Annotorious [1] is a neat little JavaScript library for adding annotations to an image, and displaying them later. I might be wrong, but it doesn’t appear to support zoomable images at the moment. I do see there was some cross-project activity with OpenSeaDragon [2] so maybe asking over there will yield some leads? Ranier Simon gave a excellent, brief presentation about Annotorious at iAnnotate earlier this year. [3]

Leaflet [4] is widely known as a JavaScript library for doing maps; but the tiling that goes on when displaying maps is very similar to zooming on other images like in OpenSeaDragon. Because it is oriented around maps, it definitely supports drawing paths, polygons, other shapes, and there are lots of plugins [5] for various things, including overlaying stuff over the image with Raphael.

Another thing to look at from the digital library research angle might be the SharedCanvas work [6,7]. I’m similarly curious to hear if other people have done annotation with zoomable interfaces before. 

Wondering out loud a bit: don’t your archivists need to make the annotations on a zoomable interface, even if your end-users don’t?

//Ed

[1] http://annotorious.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon/issues/14
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HgWIkBeQNM
[4] http://leafletjs.com/
[5] http://leafletjs.com/plugins.html
[6] http://www.shared-canvas.org/
[7] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00799-012-0098-8

On Nov 10, 2013, at 9:41 AM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Does anyone have experience with an image zooming engine in conjunction
> with image annotation? I don't want end users to annotate things
> themselves, but allow them to click on annotations added by an archivist.