revamped the upload feature of the site with changes designed to make it easier for you to upload images from your computer to Footnote and use them on the site.

The three biggest improvements in the new upload process are:

1. You can upload more files more easily.
2. You get more feedback about how the upload is proceeding.
3. You can choose to put your images in a Collection within Your Gallery during the upload process.

A Few Notes about Uploading

• It’s free. You can add images to the site with a free Basic Membership.
• You can upload as many images as you like.
• Other Footnote visitors can see your images for free.
• You can use Footnote’s tools to enhance, explain and share your images.

How It Works
To begin uploading, go to Your Gallery and click the “Upload Images” button.

(Note: You can get to Your Gallery by clicking the “Gallery” link in the upper right area of the site when you are signed in to your free Basic Member account. If you don’t have a free account yet, you can create one here.)

Then:

1. Click the “Choose Images…” button.
2. Select one or more images from your computer. You can select multiple images by clicking on them individually while holding down the “CTRL” key (Mac: “Commad/Apple”), or by holding down the “Shift” key while you click the first and last file in a list you want to upload.
3. Choose whether you want to upload your images to Your Gallery or to a specific Collection.
4. Click the “Upload Images” button.

While your files are being uploaded, you’ll see a progress bar for each image and an estimate of how long it will take to upload that file. Hopefully this will help you know if you should hang around and wait while the images upload or, if you have a slow connection and you’re uploading lots of files, go get something for dinner while we work on the upload.

As with the other new features on the site, we hope you’ll give the new upload process a try and send us your feedback and suggestions.

After a lot of work and tense moments, we were relieved to finally launch the latest improvements to Footnote. We were also pleasantly surprised by comments from Merlin Mann on 43 Folders:

Stuff like Footnote makes the internet what it should be — an affordance for collaborating on stuff you would never in a million years be able to do by yourself. Crowdsourcing at its finest.

We launched some new and updated features this morning that we wanted to let you know about.

Keep in mind that most of these are just the first step toward things that we’re working on. We hope you’ll use them in these early stages and send us your feedback so we can include your suggestions as we work on future versions.

The main additions with this update are:

• New tools for organizing Your Gallery
• An overhaul of the upload process
• New tools for connecting images and explaining their relationships
• The ability to link to or embed Spotlights on your own web page
• An update to our Terms of Use, clarifying some issues about copyright and use of the site by minors
• A new tour page that explains what you can do on Footnote

The new tour page explains many of the other features we’ve added, so I’ll talk about that one here and we’ll cover the others in more detail in future posts.

Take a Tour
You can get to the new tour page by clicking the “Take a Tour” button at the top of the home page.

When you get there, you’ll find a list of things you can do on Footnote running down the left side of the page. Click on any of the items in the left column and you’ll see details about that activity in the right-hand pane.

We plan to add video examples and an updated introduction to Footnote to this page in the near future. We hope the tour will provide the information you need to make the most of your time on Footnote.

Have a look at the tour page and let us know what we can do to make it more useful for you.

Two weeks ago, I gave a keynote presentation titled “We Media: How Audiences Are Changing The Future of News and Information” (PDF) at the Fall Meeting of the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers in Arlington, Virgina.

The ASIDIC meeting attracted folks from organizations like ProQuest, Newsbank, Thompson, Hewlett-Packard, NARA and the Smithsonian together to talk about digital content strategies.

If my talk added anything to the conversation, it was this: Whatever your strategy, make sure that Social Media (user contributions, ratings, networks) is a central part of it.

People were clearly open to the message. But just telling people what they already know or want to hear is not actionable. So, I put together a few rules for guiding their innovation.

Why some sites like Facebook experience a meteoric rise and many others never make it off the launch pad is a mystery. But it seems clear that those who are successful have at least these 7 things in common:

1. They start with a compelling idea & simple solution.
2. They let people make their stuff better, more findable or entertaining.
3. They live by the Golden Rule - be nice to others.
4. They encourage lots of feedback.
5. They create “usable exhaust” - new things are created just by people doing stuff they want to do.
6. They let many groups form easily and quickly.
7. They recognize and encourage the good people in the network.

This list will no doubt change over the coming months as more of you help us figure out how to create a better place for you to find, share, relate and discuss your stories.

Update: Social Media Web sites are the future of the media business via CNet.

You may have noticed that on the new Title Information Pages we try to include at least a couple of sample images to give people a better idea of what they’ll find in each title.

You’ll see these images in the left hand column of the page, as in this example for the Lincoln Assassination papers. Sample images are always free.

Often we find these sample images by just poking around the title. I’ve been surprised by how easy it is to find interesting and unexpected things from any title if you just take a few minutes to browse.

Recently, I had a lot of fun looking for sample images for a couple of titles that may have slipped under the radar of most site users:

Gorrell’s History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service, 1917-1919 is a report of some of the first uses of aircraft in war. Edgar S. Gorrell was assigned to gather information that would “assist in establishing Army aeronautics on a sound basis for the future,” and this title is the result of his work.

Browsing this title, I found great descriptions of the kinds of things the military was learning about air warfare and some fascinating pictures, including stitched aerial photos that must be among the earliest precursors to Google Earth.

Historical Files of the American Expeditionary Force, North Russia, 1918-19 includes reports from the US involvement in a multinational task force that was sent to North Russia in 1918 following the signing of a treaty between Russia and Germany. I had no idea the US was involved in Russia at this time, and this title provides intimate details about what was going on.

I found lists of troop activities, reports of soldiers missing or killed, more early learnings about the military use of aircraft and much more.

These documents and those from individual Member’s shoe boxes, tell some of the most interesting stories of history. It’s our hope that as you and Footnote make more of these documents available, their stories we’ll give us not just a clear vision of the past but a better idea of how we got where we are.

If you find something that you think would make a good sample image for one of the titles on the site, please send us a link to the image and tell us why you think it would make a good sample.

We just wanted to remind everyone that some of the Footnote team will be in Ft. Wayne, Indiana this week for the FGS Conference. We will have our booth set up next to Dick Eastman and the laptop lounge. So, if you are planning on going to the conference, we would love to have you come by and visit. Plus you can relax in the laptop lounge. We look forward to seeing you and having a great conference. Look for a future post about the conference with pictures.