"Hacking" is often considered a bad thing by the general public. Though sometimes a hack can be a good thing. Take the Library of Congress digital collections for example. The site has a rich collection of multimedia resources but the interface is fairly low tech.
Cory Doctorow, a SF writer and regular blogger on Boing Boing, blogged the following on Friday, Sept. 16.
The Library of Congress has a stupendous, enormous photo gallery called "America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945,"... Unfortunately, the organizational back-end for this is so primitive (especially in comparison with modern image-sharing and organizing sites like Flickr) that it, too, seems to hail from 1939-1945, making the site a real pain to navigate and use.
In response to Cory's lament, an enterprising programmer created a script that improves the interface.
Simon Willison hacked a Greasemonkey script called americanmemoryfixer.user.js that fixes the user-interface's worst sins:
* Changes the colour scheme to black-on-white, and the typeface to Verdana.
* Removes all table borders.
* Adds headings to some pages, and fixes various title tags.
* Sets the default gallery view to be a set of thumbnails, rather than a list of names.
* Displays a large image (as opposed to a thumbnail) when you view a photograph.
The new interface can only be viewed using the Firefox browser with Greasemonkey installed. Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that allows the public to change how a website will look or interact (I'm over simplifying this, so no angry email please).
What is so interesting about this hack is how easy it was to change not only the display elements of the page but the interaction as well. Where a simple list of images were displayed, thumbnails are now displayed; instead of small thumbnails, the large versions are displayed.
For some digital collection developers, this loss of control may be a little scary. But this is the future. Open content that is separate from design is the future. Collaborative interfaces that allow the public to hack the use and display of the content is the FUTURE.
Links:
* America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945
* Mozilla's Greasemonkey
* American Memory Fixer Greasemonkey Script
* Boing Boing blog entry on LOC and script
Posted by Paul H at September 19, 2005 09:22 AM
