James Smith

Since 2016 I have been the sole developer on the British Library digital art project ‘The Elastic System’, this project uses online mapping software (similar to google maps) to create a 50000x50000 pixel scrollable zoomable image of book shelves full of books in one of the British Libraries special collections. The book spines are clickable, and if you are a library member, you can reserve any of the books through this interface. Any book that is reserved has the book spine image removed from the shelf revealing an image behind. The background image is of library staff who work in the basement of the library. The system is in two parts, one part works in real-time by placing slices of the background image over the background image of book spines (to give the illusion they are revealing a background image), the second part runs on another server and uses the data to pre-render the map tiles with the reserved books, this is essential as if we tried to place slices of images over the map performance is severely degraded when more than 50 additional images are added to the map, so this optimisation of real-time and nightly pre-rendering makes the system work.