Waypoints

Waypoints is a web-based digital archive designed to broaden the availability of the U.S. Coast Guard's collection of historical artifacts. There are over 200,000 artifacts available through the Coast Guard historian's office. The current collection is quite diverse and contains items such as physical objects (e.g., lighthouse lenses, art), historic files (e.g., documents from the Titanic sinking), and photographic images. A digital archive broadens availability of the collection to those who were unaware of its existence or unable to access the material. To promote content exploration, we have used faceted (hierarchal) metadata as the primary means for organizing and presenting artifacts.