The Veridian digital library software was originally developed for the display of printed materials, and particularly for newspapers digitized to the METS/ALTO standard. More recently we added support for other printed material that was digitized to METS/ALTO, like books. At the same time we experimented with an animated “page turning” user interface as an alternative to the “zoom and pan” interface.

While we now believe Veridian does a good job of displaying digitized printed material we do come across projects from time to time where more is required. That is, we’ve come across several people recently who have said something like the following:

“We like Veridian, and we think it’d be great for our digitized collection of newspapers/books/journals. In future we think we’ll probably want to put our collection of images/maps/audio/video online however, and we really don’t want to have to purchase yet another digital library software system when we do!”

So we decided a while back to investigate adding support for a wider range of different types of digitized materials, while also ensuring we don’t weaken support for printed materials. So far we’ve come up with a proof-of-concept and we’d love to hear any feedback anyone has on it.

See new Veridian support for digitized images here.

See new Veridian support for digital video files here.

See new Veridian support for digital audio files here.

AtoJs Online was officially launched at a function in Wellington last night. It’s a collection of digitized volumes of the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (of New Zealand). The digitized collection currently covers the years 1862 to 1879 (approximately 24 volumes and 27,000 pages), with more to be digitized in future. The reports cover many subjects, documenting the work of government departments and a wide range of other activities carried out by, or of interest to, the government of the day.

The collection is being digitized using the METS and ALTO standards, and is presented online by the Veridian software. It’s the second project developed by the National Library of New Zealand using Veridian, following their Papers Past historic newspaper collection.

We’ve been working with Princeton University Library for approximately the past 18 months on a project to digitize historic issues (1876 through 2002) of their college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The (nearly) completed collection has now been launched publicly, and is available at the following link.

http://theprince.princeton.edu/

This collection has been digitized to article-level METS/ALTO, similar to other historic newspaper projects we’ve worked on with the National Libraries of Singapore and New Zealand, Cornell University Library, the University of California at Riverside, and others. The digitization services were provided by Digital Divide Data, using the DocWorks software from CCS in Germany. DL Consulting provided the Veridian software to make the newspapers accessible on the Internet.

An article containing more information on the project can be found at the following link.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/05/27/26183/

CCS in Germany have signed up three new partners to help with sales and support of Veridian in Europe. The new partners are based in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Switzerland. CCS expect to sign on more European partners to support sales of Veridian and their own CCS docWorks software over the coming months.

The press release from CCS is available at the following URL.

http://www.openpr.com/news/141205/CCS-wins-new-partners-in-the-UK-Italy-and-Switzerland.html