(Please excuse any duplicate postings of this message)

We are pleased to announce a new version of our open-source document image viewer, Diva.js. Diva is designed for archival document digitization initiatives where viewing high-resolution images is a crucial part of the user experience. Using Diva, libraries, archives, and museums can present high-resolution document page images in a user-friendly “instant-on” interface that has been optimized for speed, flexibility, and interoperability. 

Diva 5.0 contains many significant “under the hood” changes, and packs a number of new features, including:

 - Page images are now rendered using the HTML Canvas, allowing us to support “smooth” zooming. 
 - Improved IIIF support: Toggle “non-paged” pages' visibility and search for pages based on their canvas label name.
 - Complete re-organization of the source code, and more stringent internal data structures. We have switched our language and build system to include ES6, WebPack, and Karma. This should make the development process much easier going forward.

With this release we are also deprecating the older Diva JSON format in favour of IIIF manifests. We will remove support for the Diva JSON format in the next release.

If you are new to Diva, take a look at our updated webpage <http://ddmal.github.io/diva.js/>. You will find a few demos <http://ddmal.github.io/diva.js/try/> there. For a complete list of new features, bug fixes and API changes, please consult the changelog <https://github.com/DDMAL/diva.js/releases/tag/v5.0.0>.

As always the code is open-source and available on GitHub <https://github.com/DDMAL/diva.js>. For any bug reports or feature requests, you can submit an issue on GitHub <https://github.com/DDMAL/diva.js/issues>.

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of William Bain (@wabain) <https://github.com/wabain/> towards this release. William expertly guided us through the transition to ES6 and provided the initial canvas image drawing implementation. Thanks, Will!

Cordially,
Jérôme Parent-Lévesque
Andrew Hankinson

Development of Diva.js was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project. Find out more at https://simssa.ca <https://simssa.ca/>.