IIIF Design Community Group

About

The name of this community group, “Design,” refers to principles within the fields of information architecture, usability, user experience, human-centered design, and interaction design. The IIIF Design community is committed to discovering data, gathering information, and making recommendations for design of IIIF-compliant resources and interfaces that center human end users. This community group’s overarching goal is to support the development of IIIF specifications and implementation guidelines. We do this by sharing user research data and results that identify modern users’ research and online discovery practices. We create recommendations, best practices, and guidelines for the IIIF community that improve the interoperability of IIIF resources, tools, and interfaces so that humans can find, identify, select, use, and reuse the resources they need.

To be successful, the design of IIIF-complaint resources, tools, and interfaces must be people-focused and meet clearly defined human user needs. This group aims to go beyond specification work to promote implementations that engage experts in research, content, user experience, metadata, and various technologies. In order to advance discovery in the LAM (library, archive and museum) space, this group will foster user-focused approaches that enable the targeted discovery, use, and reuse of IIIF resources that span institutional and domain silos.

Previously, this group focused on discovering and collecting information about how human end users discover IIIF materials and on thinking about how we can improve discoverability. Since 2021, we have begun to think more holistically about how IIIF-compliant resources can be used and reused, which led to the name change to “Design.”

Goals

  1. Research individual user behavior and goals to understand how different kinds of people discover, use, and reuse IIIF materials, and to identify the unmet needs in users’ current processes
  2. Review current IIIF interfaces, systems, tools, and services, to understand their design and functionality
  3. In collaboration with TSGs and other community groups, test potential user experiences with IIIF audience members
  4. Generate recommendations, best practices, and guidelines for improving support for discovery, use, and reuse of IIIF-compliant resources across institutions by people
  5. Inspire design solutions within the IIIF community, building on earlier Design community group findings and ongoing work of the TSGs as much as possible
  6. Communicate and disseminate the work of the group to the larger IIIF community and allied professional communities

Organization

Chairs

  • Ben Bakelaar
  • Arcadia Falcone, Stanford
  • Paola Manoni, Vatican Library
  • Jeff Mixter, OCLC
  • Stacey Redick, Folger Shakespeare Library

Communication Channels

Call Notes and Group Documents

IIIF Design Community Group Folder

Call Connection Information