Home

In 2009 Armadillo Systems were commissioned by the British Library to create a piece of software that would showcase how the researcher of the future would engage with a fully digital repository.

We spent six months with focus groups assessing the present and future needs of the researcher, trying to understand both the existing research practices and how they might be shaped by the transition to digital. This lead to an initial prototype used for evaluation and feedback.

This analysis led to the definition of a final scope for the software and we produced an application for the 2010/11 “Growing Knowledge” exhibition held at the British Library, built with a defined dataset and running just for the duration of the exhibition.

Having come this far, we knew that there was a need for an engaging next-generation application that could easily and flexibly surface a digital repository. The researchers of tomorrow were clearly not going to be content with the existing vertical search tools that just drilled in to the catalogue.

The decision was made to build a software framework based on open standards, abstracted from both metadata and repository that could be extended or customised in any way the client saw fit. That became iNQUIRE.

In 2015 the Bodleian Library launched the first public version of iNQUIRE as Digital Bodleian.

In late 2015, having tracked it's progress and adoption for some years, we started development of a IIIF-compliant version of iNQUIRE, using the Presentation and Image APIs. This not only allows for extremely rapid deployment of a discovery and research interface on top of a digital repository, but also facilitates effective cross-collection search.

iNQUIRE was released as open source under the MIT License in May 2016.