About - UniversalViewer/universalviewer GitHub Wiki

The Universal Viewer (UV) is a community-developed open source project on a mission to help you share your content with the world

The UV software can also play audio and video files, display 3D files, PDFs and more. You can try it for yourself at universalviewer.io.

You can see the Universal Viewer displaying different types of content from multiple institutions on the examples site.

A community of testers, developers and institutional users has grown around the Universal Viewer. There is an active Slack channel and regular community calls. We're really excited to see what comes next!

Development of new features continues with increasing numbers of contributions from the Universal Viewer's user community. Head over to the main Universal Viewer pages or read this blog post about a recent 'community sprint' to find out more.

Find out more

Check out the Universal Viewer documentation site.

The history of the Universal Viewer

The UV started life in 2012 as the Wellcome Player, developed by Digirati for the Wellcome Library's digitisation programme alongside their Digital Delivery System.

At that time, the Player used a custom package format that supported OpenSeadragon DZI, mp3, mp4, and PDF assets. The Player was then generously open sourced on Github by the Wellcome Library.

IIIF

Then along came IIIF. IIIF is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale, and a huge community in its own right.

In 2014 Digirati were asked by the British Library to produce a proof of concept with the Wellcome Player consuming IIIF manifests.

Shortly afterwards Digirati were engaged to produce the Universal Viewer, an application designed to replace multiple non-interoperable existing viewers on British Library web sites, with an initial focus on books and manuscripts.

This project added many new features, including:

  • "Two-up" mode
  • The settings dialogue
  • The "full expand" thumbs menu
  • An automated test suite
  • Right-to-left and top-to-bottom manifests support
  • An acknowledgements overlay box
  • The configuration editor
  • Accessibility enhancements

Then the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru sponsored development of the following features:

The British Library supported the development of features to play sound and video files for the 'Universal Player'.

The UV has since become a community-developed platform following the establishment of a Steering Group by the founding members Digirati, Falvey Library (Villanova University), Mnemoscene and the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru.