A couple of JISC funded content projects have recently gone live, and they are worth having a look through as they provide excellent examples of good interfaces for digital content
One is the papers of Isaac Newton, a joint project between Cambridge and Sussex, whilst the other is Locating London’s Past, which involves Sheffield, Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research and the Museum of London.
The Newton Papers are digitised to a beautifully high resolution, and have viewing facilities that allow users to view individual pages but also to get the sense of a collection of papers through which one can turn pages. Cambridge are also using a Creative Commons licence. Clicking on teh download link brings up a pop-up box that allows.
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
Locating London’s Past exploits a range of data related to early modern London. It’s a more complex tool than the Newton papers, but they’ve handled the ability to integrate and mash up different data soruces (e.g. trial reports, tax reports, and archaeological finds) via Google Maps.