IIIF Community Newsletter, Volume 2 Issue 2

  Rachel Di Cresce, Claire Knowles, Julien A. Raemy    |      July 03, 2018

Community Snapshot

Announcements and Actions

Save the Date - Fall 2018 IIIF Working Groups Meeting

The Fall 2018 IIIF Working Groups Meeting will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, December 3-6, 2018. This event will be hosted jointly by the The University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland. Please mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details!

Potential for IIIF Archives Community Group

There has been much discussion about the creation of an Archives Community Group. During the 2018 IIIF Conference in Washington D.C., we saw evidence of growing interest in IIIF as a means to provide access to archival collections, both through conference presentations as well as through conversations among attendees. Please add your name to this document if you are interested in participating in such a group.

NCSU Libraries: one million image available via IIIF

The North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries made its one millionth image available online through their Rare and Unique Digital Collections website.

Gallica and its IIIF collection are now served over HTTPS

Gallica, the BnF digital library, has switched from HTTP to HTTPS on June 20. We encourage institutions to host their IIIF content on the HTTPS protocol.

Organizing a IIIF event

If you are organising a IIIF event or presenting a IIIF-related topic at a conference please let the Outreach Community Group know via their channel (#outreach) on the IIIF Slack team and they will add it to the event calendar.

Newsletter Submissions

The IIIF Community Newsletter (the document you are reading right now) is published quarterly to provide an at-a-glance update on the current activities and trends in the IIIF community. Anyone may submit an item for publication as long as it relates to IIIF. Please use the IIIF Community Newsletter submission form to submit an item to the newsletter.

Community Events and Outreach

Hackathon at the National Library of Israel

At the end of November 2017, the National Library of Israel hosted its very first Hackathon, an event that inaugurated their APIs including IIIF endpoints based on IIPImage and Cantaloupe.

Some 150 people participated in this event and presented some wonderful achievements using the collections through IIIF. The Hackathon winning team presented a use of voice-recognition on YouTube videos that NERs the speech, performs a search in the National Library’s databases and instantly displays relevant items through IIIF. The Hackathon marked the end of two years of work in the context of making the National Library of Israel an “Open library”. Already over the course of the last year, some of the tools of the website have began to be based on their IIIF endpoints, which aren’t yet public.

Access to the National Library of Israel’s resources via Presentation API or Image API is only based on identifiers. They have a Copyrights system, which enable them to determine whether an item or a collection should be open for API use, and by doing that, the resources are then made available in IIIF automatically within 24 hours. For the Hackathon, the Copyrights team made available some 100,000 manifests consisting of 300,000 images.

As part of the inauguration, the National Library of Israel launched a developers website (currently Hebrew only, English is scheduled for 2018).

Biblissima event in Paris

On March 15, 2018, the Biblissima project organized on the Condorcet Campus (Paris) the first french-speaking outreach event dedicated to IIIF. It gathered between 150 and 170 people from about 70 different institutions in France, mostly from universities, research institutes and the cultural heritage sector. The afternoon begun with an overview of IIIF by Ben Albritton and Régis Robineau, followed by a series of lightning talks that showcased implementations and use cases in different contexts (Europeana, BnF and Gallica, manuscripts projects and museums use cases). The slide decks are available on this webpage (see Presentations tab at the bottom).

EuropeanaTech 2018

On May 15-16 2018 Europeana gathered a significant part of the community of Digital Heritage innovators (nearly 300 of them) and locked them on a ship. The result were two outstanding days of presentations, panels and a lot of informal discussions and networking. Main topics included centralization vs. decentralization, Linked Open Data, Wikidata and of course IIIF, with a handful of presentations touching on the work of our community. For a summary of what happened you can read this blog or dive straight into the full programme and presentations online.

Europeana, the National Library of the Netherlands and IIIF staff also organized a IIIF pre-conference day in The Hague, which was well attended (nearly 90 participants). The day was split into a morning of presentations both by experienced IIIF participants and local institutions. In the afternoon there was a wide ranging discussion in a unconference session and a beginner’s technical workshop given by Glen Robson, the IIIF Technical Coordinator.

Organization of Knowledge and Digital Humanities

On May 21 2018 the “TOI IV - I Organization of Knowledge and Digital Humanities” event was held at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo, where Sarah Lorenzon Ferreira and Marina Macambyra presented the Digital Library Production project of ECA / USP, where they highlighted the relevance of IIIF for the visualization of images, as well as Mirador for comparing images.

At the moment, only ECA / USPs uses IIIF in Brazil. They hope that through this project IIIF will be better disseminated in Brazil.

Anyone interested in the project can learn more through the following:

2018 IIIF Conference in Washington D.C.

The 2018 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference in Washington D.C., May 21-25, co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, was a great success.

