Almost Christmas | Introductory Remarks at Access to the Worlds Images

IIIFAccess to the World’s images

Almost Christmas 2015Sylvia Van Peteghem

How come we’re involved ?

Ghent University

Ghent Gand Gent

° beginning 19th century

Today 41.000 students

9.000 personnel

11 faculties

Ghent University Library

Large cultural heritage collection thanks to

French revolution 1789 and special chief librarians 19th C

Strong IT team

Wonderful building

Reorganisation 2003

Collections

horticulture ?middle ages ?ephemera ?architecture ?

Focus on architecture2004-2009

Goal: make collections visible (metadata, scanning) and

open for research

No project money

Kill your darlings

library: logisticsresearchers: research

museum: museum

Projects

Recollecting Landscapes

We learned to digitize …

40.000 “topo”pictures

Google said yes (Stanford …)

250.000 books 140.000 page views/day

If Google can, we can

Ghent university said yes

We learned a lot got some skillsknow better what we have know better what we can (and what we can’t)

To keep moving you need people with ideas, content, drive, skills in metadata, scanning, IT.

But also collections and infrastructure.

And a public.

Ready for new dreams …

One of these dreams

1904

1980

2004

2014

In between

You cannot imagine how long it took me …