With thanks for the demonstrations and work done by Jeffrey Witt (Loyola University Maryland), Rafael Schwemmer (text & bytes), Régis Robineau (Biblissima), and Chip Goines (Harvard University), the Walter J. Ong, S.J. Center for Digital Humanities would like to announce an exciting new LDN Inbox.

In support of better discovery, an open feedback loop, and the constant enhancement of scholarly resources, the Rerum Inbox is committed to providing a free and public location for important announcements about scholarly resources. This offers a service to individuals and institutions without the financial or technical means to host their own inbox and creates a path for interaction with the vast holdings on the Internet that are otherwise inaccessible. By generating new inboxes dynamically, Rerum Inbox immediately and universally opens the resources used by the scholarly community to the contributions of the scholars it comprises.

LDN Inboxes are a developing W3C standard; this implementation includes further constraints designed to best serve the IIIF community. The Rerum Inbox is public right now with documentation. At the moment, there are less than 20 messages in the Inbox, so your resource isn’t listed, but you can still check, if you like. If you publish resources and would like to include the Rerum Inbox as your “official” notification channel, add the service block with our blessing. If you are developing software and would like to interact with the Inbox, check the specs or see it in action in the Mirador LDN Plugin. You can get your own copy (Java/Firebase) on Github if you don’t want to use ours. There you can also submit issues for suggestions, questions, or contributions!

Special thanks to Saint Louis University for supporting this project. We were able to get it turned around quickly because we did not apply for funding, believing it was an important enough advancement to release to the wild as soon as possible. Without this support, we could not host the endpoints or data with confidence and sustainability.

We hope to have some more instructional and marketing materials out over the next quarter to make it easier to incorporate an LDN inbox into your projects and repositories, but if you have any questions in the meantime, please ask.

With appreciation, Patrick