Presentation slides and session notes can be found in the IIIF Google Drive. Overall, there were:

  • 269 participants in the IIIF Showcase
  • 223 Conference participants from 104 different institutions/organizations in 14 countries
  • 21 lightning talks
  • 31 presentations
  • 10 panel and discussion sessions

Many thanks again to our hosts, the Program Committee, and our 2018 IIIF Conference sponsors:

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2018

Jack Reed, Jeffrey Witt, Benjamin Albritton, Drew Winget and Rachel Di Cresce taught a IIIF Workshop entitled, “Introduction to IIIF: Sharing, Consuming, and Annotating the World’s Images” at DHSI Victoria June 4-8. There were 22 workshop attendee representing 4 countries whose expertise ranged from history, librarianship, publishing, archives, linguistics and UX. Students were guided through the basics of the Image and Presentation API, set up an image server, a IIIF server and an annotation server, and experimented with setting up a IIIF image viewer. Students were also introduced to more advanced IIIF and view capabilities like ranges and layers. At the end of the week the students shared mini projects they had started using the knowledge they learned in class.

The workshop was a fantastic success with several attendees reporting the workshop was the best they had ever attended at DHSI. The organizing committee at DHSI also extended an invitation to run the workshop again next year due to high demand. In addition, a new slack channel was created called “beginners” for those new to IIIF and looking for some direction. Several of the workshop participants joined and are asking questions. Please join the channel if you wish to help! The workshop documentation can be viewed here: https://iiif.github.io/training/iiif-5-day-workshop/ . It is the instructors’ hope that the curriculum can be improved and re-purposed by other IIIF community members for various workshops in the future.

IIIF Presence at Conferences and Meetings

Active community participants are encouraged to represent IIIF at conferences, workshops and events around the world. Recent and upcoming IIIF appearances include:

  • On February 22, Cathryn Goodwin (Princeton University Art Museum), Charles Butcosk (Colby College Museum of Art), Jeff Steward (Harvard Art Museums), and Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass (Yale Center for British Art) presented on IIIF Use Cases for Enhanced Research and Collection Engagement on a College Art Association conference panel chaired by Emily Pugh from the Getty Research Institute.
  • On March 27, Julien A. Raemy has been invited to present his bachelor’s thesis on IIIF to the Geneva Library Association (AGBD).
  • “Les protocoles IIIF : présentation des potentialités” (in French), presentation by Régis Robineau at the HIMANIS Project Final Day (Paris, Archives Nationales, May 29).
  • Claire Knowles and Terry Brady presented at the Open Repositories conference at Montana State University, 4-7 June, on IIIF and DSpace.
  • Leander Seige from the University of Leipzig gave a lightning talk on Manuscripts, IIIF and the upcoming German manuscript platform at ELAG 2018 in Prague on June 6.
  • On June 25th-29th, the Scholastic Commentaries and Text Archive held a weeklong standards workshop culminating in a Friday showcase presentation at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Since the SCTA is working hard to make scholastic data available via IIIF both for its end users and for re-use by institutions with related content, IIIF was a central topic of discussion throughout the week.
  • Julien A. Raemy, Leander Seige, and Jeffrey Witt were all invited to give a recap on the 2018 IIIF Conference, to talk about the IIIF ecosystem, as well as providing ideas and best practices on how to generate manifests at the Basel University Library on June 28. Notes and presentations of this internal meeting are available on a Google Drive directory.

Technical Work

Presentation API 3.0 - alpha

The alpha draft of the Presentation API 3.0 was ratified at the Washington conference. This means that it can be taken to beta over the next few months. Work on the registry of known extensions, and the cookbook accompanying the specification, will need to happen during this period, and contributions are most welcome.

Image API 3.0 - alpha

The alpha draft of the Image API was not ratified at the Washington conference, as one change in behavior caused concern. This change was discussed on the technical community call on June 27.

Change Discovery API 0.1

The Discovery Technical Specification Group has produced a first version of its main deliverable, a new API to facilitate the discovery and the update of IIIF resources. The specification covers the first item of the group’s charter, namely answering the needs expressed by the IIIF Community for crawling and harvesting IIIF resources. Members of the group (OCLC, NCSU, Digirati, Europeana) have worked on first implementations, and it has been submitted for feedback at the 2018 IIIF Conference in Washington D.C. Work will continue in the TSG in the coming month to cover other aspects of the charter.

Community Groups

IIIF Community groups are designed to provide a forum for general discussion, brainstorming, sharing of use cases and demos, and working to produce tutorials and presentations based on existing IIIF APIs. The process for forming Community Groups can be found at http://iiif.io/community/groups/framework/. Please see the IIIF Community Groups page for a calendar of group and community calls, as well as links to more information about each group.

