The Wellcome Library developed a "Digital Delivery System" called the Player to provide digital access to its collections online. The Player allows users to view digitized books, archives, videos and other content from the Wellcome Library within their web browser. It was developed using an agile approach with the developer located in the library. The Player integrates with the library's existing catalog and digital asset management systems. It uses open-source tools like Seadragon to provide zooming capabilities and deep navigation of digital content. The Wellcome Library aims to make the Player open source to help other cultural heritage organizations provide access to their digital collections online.

1. The Digital Delivery System (“Player) for
the Wellcome Library
Online Information 2012
Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services, Wellcome Library, UK
Tom Crane, Principal Consultant, Digirati, UK

2. Overview
• Set the Wellcome Library in context
• Describe the problem we set out to solve
• Outline the methodology for developing the “Player”
• Demonstrate the “Player”

3. The Wellcome Trust & Library
• A global charitable foundation, that seeks to supporting the
brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical
humanities
• Annual research spend of around £650m
• Wellcome Library, part of the Wellcome Trust
• Collections of books, manuscripts, archives, films and pictures
on the history of medicine from the earliest times to the present
day.
• Provide insight and information to anyone seeking to
understand medicine and its role in society, past and present

4. Wellcome Library

5. Wellcome Digital Library pilot: 2010-2013
Genetics and its Modern Foundations
• A new online resource for everyone interested in the history
of human and animal health
Aims
• digitise key library holdings - relating to a major Trust
challenge area
• build sustainable/expandable mechanism – foundation
stone for WDL
• digitise important third party content – linked to theme
• use innovative content and tools – to encourage
discovery and use
• explore commercial partnerships – enhance access to
non-theme material

6. Digitised content (in progress)
• 1m pages of archival materials (incl. those held elsewhere)
• 2,000 books related to genetics research (750k pages)
• 14,000 early printed books (until 2015) [5m pages]
• 7,000 Medical Officer of Health reports (500k pages)
• …a lot of content (for a pilot)

7. WDL systems: key principles
• Integrate digital content with analogue content
• Use existing Library systems
• Encore - the Library’s discovery platform
• Sierra - the Library’s LMS (for authentication)
• Safety Deposit Box - Digital Asset Management system
• Use JP2K image format and METS
• Need to develop system to “play” digital
content, which integrates with these systems (the
“Digital Delivery System – DDS)…but didn’t know
how such a system would work

8. Developing the DDS: our approach
• Issued an ITT inviting Suppliers to bid to develop a technical
specification for the DDS
• Awarded fixed price contract to two suppliers to develop a
technical specification
• Appointed Digirati to build the DDS
• Digirati developers were located in Library, and built the system
on Library servers
• “Informal” agile project management – fortnightly
meetings, showing progress of “Player”
• Highly effective way of running a complex IT project

9. What the Player does: simplified
• User finds record in Catalogue with link to “View Online”
• Using unique record ID, the DDS system retrieves the METS file
• METS file holds:
• (some) descriptive metadata
• ID’s for all the individual page images
• Access conditions
• METS files converted to JSON and the Player “reads” JSON file to
determine what to play (book, video audio), and what access
conditions to apply.
• Digital objects retrieved by DAM (or cache)
• In case of books/archives, using IIP image server, images
converted from JP2 to JPEG

10. cat record: b18021013 Digital Asset
Digitisation Workflow Management System
METS
b18021013.xml
Read METS Read JP2, Audio, Video
DDS
Serve Serve JPG tile
JSON data generated from JP2
Request data Tile
about b18021013 request
library.wellcome.ac.uk/player/b12345678

11. Demonstration
• Artwork – to demonstrate zooming capabilities
• Book – to demonstrate key functionality of the Player
• Navigation
• Thumbnails
• Downloads
• Bookmarks
• Embed
• Archive – to demonstrate integration with authentication system
and how specific pages can be restricted
• Video
• Multiple manifestation – to demonstrate how multi-volumes works
are handles

12. UI of the Player
• Early decision taken to use deep-zoom tile approach
• Using Seadragon as the “canvas”
to render deep zoom images
• Using IIPImage as the Image Server
to generate tiles from JP2 sources
on the fly
• Generating tiles in advance is not scalable or efficient
• Took view to build own player, though following in the footsteps of
others (e.g. Library of Congress, Internet Archive, Newton papers
etc)

13. Next steps
• WDL goes live tomorrow (21st Nov 2012) – soft launch
• Accessible at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk
• Measure how Player is used, how Wellcome network copes with
traffic, and feedback from users
• Full launch – with more content and more functionality (e.g. search
within) on 4th March 2013
• Make the Player open source and provide some funding to support
this
• Ambition is that the WDL Player becomes the de facto system
for rendering digital content held by libraries and other cultural
heritage organizations