How Digital.Bodleian will open access to over 1 million extraordinary images | CILIP

"On 14th October 2015 I’ll be speaking at RLUK’s conference, Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, and ahead of that I would like to tell you the story of Digital.Bodleian, which we launched in July this year. Digital.Bodleian brings together 25 years of digitisation of our unique collections under a single interface. Public engagement and support to digital scholarship are key strands of our strategy, and Digital.Bodleian was designed to draw in people from all walks of life to our collections as well as to engage the researchers who are our traditional user base ... Up until the launch of Digital.Bodleian, like most academic libraries, our digitised collections were disseminated on-line in separate silos, in discrete project-driven websites. These have been incredibly popular with the academic communities they serve, but their functionality for public discourse has been limited. Because many of them were developed some time ago, they are restricted by technology and they demonstrate, sometimes quaintly, that design trends have moved on ... With Digital.Bodleian we had a clear vision: to draw in new audiences, provide a more modern service to academics, and to unite the collections in a more contemporary and engaging way, using innovative technology. The result is that we now have over 120,000 freely available digitised images accessible to users worldwide, and at least another 1.5 million images which we hope to release over the course of the coming year.  Three principles have guided the development of Digital.Bodleian. Those principles are: [1] Open collections: using open licences that allow people to use and re-use the images for education and research, without payment of a fee or the need to separately obtain copyright permissions. You can see our licence terms here [2] Open standards for metadata and APIs that allow the collections to be shared with as few technical barriers as possible. So we are using the Dublin Core metadata standard, and the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF set of APIs.(I’ll come back to IIIF in a minute). [3] Open software, allowing the community to benefit from our technical development. The software which powers the user interface ofDigital.Bodleian was developed by Armadillo Systems in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries. Armadillo have made plans to make this software open-source. We have also implemented the British Library’s ‘universal viewer’, a fully open-source viewing interface based on the Wellcome Player, developed by Digirati and the British Library ..."