In 2017 Gaia Resources was awarded a small grant as part of the TWiG (Testing Within Government) program within the Advance Queensland initiative. This allowed us to collaborate with Queensland State Archives (QSA) to develop a platform for visualising collection items and providing a way to explore collections using spatial and content relationships.

Screenshot of the Q-Album home page

After the program concluded there were a number of iterations, design improvements, and customer testing rounds which led to the development of Q-Album, which went live with a soft launch in late 2019. Q-Album hosts over 500 historic collection items from the collection and has now been opened to community groups across Queensland to contribute their historic items to build a community resource.

The platform includes:

• comparisons between historic photos and modern street views,
• digitised archival materials,
• publishing workflows between community groups and QSA,
• mapping tools,
• tag-based taxonomies of content,
• organisational profiles, and
• cross-referencing to TROVE and other historic data sources.

If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help with you archives project, let me know via email or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers