Getting Started with Rednal
Rednal is a digital collections platform built by the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) for archives, museums, libraries, and research institutions. It provides IIIF image serving, OCR, AI-powered tools, and deep zoom capabilities — everything an institution needs to digitize, manage, and publish its collections.
A Mature Platform
Rednal has been in active development for over eight years and powers production collections containing millions of digitized canvases. The platform is stable, battle-tested, and used daily by researchers and curators around the world.
Transitioning to Open Source
We are currently preparing Rednal for release as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license. This transition involves:
- Packaging the platform for self-hosted deployment
- Writing comprehensive documentation (what you see taking shape here)
- Preparing the public GitHub repository
- Building installation and configuration tooling
Until this work is complete, the source code is not yet publicly available. If you are interested in early access, partnership, or have questions about the timeline, please get in touch.
Documentation Sections
- Frontend Documentation — The researcher-facing interface: search, deep zoom, document viewing, AI chat, and more
- Backend Documentation — The curator toolkit: asset management, metadata, OCR, annotations, and IIIF manifest generation
- API Reference — REST API endpoints for programmatic access to collections, search, and content delivery
Technology
Rednal is built on proven, open-source technologies:
- Node.js and Express — Server-side runtime and framework
- Angular and React — Frontend frameworks
- MongoDB — Document database
- Elasticsearch — Full-text search and indexing
- IIIF — International Image Interoperability Framework
- Docker — Container deployment