The DIAMM site has received a major upgrade!

First launched in 2017, the current iteration of the DIAMM website has received constant maintenance, but very little in the way of major upgrades. This has led to several "nice-to-have" or "quality-of-life" updates being deferred for lack of time and funding support.

Thanks to a partnership between the RISM Digital Center and the ERC-funded BROKENSONG project (Karen Desmond, PI), we are able to dedicate a number of weeks of work to bringing the DIAMM site up-to-date, improving access, enhancing collaboration opportunities, and addressing some long-standing issues along the way.

At the top of the list of improvements is a new method of providing API access to the images and metadata hosted by DIAMM. In the early days of DIAMM, when the original agreements with partner libraries were signed, they included stipulations that the images would be protected by password access. Fast-forward over two decades later and the expectations for online access to images have changed, but we are still bound to the signed agreements.

What this has meant is that providing access to images outside of the DIAMM website, such as with IIIF, have been difficult as we tried to navigate the requirements of our agreements but also collaborate with our partners. This is changing with this new release. We have a solution that satisfies both the intent of the agreement, as well as allowing our partners to use the DIAMM images in their own websites. If this sounds interesting to you, and you would like to know more, please get in touch.

In addition to enhanced API access, we were also able to address a number of issues that precluded timely updates to the DIAMM website. The Source view has been completely rewritten, ditching a difficult-to-maintain ReactJS app in favour of a simpler Django template system. The old React app was very difficult to maintain and changes or updates had a habit of breaking it in strange ways. The new Source view is much easier to maintain.

Behind the scenes, a number of quality of life improvements were made to help the DIAMM editors do their work more effectively.

• Significant improvements to search indexing, removing some synchronization problems that have been plaguing the site since the beginning;
• Performance improvements to editing interfaces, giving a much better experience when editing large and complex records;
• A rewritten image server, providing faster and more secure access to the images;
• Improvements to bibliography and inventory displays

Many, many other changes made their way into this release. As always, you can check out the public source code to the DIAMM website, and let us know of any issues you find.