Stockholm University already provides a Flash-based zoomer. What I wanted to achieve was the ability to link to a coordinate,
This is part one of your question. Find out how if the zoomify viewer of Stockholm university supports link parameters, that zoom and pan to a specific location.
as part of an OpenStreetMap layer, from Wikipedia articles that have coordinates.
Huh?! Where does the OpenStreetMapLayer come into play here?! I don't see that.
Here is a suggestion: GoogleEarth supports tile-based overlays through KML files. This is the closest thing to what I think you want to do (overlay the old maps over new cartographic material). I don't see this happening in OSM though. Daniel