JISC Historical Texts Website Design and Coding

One platform, over 350,000 late 15th to 19th century texts and over 65 million images. Historical Texts brings together three historically significant collections for the first time: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collection.

Key features of JISC Historical Texts include: 67 million metadata records comprising book and page metadata; full text and images for each page; delivered entirely using cloud services the data volume is greater than 75 TB; all 65 million images pre-processed to create high quality zoomable images; and a map-reduce approach used for asynchronous processing of the source data.

The UI was developed in AngularJS with Bootstrap, as a UI framework is broken down into two main applications: “Search” and “Viewer”. Gooii Partnered with Knowledge Integration on this project, whose CIIM middleware solution populated data in an Elasticsearch index for the UI to consume.

Although we have only just released Historical Texts, we’ve already started work on the next phase of development, due for release in the next academic year.

To view the site please visit: historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk