Hawaiʻi's Technology and New Media Community
The World Digital Library is Now Online!
I've always liked UNESCO's homepages such as http://whc.unesco.org. One of my hobbies is traveling. I often check UNESCO's world heritage site before I go traveling to foreign countries. Now the World Digital Library is online! We don't need to visit the libraries in each country anymore. I hope this movement is going to grow and more countries will donate their precious manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials to this website!
Comment
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on April 23, 2009 at 7:45pm -
Wow - I didn't even check. I just assumed it was Flex because it has such a slick UI. jQuery just keeps getting better!
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Comment by Truman Leung on April 22, 2009 at 8:52pm -
Hi Mika, thanks for sharing these sites. I will certainly now check the world heritage site when I'm planning on visiting a country. And the World Digital Library site, is a great resource, especially to those interested in ancient documents, artwork and photos.
As for me, I found it fascinating that the WDL programmers developed the document viewer in jQuery. At first I thought it must have been done in Flash. But upon examining the Javascript, its done in jQuery. The viewer animates panning for drag and zooming with the mouse wheel. It even prevents right-clicking on the viewer (at least on Firefox). Very snazzy. I also like how they use interlace to progressively display photos to finer and finer resolution as the photo loads. Instead of jpegs, they use the canvas HTML element to draw the photos. One day I would like to learn to use canvas.
From what I can tell, canvas doesn't work in Internet Explorer. It looks like they absolute position sliced up jpeg squares of photos. I bet it took painstaking work to support IE! All our lives would be so much easier if IE was never invented.
Thanks for your post, Mika!
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on April 21, 2009 at 11:13pm
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Congrats on your first English language post! I hope to see a great deal of international participation in the World Digital Library. In particular, I'd like to see contributions from Madagascar.
Within the next year or two I hope to do my first Japanese post.
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Comment by Cameron Souza on April 21, 2009 at 9:23pm -
Cool site! I like the time slider at the bottom. Mahalo for sharing!
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