Dynapad is a development environment designed to support research prototyping of multiscale workspaces. In this paper we describe applications designed to facilitate visual access to and spatial organization of digital photo collections and personal libraries of PDF documents. The research objective is to explore a generalization of the notion of a "pile" as a foundation for a versatile suite of tools to provide unobtrusive assistance for organizing collections and other sensemaking activities. We detail the architecture underlying the applications, explain how it supports diverse functionality and interaction styles, and abstract a set of principles for designing spatial tools.