From a Blog Post by Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Library:
As the scale of the Library’s digitisation programme continues to grow – we have already digitised over 16m pages; a figure which will grow to over 30m by 2018 – we need to ensure that we can continue to deliver this content in an efficient and an effective way. Using cloud-computing services to deliver content is an obvious solution, and one increasingly adopted by organisations throughout the world.
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As a first step to realising this ambition, the Wellcome Library will – with the help of our development partners Digirati – develop a prototype Digital Library Cloud Services (DLCS) platform. This will serve to demonstrate that the proposed platform is viable, and enable the Library to calculate what it might cost for other organisations to make use of these services.
Beyond this simple requirement there is a much bigger ambition to position the Wellcome Library as a pioneer in the development of a new, interoperable, fully-scalable, digital library platform and, crucially, to make this platform available for other cultural heritage organisations to use.
The focus of the prototype will be to expose all the Library’s images as IIIF Image API endpoints and deliver these to our users via the Cloud.
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Once we have proved the viability of the platform, the next stage will be to develop additional services, such as OCR indexing and searching (based on the ALTO standard), annotation storage (based on the W3C Open Annotation standard) and an easy to use set of APIs.
We will also develop a discovery layer – that makes use of the commodity services described here – for those institutions that may not already have a discovery platform to enable them to showcase their digital content.
Read the Complete Blog Post
See Also: Google Group About Project
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