The World Digital Library is a collection of significant primary documents from countries and cultures around the world. The folks over there have put them online (as of April 21st) to both promote cultural understanding as well as to provide a resource for educators and scholars. They’ve also utilized Seadragon Ajax to do so, and the end product is really, really cool.

Simply select a world region that you want to explore and you’ll be taken to a page containing all of your “search results” and a pane on the left to help you narrow down the items you have available to you. Picking an individual item will give you a general description and all of the item’s particulars, such as creation date, author, location etc. One more click on the item will send you into the Seadragon Ajax portion of the site, where you can zoom and pan around the item to your hearts content. There’s a ton of interesting documents and photos to peruse here, so if you’re having a hard time choosing, start with a personal favorite of mine, the iconic photo of pea-pickers by Dorothea Lange.
The images do suffer from some pixel drift, though this is a product of using Kapil’s Python script for image conversion to DZI. It is also worth noting that this same gentleman did development on the WDL site. They’ve also changed the Seadragon Ajax UI buttons, but that’s to incorporate a “next” and “previous” button for documents that have multiple pages. It’s a wonderful site, and I suggest you check it out.
-Kevin Hanes