Projects
In addition to the work we do supporting the research and curatorial activities of the Smithsonian, Libraries staff are often involved in collaborative projects with other institutions, or are working on internal projects which are not hosted on our website. Here are some of the interesting things we've been working on lately:
Digital Public Library of America
Director Nancy Gwinn serves as the official Smithsonian representative to the DPLA. In addition, our Assistant Director for Digital Services, Martin Kalfatovic, is co-chair of the DPLA's Technical Aspects Workstream. The Smithsonian Libraries is also providing content for the beta test of the DPLA through our digitization work in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
MACAW
To improve the workflow in our mass-digitization programs, lead developer Joel Richard has created a web-based, open-source tool that enables us to add page-level metadata to scanned books (or other 'sequentially organized' objects) as well as package and submit those scans to the Internet Archive. The code has been released under an Apache v.2 license and is available on GitHub. If you or your organization are interested in using, or becoming committers, to this project, contact Joel Richard.
World Digital Library
The Smithsonian is a signatory member of the World Digital Library (WDL). The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Smithsonian Libraries has provided six objects to the collection. These include high-quality scans and rich descriptive records for titles such as Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum by Jacques Besson and Systema Saturnium by Christiaan Huygens. Nancy Gwinn is the Smithsonian representative to the group.
