Our collection of fable literature is made up of animal epics from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Most of our current collection was compiled by the Dutch physician and bibliophile Wim Gielen, who collected titles from classical authors like Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine, as well as a substantial number of pictures. The illustrations from these books form the basis of our project FablePictor.
FablePictor is a search engine that allows for the exploration of the numerous pictures and illustrations that can be found in the collection Wim Gielen. Every illustration that contains an animal has been registered to make it searchable by animal. We added the metadata to show which animal appears in what picture. Twenty were chosen – monkeys, donkeys or frogs. To show these pictures, we use IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), which is an open standard tool that facilitates the sustainable online display of pictures through uniform storage settings, metadata exchange and sustainable URLs.
At the Special Collections, we aim to use IIIF consistently to increase the accessibility of our materials on an international scale. We already use IIIF to display our digitized images, but through the FablePictor project, we aim to also digitally offer individual pictures directly. Any visitor on our website can easily see the illustrations and how the imaging of a certain animal evolves through time and place.
This project was developed by Lotte Tilborghs, in collaboration with the Special Collections, the Anet team and our team of working students and volunteers. Their work culminated in the FablePictor search engine, which contains over 3.700 illustrations. Are you a researcher? Are you interested in IIIF? Or do you love animals and fables? Please take a moment to explore the FablePictor website.
Explore FablePictor
