Standards & Interoperability

Source Library is built on the principle that knowledge infrastructure should outlast any single platform. We use the same open standards trusted by the world's great libraries and archives, ensuring that every text we digitize remains accessible, citable, and interoperable — regardless of what happens to us.

IIIF — The Language of Digital Libraries

The International Image Interoperability Framework is the standard that connects digital libraries worldwide. Every book in Source Library publishes a IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifest — a structured description of the book's pages, images, metadata, and text layers that any compatible viewer can load directly.

This means our books can be opened in Mirador, Universal Viewer, or any IIIF-compatible application without any special integration. Researchers can compare our manuscripts side-by-side with holdings from the British Library, the BnF, or the Bavarian State Library — all speaking the same language.

Try it: view the manifest for Musaeum Hermeticum

Text as Annotation

OCR transcriptions and English translations are not stored as opaque blobs — they're published as W3C Web Annotations that link text to the specific page image it was derived from. Each annotation carries a BCP 47 language tag — la for Latin, de for German, en for English — making the content machine-readable and linguistically explicit.

Because annotations are referenced from the manifest rather than inlined, even a 900-page book loads instantly — text is fetched only for the pages being viewed.

Provenance & Dublin Core

Every book stores Dublin Core metadata preserving the chain of custody from physical book to digital archive to Source Library. When we import a book from the Internet Archive or the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the original institution's identifiers, source URLs, and rights statements are recorded alongside the digitized content.

Open Licensing

Image rights are expressed as machine-readable SPDX identifiers, mapped to Creative Commons and RightsStatements.org URIs in IIIF manifests. Most of our collection is public domain or CC0 — free to use without restriction.

Citable Scholarship

Published scholarly editions receive Digital Object Identifiers through Zenodo, enabling permanent citation. A DOI means the edition can be referenced in footnotes, indexed by Google Scholar, and discovered through library catalogs — anchoring digital editions in the infrastructure of academic scholarship.

Source Institutions

Source Library imports from IIIF-enabled digital libraries worldwide. Original provenance is always preserved, and images are archived to ensure long-term availability independent of any single institution.