Last week the American Academy in Rome launched a major update to the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library’s Digital Humanities Center, giving the repository a new look and feel while increasing access to the collections and their research value in several important ways.
The complete database was migrated to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which standardizes the delivery of visual files across platforms and institutions. Using IIIF, you can connect and unite DHC materials with IIIF-enabled visual materials from other institutions (including digitized archives and museum collections, for example) to build personal “digital libraries.” That means you can directly compare images from scores of different collections in a single place and more easily incorporate images from the DHC into teaching platforms and online exhibitions.
The DHC now includes 60,000 high-resolution images and digitized documents. For the first time, users will see the highest-quality version of each image in our collection (with the ability to download them as TIFF files). In one swoop, there is vastly more detail for thousands of images.
Staff members from the Library, the Photographic Archive, the Institutional Archive, and the Norton–Van Buren Archaeological Study Collection all collaborated to make this major upgrade possible. The Academy looks forward to new audiences discovering the DHC thanks to the seamless access across institutions.