# A zoomable display of BHL content

**URL:** <https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115>\
**Category:** General\
**Tags:** visualisation\
**Created:** [May 9, 2026, 7:21am UTC](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115 "2026-05-09T07:21:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rdmpage](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/user_avatar/forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/rdmpage/32/8_2.png) [@rdmpage](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/u/rdmpage)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2026, 7:21am UTC](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115/1 "2026-05-09T07:21:50Z")

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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.

[![](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/uploads/biodivlibrary/original/1X/ff97312e8fd8299f77a1598ed5283028dda899b7.jpeg "Visual map of some pages scanned by BHL Australia") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edYrzRBe4iA)

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**Author:** ![rdmpage](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/user_avatar/forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/rdmpage/32/8_2.png) [@rdmpage](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/u/rdmpage)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2026, 10:33am UTC](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115/2 "2026-05-09T10:33:12Z")

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The viewer is now live:

> **[BHL Hilbert viewer](https://iphylo.org/bhl-all-the-pages/)**

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**Author:** ![Ambrosia10](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/user_avatar/forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/ambrosia10/32/18_2.png) [@Ambrosia10](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/u/Ambrosia10)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2026, 7:50pm UTC](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115/3 "2026-05-09T19:50:37Z")

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> [@rdmpage](#):
>
> experiment I created a zoomable “map” of content scanned by Museums Victoria

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.

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**Author:** ![rdmpage](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/user_avatar/forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/rdmpage/32/8_2.png) [@rdmpage](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/u/rdmpage)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2026, 7:57pm UTC](https://forum.biodiversitylibrary.org/t/a-zoomable-display-of-bhl-content/115/4 "2026-05-09T19:57:55Z")

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What, you want it to be actually useful!? 🙈

![giphy](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex033/uploads/biodivlibrary/original/1X/6d6f220116a0e795b02e53edd206fea447cac610.gif)

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.