On Friday 13 March 2015 a focus group was conducted at the Wellcome Trust, to introduce Digital Library Cloud Services.
The briefing note below sets the scene; a more detailed technical overview was also provided.
Audience
The DLCS should be of interest to the following groups of people:
- Anyone interested in presenting large images or structured sequences of images on the web: maps, manuscripts, archival materials, printed books, newspapers, sheet music, artwork, STEM imagery, post
ers, infographics and so on - from 1 image to millions, all presented in an engaging, deep-zoom environment - Anyone interested in presenting whole collections on the web
- Anyone interested in annotation of images (both curated and user-generated) and handling those annotations at scale - searching, moderating, other processing
- Anyone interested in searching text of digitised books, rendering PDF or HTML versions of digitised books, etc.
- Anyone interested in building ad hoc web applications - discovery, experience, education - on top of your own image resources, and interoperating with the image resources of others
- Anyone (including funding agencies) concerned about the long term viability and maintenance of digitised collections beyond digitisation programme funding
Overview
Like many other institutions the Wellcome Library has been developing and integrating software to enable the scenarios above. While the needs of different institutions vary widely when it comes to front-end presentation and back end integration with asset management systems, catalogues and other sources of images and metadata, we believe that emerging standards in this field now allow for the development of several commodity services that could be presented as a cloud platform for reuse by others.
As the Wellcome Library’s digitisation programme continues over the next decade, we need to build the infrastructure to support these activities at greater scale. We will need to build this platform anyway, for our own purposes. These platform services will underpin the Wellcome Library’s own web presentation of its resources.
However, with a little more effort, and help and input from others in the community, we can ensure that others can use these services too. You might be interested in just one aspect of the services, because you have all the others covered. Or you might wish to build a sophisticated presentation for a particular collection by integrating all these services with your own systems.
Our aim is that in-house developers at cultural heritage organisations can get on with developing interesting and innovative applications, instead of having to continuously reinvent the wheel with plumbing and complex infrastructure. Taking the Wellcome Library as an example, other developers should be able to reproduce similar functionality (with a wide and growing choice of open source viewers) for considerably less effort. Such developers may still have big systems integration tasks - but those tasks concern the systems they know intimately.
While we are initially focused on getting the service platform right, we will also look to build “reference” implementations of discovery applications that use the services. These can act as starter kits or developer resources, but they can also act as “off the shelf” implementations for a small collection that wants to get material online with the least development effort.
In these scenarios, if you can supply the images and metadata (via easy to use tools and/or APIs), the rest of the development effort should be dramatically reduced.
We can build the service platform we need for the Wellcome Library. But we want to ensure others can use it, and eliminate aspects that prevent others integrating it for technical, policy or other reasons.
DLCS: the vision
The overarching aim is to develop a suite of easy-to-use, highly available and affordable services that allows anyone to showcase their digital content in a feature-rich environment.
We believe this initiative has the potential to change – for the good – the way digital content is discovered and presented. If implemented correctly – and that includes ensuring that the costs for using these services are affordable – then the days in which digital content is poorly presented, un-interoperable, with little or no added features – may be numbered.
Key services that will be provided include image deep-zooming, full text search indexing and searching, and annotation creation. All these services will be supported with a well-defined set of open APIs to allow this content to be consumed both by the contributing institution and other third parties as appropriate.
In addition, the project will seek to provide an out-of-the-box discovery platform that can present anything for a single image/work to a large collection, thus allowing individuals/institutions to publish their content without incurring significant capital investment or IT involvement.
Ultimately the ambition is to develop a set of managed services – the underlying plumbing that supports the delivery of digital content – and, for those who require it, provide a customisable, ready-made platform for delivering digital content.
Questions to consider
- Is there a need for a shared service to support the delivery of digital assets?
- If yes, how useful would this be for my organisation and what services would we need to provide to make it invaluable?
- What organisational structure would be most appropriate to deliver these services?
Robert Kiley
Acting Head of Library
The Wellcome Library
March 2015