2024 IIIF Annual Conference Schedule
The outline schedules of the conference is available below. The exact timing of each day’s schedule is still subject to change.
Register
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Please register for the conference using Conftool. Payment must be submitted following your registration via Paypal using a credit card number, or via check. You can register here.
- Registration for the IIIF showcase is free.
- Costs for the conference will be $495 for a general ticket, $255 for a consortium members ticket and $125 for students. Registration closes May 14, 2024.
Schedule
Conference:
- Day 1 - Tuesday, June 4th
- Day 2 - Wednesday, June 5th
- Conference Reception
- Birds of a feather sessions - Thursday, June 6th
Showcase:
Sponsors
The IIIF Annual Conference is generously supported by the following Conference Sponsors:
Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Bronze Sponsors
Academic Partners
Conference
Day 1 - Tuesday, June 4th
The conference will take place in De Neve Auditorium on the UCLA campus.
Day 2 - Wednesday, June 5th
The conference will take place in De Neve Auditorium on the UCLA campus.
Birds of a Feather sessions - Thursday, June 6th
The Birds of a Feather sessions will be held at the Charles Young Library.
Time | Session 1 | Session 2 | Session 3 |
---|---|---|---|
10:00 - 12:00 | IIIF and 3D workshop | IIIF & End Users: increasing uptake and creating ambassadors | Connecting IIIF and Semantic Cultural Heritage Metadata for Discovery |
12:00 - 1:30 | Break | ||
1:30 - 3:45 | Where Next with IIIF Collections? | Fish-of-a-School: IIIF for Educators | A/V Annotation |
IIIF 3D - Expanded Dimensions and Collaborative Scenes for Prezi 4.0
To complement the growing impact of IIIF in 2D and Audio/Video (A/V) collections around the world, the 3D Technical Specification Group (TSG) is meeting frequently to advance a draft of standards for 3D content, to complement and expand the potential of all IIIF-based collections. In addition, the 3D Community Group (CG) shares significant projects, tools and contacts with other 3D researchers and developer communities to collaboratively consider challenges and potential solutions in common. The two IIIF 3D groups work together engaging with specialists and representatives across user communities, international and standards bodies, as outlined in their charters. The combined CG and TSG efforts are working to extend IIIF suitably into the 3rd dimension, expanding options for better data sharing across institutions and collections, to help overcome barriers for sustainable sharing. The TSG is determining workable options for incorporation of 2D and A/V with 3D data, including to enable digital dioramas (mini-metaverses), with considerations for scene and soundscape constructions, and the potential to help build a more inclusive and sustainable metaverse. This session will provide an update on the work and progress with use cases and technical specification drafting for the evolution of IIIF 3D. Please do join us!
Re-introducing Ramp: a IIIF Media Component Library
Formerly known as the IIIF React Media Player, Ramp is a IIIF viewer for audiovisual materials that supports the IIIF Presentation 3.0 API. It is an exportable NPM component library that provides ReactJS components for media playback, structures (table of contents) display, transcript presentation, metadata display, supplemental files, and highlighting annotations. A benefit of a component-based IIIF viewer is that individual implementations can choose which components to utilize and how to integrate them into their application. Ramp is now the primary media player for the Avalon Media System, providing nearly all item display functionality in Avalon.
In order to help community members with audiovisual media determine if Ramp would be useful for their needs, it has been added to the IIIF Viewer Matrix and has an up-to-date live demo site (https://ramp.avalonmediasystem.org/).
This presentation will provide an overview of Ramp and its constituent components and demonstrate how they are leveraged in the Avalon Media System. It will also provide an update on future work to broaden support for annotations and increase interoperability with AVAnnotate and Aviary, other producers of IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifests for audiovisual media.
Unlocking the richness of digitized map series with IIIF and Allmaps
Existing interfaces presenting digitized map series leave much to be desired. Navigation can be cumbersome and georeferenced versions break the link to the original image. The combination of IIIF’s Georeference Extension, the open source ecosystem Allmaps, and a group of ambitious students has yielded new methods for georeferencing map series and presenting them to a wider audience. This was achieved by transcribing historical sources about the series, converting geographic coordinates, using computer vision to detect the corners of the map depicted on the image, and publishing the results as Georeference Annotations.
By applying the methods to other map series in IIIF-compatible repositories, their reusability is demonstrated. New features such as thin plate spline transformation, distortion analysis to assess the accuracy of maps, and alternative map projections will pass in review, as well as suggestions for how to publish reusable information about map series as linked open data.
