Drupal as a Book Viewing Platform

Electronic books are having a huge impact for book publishers and libraries. EBooks formats are confusing with a wide array of end user formats and even more digital filetypes from publisher's workflows. Scanned books are often very large images in non web-friendly formats (JPEG 2000 and TIFF). Web based book viewers are common but vary greatly in features and technologies. Annotation features are rare and incomplete. There is a great need for scholarly annotation tools. Providing the ability to share parts of a page, to create private and public marginalia and annotations, and to embed books into other websites.

The Ancient World Digital Library is a pilot project of New York University's Digital Library Technology Services Publication team. It's a book viewing platform built on open source technologies: Drupal, Open Layers, and the Djakota JPEG 2000 Image server. DLTS is also working with the NYU Press to bring their "born digital" books into Drupal. Creating an API to allow these books to be embedded into other non drupal sites. Leveraging Open Url info and the new RDF features in Drupal 7 to provide contextual rich metadata and semantic web information.