A zoomable display of BHL content

General
1

As an experiment I created a zoomable “map” of content scanned by Museums Victoria by @bhl_nicole and her team. Imagine every scanned volume exploded into all its pages which are then packed into a big square, then we fly a drone over that content. That’s sort of the effect I was after. I chose BHL Australia content as I wanted a easily defined block of content that wasn’t too large for this experiment (about 220,000 pages). Shout out to @cajunjoel for his work on moving BHL images to Amazon’s servers, because that simplified getting the images. There’s a YouTube video below. I hope to put the actual map online somewhere so people can explore it for themselves.

1 Like
2

The viewer is now live:

1 Like
3

I’ve had an explore. What a great way to see and dive into such a large corpus of works. However the first thing I did when I zoomed in was attempt to click on a page anticipating that it would take me to the page in BHL.

4

What, you want it to be actually useful!? :see_no_evil_monkey:

giphy

Yes, that could be added, and other things such as labelling by title, etc. For now I imagine it to be more of a “toy” to give people a sense of what is in just a small sample of BHL. It’s also a bit like “Find Waldo”. For instance one page has a “paintress” copying some rock art.

1 Like