Last but not least, Allmaps Arcade is introduced, a playful interface to encourage public engagement with digitized map collections that can be configured with a specific map series and geographic area. Players are asked to place sheets in the right position and earn points based on speed and accuracy.
Re:tooling for education: IIIF from an educator’s perspective
The IIIF for Education Community Group is bringing together educators, academic technologists, librarians, instructional designers, museum professionals, and others to examine the ways IIIF resources and IIIF-related tools can be used as part of curriculum in Learning Management System (LMSs) and other online platforms to create meaningful, constructive, and collective learning experiences for students. Our development and implementation of course assignments making use of existing IIIF-enabled tools and resources has led us to consider them in light of three key aspects: teaching/pedagogy, assignment design, and campus infrastructure. In doing so, we hope to highlight best practices for teaching with IIIF tools and resources but also to identify current gaps in support for educators and to guide the development of new and existing tools. This lightning talk will highlight the tools that help to make these valuable experiences possible while also touching on potential areas for future development or adaptation to allow these tools and resources to play a more central role in teaching and learning.
What if we OCR everything?
There is a growing interest within cultural heritage organisations to understand the environmental impact of the infrastructure used to power the digital services accessed by the public. However, understanding the complexity behind this challenge involves breaking down the problem into well-defined and easily understood use cases that are common across the sector. At this point, we can begin to define the benchmarks, tools and techniques that help to generate data we require to start more informed discussions. The application of IIIF generates interesting use cases, such as the challenge of handling the large amounts of annotation data that result from the OCR of images at scale. In this talk, we will describe ongoing work to help understand this challenge and examine how the choice of technology can impact the digital footprint of a IIIF-related digital service. More specifically we will examine the performance of the annotation server Miiify against some repeatable benchmarks when applied to real-world data at scale. The goal is to share our findings and hopefully generate further discussion and sharing of best practices within the field of green computing.
The Manifests are the Metadata: Exploring provenance through a manifest-led environment
‘Provenance research only serves its purpose when it is made public. Flow of information, networking, exchange and accessibility are key terms which unfortunately still describe a Utopia’, begins Mahlo’s preface to the Provenance Research Manual. Faced with the challenge of making the provenance records connected to a recent acquisition the paper presents the results of a project to make it’s provenance records public, while in working in an entirely IIIF-native environment, with no external dependencies beyond an image server.
3D Manifest with Kompakkt in Babylon.js
3D Manifest with Kompakkt in Babylon.js
Internet Archive Support for IIIF: An Update
Last fall, Internet Archive staff and volunteers from the IIIF community brought IIIF support into the Internet Archive as a production service. We'll review what that support includes, show you how to use the over 50 million new resources, and provide an update on recent developments.
We'll finish with how you can help. There's some really interesting use cases left, and the Internet Archive is a great playground for experimenting with some of IIIF's emerging standards.
Fun With IIIF 2024
It's time to play the music
It's time to light the lights
It's time to showcase entertaining aspects of image dissemination tonight!
It's time to get things started
On the most sensational inspirational, celebrational, IIIFational
This is what we call the Fun With IIIF Show!
Welcome to another round of the best, the wildest, the outright funnest things that the IIIF world has to offer. Triiistan Rodiiis will lead you on a whirlwind tour of over a dozen projects that prove that IIIF is not just about scholarship and research, but can also be about fun, frivolity and the kind of playfulness that is only truly possible once you have a suite of flexible and easy to use standards for image interoperability at your disposal.
The implementation of a rights-aware IIIF server at The New York Public Library
Rights management at The New York Public Library (NYPL) is unique and complex, and the need to protect our assets was urgent while our resources were spread across multiple projects. In addition to copyright statuses, rights may be influenced by provenance, donor agreements, on site, off site access and specific research library guidelines. The sizes of images, whether or not they are available on the web or physically on site, only by request or not at all is governed by our rights management system. This presentation will discuss how the NYPL’s Digital Asset Management team created a rights-aware IIIF image server without using the IIIF Presentation and Authorization Flow APIs.
