The first version of Mirador was generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Stanford University. Conceived of as a shared, open source development project from the start, Mirador really took off when Harvard University opted to join the effort in 2014.
Since then, Rashmi Singhal from Harvard and Drew Winget from Stanford have led its technical development, with Stu Snydman from Stanford organizing and coordinating the Mirador community effort. With their steady and expert leadership, the Mirador community has now grown to include a score of contributors from more than a dozen institutions, and countless users worldwide.
Version 2.1 in particular features advanced annotation capabilities that introduce powerful new functionality for creating and editing annotations using a variety of shapes and colors. These features were inspired by requirements for the ConservationSpace project, also Mellon funded and led by the National Gallery of Art. The leadership and effort of David Beaudet from NGA, along with contributions from the engineering team at the Sirma Group made these powerful new features possible.
A talented and global group of professionals and technologists contributed to the design, development, and testing of Mirador 2.1, helped produce documentation, offered sage advice on the project’s direction, and consistently joined the biweekly community calls that sustain the effort. Special thanks to John Abrahams, Michael Appleby, Arthur Barrett, Jazahn Clevenger, Ralf Eichinger, Yury Emelyanov, Gary Geisler, Chip Goines, Bryan Haberberger, Seong Kim, Stanislav Kostadinov, Dixon Law, Mark Matney, Kiyonori Nagasaki, Radoslav Petkov, Jack Reed, Régis Robineau, Emma Stanford, Randy Stern, William Straub, Fabio Torchetti, Jennifer Vine and Jeff Witt.
Mirador wouldn’t be possible without the support and advocacy of leaders at the institutions that committed staff time and invested resources in Mirador’s ongoing development. Many thanks to Ben Albritton, Tom Cramer, John Haeger, and Michael Keller at Stanford; Franziska Frey, Jeffrey Hamburger, and Jud Harward at Harvard, and Merv Richard and Alan Newman at the National Gallery of Art.
The Mirador team would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Ian Gilman, the maintainer of OpenSeadragon. Not only is OpenSeadragon the core image viewing technology used by Mirador, but Ian and his colleague Melinda Minch made important enhancements to OpenSeadragon to support the IIIF specifications and other specialized functionality.
Mirador has been a gratifying and exciting collaboration that is growing and moving in exciting new directions. We are excited to expand the community of contributors in the next and future releases.