The proposed project is a timeline tool intended to provide an optional visual interface to digital archives in the form of multiple timelines.  The software would use Web 2.0 technologies to create timelines on the fly from existing archival records based primarily on tags or categories and secondarily on dates.  The user would have the option to choose one or more tags to compile into one or more timelines, which would then be displayed on the screen with links to the archival records.  Clicking on the record would would display the archived entry on the other side of the screen.

This tool is needed to fill a gap in the means of understanding social history and the concurrent effects of multiple events throughout time.  It will allow users to visualize the passage of time and better understand the context within which a historical event or movement occurred.  This tool provides a method to search for pertinent data as determined by date and tag.  It allows for user-determined filtering of event types based on tags and/or categories, thereby allowing the researcher to narrow their search to find the most effective method of contextualizing data.  This tool can be used on a large scale, but will be most effective in building a thorough understanding of events over a shorter period of time.

The primary audience for this tool will be academic researchers, who will use this as an additional method of searching through and understanding scholarly archives.  The audience may change somewhat based on the particular archive with which the tool is used, so it may be pertinent to a high school, undergraduate, graduate or professional community.  It may also have uses as a historiography tool.

This software powering this tool will be written in a LAMP environment; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/perl.  PHP and/or perl will be used for the structural elements, and MySQL will provide the initial test database, though the intention is for the project to be expanded to work as a plug-in for multiple databases.  It will also utilize AJAX for pulling the records from the database, and will probably rely on JSON data types rather than XML to save on space and to provide clarity and simplicity to the code.  Most of these decisions are based on utilizing open source tools, and the completed project will be licensed under the GPL, providing an open code source to allow multiple entities to use the tool and modify it to work for their needs.

Timeline users will have full control over the display they receive; they will choose the tags they are interested in seeing, note whether these tags should be displayed in one timeline or in separate timelines, and choose the range of dates in which they would like to search.  Some archives may also allow users to tag archived entries in real time, but that option would depend on the policy of the individual archives.