Access to the Wellcome Library, with IIIF
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The Wellcome Library is a major global resource for studying medical history and contemporary biomedical science, with a vision of being a premier physical research destination. It offers over 25 million digital items, including 19.5 million book pages and 6 million images from various sources. Additionally, it provides 700 hours of video, promoting free and unrestricted access to its unique collections.
Access to the Wellcome Library, with IIIF
- 1. Access to the Wellcome Library, with IIIF Christy Henshaw, May 2016 @Chenshaw, @WellcomeDigital, @WellcomeLibrary
- 2. The Wellcome Library We are one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history. We also offer a growing collection of material relating to contemporary medicine and biomedical science in society.
- 3. Our Vision To provide a first-class physical research destination focused on our unique collections, and creating a free and unrestricted digital library focused on cultural contexts of health
- 4. Scale and scope >25 million images and growing • 19.5 million book pages (books, serials, grey literature) • 6 million images from early printed books, archives, artworks, manuscripts, prints, slides • 700 hours of video
Editor's Notes
- #6: Show manuscripts and C+D index lists, click on images and show the resulting high resolution file as served up by IIIF
- #7: MOH reports – show use of text and data “annotations” made possible by sharing the images and the data in a standardised way. We are only part-way there – the images and text data are available, but we haven’t yet made the statistical data available as annotations on the pages. We have a crowdsourcing project with Zooniverse about to start, adding semantic information to the text of the reports – this kind of data can also be made available in a standardised way, as annotations.
- #8: We have hundreds of recipe manuscripts we plan to digitise and transcribe, via crowdsourcing. As with the previous example, this data can be stored as annotations and made available via IIIF services. When it comes to crowdsourcing, IIIF has more to offer than just serving up the data – it can also facilitate collaborative crowdsourcing projects, and ensure efficient use of tools and platforms. Rather than relying on silos of content with a lot of different webpages and input interfaces, IIIF-compliant crowdsourcing platforms could draw on any IIIF collection, allowing content owners to work together in a far more joined-up way than is currently possible.
- #9: Using the IIIF authentication standard, we can control access to our content when need be. For example, we digitise a lot of 20th century personal and organisation archives at a scale that means we can’t thoroughly vet each and every piece of paper for privacy or protected information under the data protection act. Just in case something slips through, a click-through like this ensures that we are letting our users know that they have a duty of care around any private or protected information they might find. These controls will still function even if the content is used elsewhere, via our IIIF services, which means we can share a lot more of our digitised archives than we normally would.
- #10: Another useful feature of IIIF is the ability to group items into collections. We use “collection” in two different ways: as a by-product of the digitisation process (such as grouping multiple volumes of a single work, or issues of a journal), or built on the fly according to specific categories such as “topic”, “author” or “type of thing”. IIIF collections provide a very handy way of curating a collection and then sharing that collection in a standardised way that allows tools and interfaces to display it. You can display these in a gallery, or just add it to your collection of “special stuff”. For example, we can display digitised content on this sandbox page which tests ways of grouping our library items under different categories in a programmatic way. We are incorporating subject heading definitions with Wikipedia entries with our own catalogue data with IIIF collections to make this page work.