Explore a IIIF newspaper collection and meet Jeffrey

After recently adding International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) support to Veridian, we jumped at the opportunity to implement IIIF into the Swiss National Library (SNL) digital newspaper archive.

We’ve been working with Florian Steffen, head of digitization at the SNL and IIIF Outreach Group Co-Chair Julien Raemy to add both IIIF image and presentation API support to the SNL collection.

With the work now complete, over 280,000 pages of public domain Swiss newspapers are available to the IIIF community.

By enabling IIIF viewing of this first Veridian collection, we hope to encourage more to come onboard and help stimulate the development of IIIF for online newspapers.

Kuan-Yu (Jeffrey) Ke first joined Veridian in 2005 and aside from a brief stint living back in Taiwan, has remained a key member of our team.

If you’re a Veridian customer it’s likely you’ll have chatted with Jeffrey who is our Project Lead and Sales Engineer. His skills in assessing client needs and finding solutions make him a great first point of contact. He’s been a part of many significant Veridian projects.

Around the office we enjoy Jeffrey’s endless optimism, organisational genius and regular offerings of delicious Chinese treats. We dragged him away from his long to-do list to answer a few questions...

How did you get started in the world of digital collections?
My interest in programming, or software engineering led me to work with digital collections. I was involved with the Greenstone project at Waikato University in Hamilton, New Zealand as part of my Master's studies, and after that I joined Veridian as a software engineer. I like coding a lot, and having the ability to design, prototype and implement a system is something I’ve enjoyed since I was young.