Institutional partnerships and open standards: Unlocking your archive for digital scholarship

Abstract

This paper will look at the tools available for digital scholars on several large digitised document archives. Each of these archives demonstrate how raw images and cataloguing metadata can be leveraged to create user-facing features based on the open standards provided by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). We will explore how rich, responsive interfaces deepen engagement with users on mobile and desktop devices. Specifically, we will be look at the Endangered Archives Programme (https://eap.bl.uk/) and the Qatar Digital Library (http://www.qdl.qa) and the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive (https://www.agda.ae/) which between them comprise over eight million digitised pages.

These projects all demonstrate international inter-library cooperation and the use of common archival standards such as OAI-PMH, EAD and METS. We will demonstrate how these cataloguing standards allow us to present the metadata online in formats that are helpful to researchers and scholars. Not only this, but also how to use it to provide powerful, faceted search, and onward journeys for users to find relevant and related documents. The use of the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs provides advanced features to digital scholars including side-by side document comparison and image manipulation, all while relying on reusable, open-source software to keep custom coding to a minimum and allow experience in one online archive to be easily applied to another.

Finally, we will look at how OCR transcripts combined with positional information allow implementation of the IIIF Content Search API, providing users with fast and accurate highlighting of search terms within document fragments.