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* Eric Hellman, President, Gluejar, Inc. (eric at hellman dot net)
Libraries have historically delivered value to society by facilitating the sharing of books. The library "brand" is built around the building and exploitation of their collections. These collections have been acquired and owned. As ebook readers become the preferred consumption platform for books, libraries are beginning to come to terms with the fact that they don't own their digital collections, and can't share books as they'd like to. Yet libraries continue to be valuable in many ways. In this transitional period, only one thing can save libraries from irrelevance and dissipation: Code.
== The Story of TILE: Making Modular & Reusable Tools ==
* Doug Reside, MITH, University of Maryland (dougreside at gmail dot com)
The Text Image Linking Environment (TILE) is a collaborative project between the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Digital Library Program at Indiana University, and the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Since May 2009, the TILE project team has been developing through NEH Research & Development funding a web-based, modular, image markup tool for both semi-automated linking between encoded text and image of text, and image annotation. The software will be complete and ready for release in June 2011.
The basic functionality of TILE is to create links between images and text that relates to that image – either annotations or transcriptions. We have paid particular attention to linking between image of text and transcription of text. These links may be made manually, but the project also includes an algorithm, written in JavaScript, for recognizing text within an image and automatically associating the coordinates with a Unicode transcription. Additionally, the tool can import and export transcriptions and links from and to a variety of metadata formats (TEI, METS, OWL) and will provide an API for developers to write mappings for additional formats. Of course, this functionality is immediately useful to a relatively limited set of editors of digital materials, but we have made modularity and extensibility primary goals of the project.
Many members of the TILE development team are also members of the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC), and have therefore attempted to develop TILE’s annotation features to be OAC compliant. Like OAC, TILE assumes that the text and the images to be linked may exist at separate and completely unconnected servers. When a user starts the TILE tool for the first time, she is prompted to supply a URI to a TILE compliant JSON file.
TILE’s JSON is simple and thoroughly documented, and we provide several translators to map common existing metadata formats to the format. We have already created a PHP script that will generate TILE JSON from a TEI P5 document and are currently working to do the same for the METS files used in the Indiana University’s METS navigator tool.
Additionally, TILE provides a modular exporting tool that allows users to run the work they’ve done in TILE through an external translator and then download the result to the client computer. For example, a user may import a set of images and transcripts from a METS file at the Library of Congress, use TILE to link images and text, and then export the result as a TEI file. The TEI file may then be reimported to TILE at a later data to further edit or convert the file.
At Code4Lib, we will demonstrate the functionality of TILE and display a poster and provide handouts that describe the thinking behind TILE, how it is intended to be used, and details on how TILE is built and functions.
