The Cell Image Library (CIL) is a public and easily accessible resource database of images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes. The purpose of this database is to advance research on cellular activity, with the ultimate goal of improving human health. This comprehensive and easily accessible Library is designed as a public resource first and foremost for research, and secondarily as a tool for education. The long-term goal is the construction of a library of images that will serve as primary data for research. A discussion of the development of the open source library and a demonstration of the features focusing on large data sets will be presented. Lastly, there will be a discussion of new tools that have been incorporated to interact with the data in the CIL to aid in original research will be presented. Key to the success of CIL-CCDB is its ability to bridge the abstract concepts of cell biology and cell structure with the reality of that seen in the laboratory. This is most notably demonstrated by the interactive cell illustration on the homepage that invites users to ‘Explore the Cell’. This feature, unavailable with general search engines such as Google Images, provides easy access to narrative and to images and videos for both non-scientists and experts. By hovering over a cellular feature on the illustration or hovering over the word on the right, users see both the word and all those features highlighted in the illustration
