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WE WANTED. TO PROVIDE USERS WITH HIGHER-QUALITY IMAGES AND INCREASED FUNCTIONALITY WHILE ALSO CREATING DERIVATIVE FILES ON-THE-FLY AS NEEDED.
Art libraries provide visual resources in formats that can be used for a variety of purposes, often at very high resolution to accommodate the requirements for publishing in print and online uses (such as deep zooming and dynamic presentations). Additional features such as annotation and citation as well as the ability to combine image resources from a variety of places across the web are growing in popularity. Providing increased access to high-quality digital content is a priority that is only accelerating during the COVID-19 pandemic as we embrace remote access for both work and educational purposes.
Challenge
At the National Gallery of Art (NGA) Library, we adopted FADGI guidelines in 2010 for capturing, processing, and preserving image files, but the first viewer we implemented for presenting these images to readers in the OPAC was a JavaScript overlay. It served only derivative JPEG images and thumbnails at low resolutions (see Figure 1). These derivative files required a lot of staff time to maintain, as they had to be created manually at various sizes, and they had limited applications for researchers, as their low resolution did not allow users to zoom in to see details.
In 2018, upon upgrading our imaging studio equipment and planning a system migration from Ex Libris' Voyager to its cloud-based products Alma and Primo, it became clear that it was time to look at a better method of delivering images that would leverage the high-resolution TIFF files archived on our servers. We wanted to provide users with higher-quality images and increased functionality while also creating derivative files on-the-fly as needed. We explored various solutions, including vendor products and open source platforms.
Rationale
Without knowing the precise use cases that might come along, scalability was a key factor. Analysis of our imaging requests from researchers and development of internal library digitization projects showed that the number of digital image files had doubled year over year for nearly a decade. In addition, the new imaging equipment provided higher resolution and better color reproduction than previous solutions. Our presentation needed to take advantage of these and future improvements in image capture technology and be able...