I’ve been researching various collections on the internet and I’ve explored 4 websites; The Internet Archive, Spotify, Pinterest and Newspapers.com. The reason why I’m doing this research is to simplify what a thematic collection is and to help us build the best thematic collection for our users.

This is what I found that they have in common;

  1. They are organized around a specific theme, which is why they’re called Collections. This makes them easy to explore because it’s all related. They’re arranged in various categories and subcategories within each platform like Country, Jazz, Hip Hop (for Spotify)
  2. They allow user-generated content: These platforms allow their users to create and curate their collections based on specific themes. You, as a user, can add your own content, or you can curate content from the website and form a collection. Eg, on Pinterest with the boards, The Internet Archive, on Spotify with Playlists
  3. Diverse Content Format: These platforms contain various types of content. (This does not apply to us, yet, but it's definitely something to think about)
  4. Knowledge building: They’re all continuously growing their collections, either through user generated content like Pinterest, Partnerships like Newspapers.com or Archiving like The Internet Archive
  5. Extensive Search: They have extensive search engines that uses keywords, tags, photos to help the user easily find what it is they’re looking for.

Features we can adopt for our Thematic collections

These are the features that should be present in our Thematic collections

  1. Clear categorizations with Descriptions: When we go into the thematic collections, there will be a list of categories, like Food, Culture, Sports. Each Category will have their description, tags and metadata.
  2. Metadata and Tags: Each item in a collection has metadata that includes data like Author, Publication, date and subject tags. This helps with searching and discovery of the item.
  3. Search Functionality : The search engine should be able to search for Collection name, keywords and tags, Author’s name. This will help the user‘s experience by making it easier to find specific content.
  4. Bookmarks to allow users to save collections they want to go back to
  5. Recommendation Algorithm ( I put these in pink because we currently do not have the APIs for this. What is the process to getting this to happen in the future?)
  6. Use of Newspaper Clippings for Collections: Articles from the newspapers' pages will be arranged as clippings inside the collections. This method mirrors Newspapers.com's approach to creating collections, and it is easy for users to understand.
  7. OCR text for each clipping: We’ll use OCR to convert images of text to searchable data. This will make the content of the clippings easily searchable
  8. Sharing of collections: Users can share collections via social media, direct links or email. This will help with the engagement and visibility of our content.