New Online Book Viewer Created for the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

Interactive Knowledge has worked on dozens of digital projects for a wide variety of units within the Smithsonian Institution. This relationship began back in 2003 and continues to provide us with interesting and innovative projects. The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is one of our newest clients within the Smithsonian. We were chosen to create an online book viewer application that can be used for an unlimited number of publications within their vast collection. 

The online book viewer we created found its first application with an online exhibit titled, A Tale of Two Sisters - The Hungerford Deed and James Smithson’s Legacy. This exhibit revolves around the exploration of an eighteenth-century English Deed that divides an extensive amount of property holdings between James Smithson’s mother and her sister, Smithson’s aunt. James Smithson founded the Smithsonian Institution nearly seventy years after the Deed was written, but the document holds many interesting clues about his legacy. The online book viewer accommodates this unique document even though the pages do not turn from right to left like a contemporary book, but rather from bottom to top. 

The digital book viewer offers many features that make it extremely valuable for investigating the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives collection:

• Zooming and panning
• Page-turning animations
• Annotations of regions of interest within the document
• Display of page-specific summary text
• Support of IIF interoperability requirements and use of IIF manifests and annotations
• Rich support for mobile and tablet devices