Humanities Computing and Media Center, University of Victoria
Demonstration
Scraps is a web-based application used to mark up and display multi-level digitized artifacts, such as scrapbooks, albums, etc. The Image Markup Tool (IMT) is used to mark up the digitized images. The Scraps administration program uses the IMT files and other user-supplied data to create a hierarchical structure that is displayed by the Scraps viewer. Users can drill down through the layers of the hierarchy to view embedded objects.
Scraps is a Web application rather than a Web site. It is intended to be displayed in the full browser window like a desktop application, and works much the same as one. Scraps uses the marvelous Ext JS Javascript library to create its user interface. This first release of Scraps is fully functional, though work remains to be done.
Scraps was developed by David Badke at the Humanities Computing and Media Center, with funding from the University of Victoria McPherson Library. Scraps is open source. The project is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). The source code and documentation is available for download.
The Scraps Administration Program manages Scraps Collections, Artifacts and Objects. It is easy to use, and has a full permissions system to restrict user access and actions. It has facilities to manage the Collection, Artifact and Object properties; load Image Markup Tool files into a Scraps database; \ process images; upload files to and manage files on the server; export Scraps metadata with automatic XSLT transformations into user-defined formats; and manage user accounts and permissions. It also has a documentation viewer that displays the extensive Scraps documentation.
The Administration Program on this demonstration site has some of its options restricted for security reasons, but is otherwise fully functional. You can log in with the user name guest and password guest.
The Scraps Viewer provides a user interface that allows the user to interact with the displayed images. Each image can be displayed in several sizes. The metadata attached to each feature in the image can be displayed and searched. Features can be "active", responding to user interaction by displaying larger or more detailed images; drilling down through the features to browse through multi-page items, reveal hidden items, or see more marked up features; or linking to other web pages.
The HCMC Image Markup Tool is used to mark up the images with annotations linked to image features. The Markup Tool produces Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files, which the Scraps Administration Program converts to a format usable by the Scraps viewer. The Markup Tool is open source software and is freely available from the HCMC web site.