The British Library has expanded its online collections with the addition of a new digitization project about life on the Caribbean slave plantations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The library says it has used new technology to develop the e-project, Caribbean Views, which showcases over 1000 images in addition to maps and text from the 18th and 19th centuries depicting life on the plantations.
The library has deployed technology supplied by System Associates, software providers to the public sector. System Associates’ g-Media is a digital media library and g-Serve a content management system, used by the library for labeling and managing the information used in the project; including photographs and sound.
According to the Library, g-Media incorporates an automated process meaning workflow is driven so workers at the library can control the digitization of an image from its creation to classification. Intuitive metadata tagging ensures the data doesn’t have to be inputted manually and data fields can be edited, deleted and duplicated as required.
G-Serve is said to support a range of file formats. Incorporating a pan-zoom facility, the program can display images in a variety of different media, and create variations based on size, color, resolution and file type, which the user can then select.
Russell Watkins from the British Library said, An online collection of this kind allows users to cross-reference and contextualize material and hopefully provides very meaningful information and lessons to learners that visit the site.