Elias Tzoc blog!

As more institutions continue to work with large and diverse type of content for their digital repositories, there is definitely a “new” need to evaluate, prototype and implement file viewers to adequately display files from non-text collections.

When displaying a record in DSpace -by default- users will only see the metadata and a box with basic description of the file/s associated with the record.  This method may be fine IR projects where most files are in PDF format; however, for non-text collections users will most likely expect to get a “snapshot” of the file/s in the record.  Displaying something on the first page of a record becomes particularly important for unique and/or complex files such as: maps, manuscripts, books, or multimedia.  For these types of files, there is usually a need for features like: zooming, magnifying, searching, streaming, etc.

Then, the question/challenge is: how to implement viewers using the DSpace files that can be embedded on the record’s page along with the metadata?  For image collections, there seems to be a good number of examples –including many using some combination of Lightbox script.  An afternoon test for multi-page documents using a DjVu file seems to produce some decent results.  The trick is to create a set of JPG files for every page -using a local PHP script based on DjVuLibre- and embedded it in the item_view element.  This option (prototype) would allow users to view pages sequentially or jump to any page of the document and of course they will have the option to download a PDF version of the file if they need to.  In short, this workaround seems to work fine as an early prototype, an OCR feature will make it perfect.

Below is a screenshot of today’s test:

In since the output file is a JPG, it works perfectly fine on the iPads and probably most other tablets as well.

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