Libraries have been digitizing old stock for several years now – mostly for a specific and restricted scientific user group. But what about the social obligation to preserve, and therefore call to mind digital cultural heritage in a contemporary manner?
Flora Graeca is a masterpiece of printing, engraving, color and design of the plants of Greece in the late 18th century comprising ten volumes. It was discovered in Darmstadt’s University and State Library three years ago. Encouraged by the overall good condition and the almost one thousand finely crafted, hand-colored illustrations, the library conducted a high-quality digitization of the whole work in order to make it digitally available to the public. The key question was how to reach a circle beyond scientific users, i.e. botanists and historians, and draw the general public’s interest to this wonderful masterpiece. The offer should ideally address the student library patrons, who use the library in hundreds as place of work and communication. Why not making them curious in the libraries treasures while coming here every day? So, the idea was to enrich the illustrations by further information about the botanic illustrations by linked open data from the semantic web, such that entities could be linked semantically, and the digital copies could be connected to additional information. In combination with a presentation platform developed in a former project particularly for mobile usage, a virtual edition of Flora Graeca was formed, implemented as an edutainment application with responsive design and exploratory search for an intuitive and ludic handling. It breaks fresh ground by leaving the classic search and find paradigm towards digital strolling: just like a physical visit to a library or a museum, it allows strolling through a collection, discovering and comparing objects, and getting inspired.
