Convergence of Digital Libraries, Museums and Archives to Collective Memories

This paper describes the effects and resulting information technology support requirements created by the increasing convergence of Digital Libraries, Archives, and Museums towards Collective Memories. It provides an introduction into Collective Memory (CM) / Knowledge Management (KM) models as well as into human computer interaction support for such models based on mechanisms of interactive information visualization out of data stores, dynamically generated during the ongoing dialogue. Finally it outlines the nature of such an interactive, i.e., visually direct-manipulative information visualization dialogue and identifies a conceptual framework for a generic information visualization system, consisting mainly of three components (information model, visualization model, and information visualization function). Implementations of the system model will, first of all, provide technology to effectively produce visualizations of the information space, tightly coupling information objects and their representatives to the user, the visualization objects.