Analytical Support Tools for Historical Drawing Maps: Utilization and Development of IIIF Georeference Extension and Mirador Plugin
This proposal outlines the development of tools to support the comparison of historical maps using IIIF, initiated by the Historiographical Institute, the University of Tokyo. This project focuses on the integration and comparative analysis of Japan's national pictorial maps and other significant maritime maps from the 15th century onwards. By leveraging IIIF, the proposed tools aim to facilitate a deeper understanding of historical maritime routes and geographical knowledge. We have developed Mirador plugins that use annotations to structure information on place names and maritime routes within the maps, supporting the comparative analysis of common elements across multiple maps. Furthermore, we have constructed visualization tools compliant with the IIIF Georeference Extension, enabling researchers to compare historical maps with modern geographical data without distortion. By emphasizing open-source accessibility, these tools promise to enhance research capabilities within and beyond the IIIF community, offering new insights into historical navigation and cartography. This proposal highlights the importance of this work in preserving and studying historical maps, showcasing the potential for advanced research methodologies in historiography and digital humanities.
Tropiiify: A Tropy plugin for exporting IIIF Collections
In this talk we introduce Tropiiify, a plugin for exporting IIIF collections from Tropy, an open-source research photo management tool. Our plugin allows users to create, edit and export static IIIF collections through an intuitive user interface, with custom options for metadata schemas and annotations. Considering that serving IIIF assets on the web often requires extensive institutional support and server maintenance, we offer a straightforward alternative for small institutions and individuals without technical background to tile images and export their research materials following the IIIF specifications. The output is a file directory that can be hosted on GitHub Pages or other free hosting solutions, and fed into tools such as Canopy IIIF and Exhibit. The presentation will cover the project's history, use cases and feature roadmap.
Watch me spin up a production ready, lightning fast, IIIF image service in less time than it takes to give this talk
Serverless-IIIF started as an in-house project to solve Northwestern’s scaling needs with a focus on minimizing costs and operational overhead. The initial experiment has grown into a community project with production instances running at Princeton, Notre Dame, the Museums of Brighton and Hove, among others. It is well known that Serverless-IIIF offers implementers infinite scaling, inexpensive storage, and minimal operational overhead, but few have focused on exactly how easy it is to setup the service.
During this seven-minute lightning talk we will stand up a production-ready IIIF image service complete with storage, associated AWS Lambdas, and other requirements. In addition, we will discuss how serverless infrastructure works, why it is less expensive to run than traditional hosting for many IIIF workloads, and how serverless architecture can help you think about the environmental costs of computing.
That is a lot in seven minutes.
Turning textiles into sound to make archive collections more accessible
We will be presenting our internship project with the Digital Creativity and Cultures Hub at the University of Leeds which surrounds digitising collections from our university’s archives and Special Collections in order to make the materials more accessible. The premiss of our project is turning patterned fabrics from the archive’s collections into frequencies, inspired by the way in which certain frequencies can form cymatic patterns, to be played alongside the visual images of the patterns to create a means of experiencing the pattern in a different format, therefore making the collections more accessible to all but particularly people with visual impairments. It is important to us to maintain the original properties of the fabrics and translate them rather than produce something which is interpretive to ensure we create an accurate and exact representation of the fabric existing in a different medium. IIIF’s audio resources and deep zoom features supply our project with a digital clarity which is essential to the authenticity of the experience we aim to provide and the relationship between the two sensory portrayals of the fabrics.
Handling HTJ2K images with VIPS and Kakadu
Kakadu is currently the most efficient library for reading and writing JPEG2000 images, including the newest HTJ2K standard, which boasts far better encoding and decoding performance than the traditional JP2 format. Unfortunately, the Kakadu SDK is limited to C++ and Java, which limits the possibilities of integrating Kakadu with existing software frameworks.
Libvips is a popular, very fast image manipulation library with various language bindings and modules for reading and writing several image formats. Harvard partnered with the libvips maintainer to build a Kakadu-backed JP2 reader and writer plug-in for libvips, which allows to Kakadu to read and write JP2 images. This plug-in, recently released to the public, is being integrated in the Harvard Library ETL pipelines to build high-volume image transformation services.
FloCo in the World: Indigenous Knowledge and Global Education
The Florentine Codex is an exceptional sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript that was created by Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of Indigenous authors and artists. This encyclopedia of Nahua knowledge and language features three narratives: a primary Nahuatl text, a Spanish interpretation, and some 2,500 images. The codex is a key primary source on Nahua culture and the conquest of Mexico told from the Mexica perspective.