3D Community Group

The IIIF 3D Community Group had a productive and well-attended meeting at the IIIF Conference in Washington D.C. Please see the notes for more information. We also have our first story documented: https://github.com/IIIF/iiif-3d-stories/issues/1.

Manuscripts Community Group

The Manuscripts Community Group is moving away from monthly calls to quarterly calls. The next teleconference is scheduled to take place on August 8. A small task force of the Manuscripts Group is currently working on suggested best practices for manuscripts (such as basic metadata to be displayed) and some people from the Group have also announced that they will help the Outreach Group on organizing webinars.

Museums Community Group

The Smithsonian recently announced that 800,000+ images from their collection are now IIIF-enabled! Read more about on their website. The Museum Computer Network (MCN) IIIF SIG’s IIIF Panel proposal accepted! See you in Denver!

Newspapers Community Group

The Newspaper Community Group has been meeting regularly to discuss its ongoing OCR correction project. The group also had a useful meeting in the Washington Conference and discussed the possibility of a article segmentation competition working with IIIF Newspapers. The group was also shown the Library of Congress Newspapers which are available over IIIF.

Outreach Community Group

The Outreach Community Group would like to have the IIIF FAQ and the IIIF-C FAQ both translated into many different languages as possible by the end of this year. These will be posted on the iiif.io website as soon as they have been reviewed. Please contact the Group Co-Chairs if you are interested in helping them.

Software Developers Community Group

The Software Developers Community Group has been dedicated to improving the Developer Experience for project teams working in the IIIF space. Many members are working on developing composable front-end components, design systems, and sharing development around a “thin waist” libraries. In the interest of serving server-side developers, the group is organizing a series of calls over the next quarter which will focus on sharing backend and infrastructure-oriented best practices.

Implementations and Adoption

New Releases

  • KU Leuven Libraries is now using the IIIF with the Mirador viewer for two projects, both related to the ancient university of Louvain, Belgium (1425-1797). The first one, Magister Dixit, contains lecture notes from KU Leuven Libraries, the Archives department of Université catholique de Louvain and the Royal Library of Belgium and the second one, Lovaniensia, in collaboration with the Bibliothèques of the Université catholique de Louvain, uses IIIF to disseminate images of the rare books of the KU Leuven Libraries. The top-level collection manifests are respectively http://services.libis.be/m2/manifest/BIBC_Lectio and http://services.libis.be/m2/manifest/BIBC_Lovaniensia.
  • Cogapp have released a Slow Looking viewer, that will work with any IIIF image. Paste in IIIF image addresses to http://slowlooking.cogapp.com/ to enter a fullscreen, slow pan around the image. The results are bookmarkable and shareable.
  • Scholarly digital publication built around IIIF resources and DLCS toolset produced and published by the Paul Mellon Centre, developed by Digirati and designed by Strick&Williams. “The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018” is an open-access publication that explores the history of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Essays examining key artists, artworks, and events from each individual year’s Exhibition are accompanied by 250 completely digitised and searchable copies of the accompanying Exhibition catalogues. Natural Language Processing has been used to identify names in the OCRd exhibition catalogues in order to create an index of exhibitors.
  • The ResCarta Foundation has released Version 7 of the ResCarta Toolkit and corresponding web application ResCarta-Web which supports IIIF access to existing user digital archives. A Mirador viewer is also provided. See the top-level collection manifests.

Innovations & Ongoing Work from Across the IIIF Community

Edited by:

The Outreach Community Group Co-Chairs:

  • Rachel Di Cresce (University of Toronto)
  • Claire Knowles (University of Edinburgh)
  • Julien A. Raemy (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève)

With contributions from:

  • Benjamin Albritton (Stanford University)
  • Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass (Yale Center for British Art)
  • Shaun Ellis (Princeton University)
  • Antoine Isaac (Europeana)
  • Sarah Lorenzon Ferreira (School of Art and Communication, University of São Paulo)
  • M.A. Matienzo (Stanford University)
  • Eyal Reuven (National Library of Israel)
  • Régis Robineau (Biblissima, Campus Condorcet)
  • Glen Robson (IIIF-C)
  • Tristan Roddis (Cogapp)
  • Jason Ronallo (NCSU Libraries)
  • Tom Scutt (Paul Mellon Centre)
  • Tina Shah (Art Institute of Chicago)
  • Ed Silverton (Mnemoscene)
  • An Smets (KU Leuven Libraries)
  • John Sarnowski (The ResCarta Foundation)
  • Jeffrey Witt (Loyola University Maryland)