Introduction to Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive

Abstract

Over the decade the Open Access movement has evolved with thesupport by academic communities. In this context, we recently promote to make rare materials (e .g., manuscripts) public on the web, in order to support researchers in humanities. We have digitizedthe rare materials and investigated how to make them public. Inthis paper, we introduce our novel digital archive system KyotoUniversity Rare Materials Digital Archive. The digital archive system provides free access to the digitized rare materials to academiccommunities. It supports the IIIF (International Image Interoperable Framework), which promotes interoperable image deliveryon the web. The digital archive system is composed of two maincomponents, content management system based on Drupal and IIIFimage server. In the future, we investigate how to assess the usageof the rare material images and how to present transcriptions andtranslations for them.