Building digital collections

Madoc is our IIIF-powered collection showcase and crowdsourcing tool, developed with the National Library of Wales and the University of Ghent.

It is built on Omeka S for the display, enrichment, and curation of IIIF-based digital objects. It grows out of our work for the National Library of Wales Crowdsourcing Platform and the Indigenous Digital Archive project, with additional development funded by the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.

You can use Madoc to:

• Assemble digital objects from one or more publishers and build an interpretative web site around them.
• Build presentations using material from collections around the world.
• Enhance existing descriptions of digitised objects with your editorial content.
• Annotate digital objects from archives, libraries and museums with your commentary, transcriptions, tags and other content.
• Run a crowdsourcing project and invite volunteers to contribute.
• Build further custom discovery based on the models you are using in your crowdsourcing project.

Madoc is the human equivalent of the enrichment pipeline. IIIF Collections and Manifests go in, and Madoc builds a navigable site structure from them, with a web page for every IIIF Canvas (e.g., a page of a book) which makes it great for building up detailed content about objects - surrounding the pages of a manuscript with annotations and commentary, tagging people and concepts in photographs, writing editorial descriptions of objects in fine detail.

Madoc serves the enriched content as IIIF and W3C Web Annotations, for interoperability and reuse in other systems.

Madoc inherits the "WordPress of Collections" aspects of its Omeka S base platform. You can create new sites, give them visual themes, and give different people access to the content creation aspects of your collection.

Madoc inherits the capture model concept from our work for the National Library of Wales, where you can specify the information you want your projects to capture from users. It then allows you to build project-specific discovery tools, for potentially complex project-specific data models.

Madoc's features are what you make them - if you have feature requests or would like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.

See Madoc on GitHub

View Madoc documentation

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