http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2007/11/02/7/
Last night the Linnean Society launched the new image repository that we have developed for it using Eprints. The address of the system is http://www.linnean-online.org/. It contains over 14,000 high-resolution images of the Linnaean Herbarium – a collection of botanical specimens begun by Carl Linnaeus.
At the Society’s headquarters in Piccadilly, Julia Hoare, Linnean Society’s Project Manager for the extensive digitisation project, delivered a consummate and well-received demonstration to a colloquium of orchid specialists. This event is being treated as a “soft launch”, and feedback is being sought from this small community initially, before the system gets a full public launch in December.
The system uses Eprints to manage access to the objects and their metadata. The Herbarium can be browsed according to Linnaeus’s own binomial, Latin system, or searched across all the supplied metadata fields, including genus, species, collector and location.
Eprints takes care of searching and arrangment, as well as user registration and management. A commercial image viewing system, FSI Viewer/Erez, has been used to provide a high-definition zoom function for viewing the images.
Rory has added two features to Eprints to meet the Linnean Society’s requirements: a plugin for bookmarking objects, and another for registered users to add comments. We will be further developing these as part of the JISC-funded SNEEP project, and ultimately release them as open source extensions for Eprints.
Other collections from the Linnean Society will follow and be added to the repository. These include shells, insects and fish, as well as letters and portraits in the Society’s possession. The eventual size of the online archive is estimated to be several (check) Terabytes.
3 Comments
As I’ve remarked before to others, it’s a measure of trust in your system when your customer is happy to do the live demo, rather than leave it up to the developers
Is the high-definition zoom function provided by the commercial FSI/Viewer/Erez in any respect better that that provided by DjVu, in particular by the free (like in freedom) DjVuLibre viewers?
Regards
JSB
Hi Janusz
We did look at some Open Source alternatives and I know there were some issues that we couldn’t easily resolve. I believe that the measuring-tool functionality was missing from what we looked at. Someone will followup here if there’s anything more/different worth mentioning.
I should also mention that the Linnean Society had already been impressed by seeing ERez/FSI in action at the Herbarium Berolinense.
Richard