Active Archives – Engaging Interfaces
Clemens Neudecker (@cneudecker)
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Berlin, 28 March 2018

A Little Bit of History
• Established 1661 as library of the King of Prussia
• Today largest research library in Germany
• Approx. 12m volumes, 23m objects overall
• Forms part of Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Berlin – East and West

Digitization @ SBB

SBB Digitization Center
• Since 2007: in-house (mass) Digitization Center
• Annual production: approx. 2m pages
• Up to 80 concurrent digitisation projects
• 80% via 3rd party funded projects
• 20 diverse bookscanners, scanrobots, asf.
• Operates in two shifts with 24 operators
• Digitisation-on-demand service
• KITODO workflow management software

Scanrobot

Book Flipping Scanning

Data, Data, Dada

Presentation Portals
• Digital Collections
– http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
– Main portal for digitised objects of SBB
• ZEFYS
– http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
– Special portal for digitised newspapers
• DFG-Viewer
– http://dfg-viewer.de/
– Generic viewer for digital objects created with
funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Application Programming Interfaces
Preliminary API docs (you have been warned!):
https://gist.github.com/cneud/ba595b0d70413c952d64154646f560cf

OAI-PMH
• OAI-PMH = Open Archives Initiative Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting
– http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/
– Version 2.0 from 2002 & no more updates
– XML over HTTP
– Very widely used in GLAM sector

IIIF
• IIIF = International Image Interoperability
Framework
– http://iiif.io/
– Version 2.1 from 2016 & under active development
– JSON-based (no more XML parsing!)
– Gaining momentum in GLAM since 2-3 years

Available APIs at SBB
• OAI-PMH:
– Fully supported (all 6 verbs)
– http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/oai
• IIIF:
– Currently work in progress (only Image-API supported)
– http://content.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
• Preliminary(!) API documentation & examples:
– https://gist.github.com/cneud/ba595b0d70413c952d
64154646f560cf
Ideas for
Innovation

Lab
• Concept:
– Sandbox/Playground for innovation and knowledge exchange
in the area of digitisation, presentation and re-use
• On-line Lab:
– Provision of (open) datasets
– Documentation of APIs
– Presentation of innovative prototypes (Projects)
• On-site Lab:
– Regular (e.g. monthly) sessions with a strong hands-on character
– Exhibition/Demo/Hackathon events
– Teaching and training activities for both users and library staff
– Researcher(s) in residence

Voyant This

Image-based Retrieval

Visualization of Statistics

Historical Social Networks
• SoNAR = Social Network Analysis and Research
– extract and disambiguate person names from
metadata databases and digital objects
– construct historical social network graph

User Curation Environment
• UCE = User interface for personalized
interaction with and curation of digital
objects, e.g.
– correction of OCR and segmentation errors
– (semantic) tagging of content elements
– annotations
– links to other related content, authority files
– share, cite, link, embed

What do YOU think?

Clemens Neudecker (@cneudecker)
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Berlin, 28 March 2018
Thank you for your attention!