In 2016, the Getty Research Institute initiated a major collaborative initiative to transform the codex into an enhanced digital critical edition. Launched in 2023, the Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital (DFC) presents the newly digitized codex alongside its bilingual transcriptions and translations. Texts and images are searchable, achieved by tagging images with keywords. This image metadata is available in four languages—Classical Nahuatl, Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, Spanish, and English—and was generated following a rigorous research process by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, including native Nahuatl speakers. Built using Digirati’s Canvas Panel as a bespoke IIIF viewer for images and texts, the DFC gives unprecedented access to this manuscript of human cultural heritage. This presentation will detail the collaborative process for this ambitious project and demonstrate the newly launched DFC.
Building the Digital Florentine Codex: From User Research to Production
The Digital Florentine Codex is a richly enhanced digital critical edition of an exceptionally important 16th-century Mexican manuscript written in two languages—Nahuatl and Spanish—and richly illustrated throughout with nearly 2,500 individual images.
The Digital Florentine Codex site uses IIIF to present a browsable, searchable digital edition with multiple different scholarly transcriptions and translations of the original text along with images tagged and annotated with concepts from the Getty vocabularies in English, Spanish, Classical and Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl.
Presenting complex scholarly information while retaining an approachable, easy to use interface was both a design and a technical challenge.
This talk will outline the creation of the digital site from initial user research and user experience, through the information architecture and visual design, and outlining how IIIF and IIIF-enabled annotation tools and viewers were central to the curation of the source data and to the rich visual experience of the polished final site.
Using Booksnake to Teach with IIIF-Compliant Materials: Results from Classroom Testing
Interacting with digitized materials in a Web browser fails to replicate the embodied engagement possible during in-person research. To remedy this, we are building Booksnake, a new mobile app that transforms existing IIIF-compliant digitized materials into custom life-size virtual objects. Booksnake uses the augmented reality technology in consumer mobile devices to blend these virtual objects into a user's physical environment.
How can this technology support classroom teaching with IIIF-compliant materials? Systematic reviews show AR can support student learning gains, motivation, and knowledge transfer (Bacca et al. 2014). And embodied interaction is key to apprehending cultural heritage materials in their full complexity—both physical objects (Kai-Kee, Latina & Sadoyan 2020) and virtual replicas (Kenderdine and Yip 2019).
This presentation discusses results of large-scale classroom testing with Booksnake at the University of Southern California. Our central question is: Does interacting with archival materials in augmented reality change student learning outcomes, when compared with interacting with archival materials with a web-based viewer?
We use these results to identify potential educational implications for using augmented reality to interact with IIIF-compliant resources. We conclude with a set of best practices for using Booksnake to work with digitized sources in the physical space of a classroom.
DetektIIIF 3 – from browser extension to a versatile working environment.
detektIIIF is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that detects IIIF resources in websites. It is possible to collect IIIF manifests in a basket and send them to any compatible IIIF application. Version 2 of the IIIF browser extension detektIIIF was presented at various IIIF events in the past and has been installed more than 300 times. Now detektIIIF reaches version 3 and opens up a new field of user-friendly IIIF applications. The new version comes with an embedded Mirador workspace, which turns the browser extension into a versatile application. This makes it possible to work with IIIF manifests completely without copying and pasting cryptic URLs. It is also planned to connect the annotation function of Mirador with globally synchronized browser storage or third-party services and thus realize a persistent IIIF workspace that is automatically synchronized between different devices. The presentation explains the system architecture and demonstrates its use in a clear demonstration.
IIIF Manifest Editor - latest developments
During 2022, in partnership with the UK Towards a National Collection project and Technical University, Delft, Digirati built a new open source IIIF Manifest Editor framework, that can accommodate many of the use cases for creating general purpose manifests, learning IIIF concepts, creating manifests for specific target environments and being easily integrated into diverse production workflows.
Now, in collaboration with Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Digirati are extending this framework to introduce a number of new features including creating collections, merging two manifests, creating multiple new Manifests from one very large existing Manifest, plus the selection, reordering and moving of canvases; and some general design and usability improvements.
In this presentation we will provide an overview of these features and dive into the underlying concepts and capabilities that facilitate them such as IIIF browsing, copy and paste, and storage.
10 Ways AI Will Change Archives
Canvas Panel - a component for building IIIF user interfaces
Canvas Panel is a Web Component that renders a IIIF Canvas and the annotations on it. It makes development of arbitrary IIIF apps easier with a “canvas-native” component that understands annotations as well as image services. A concise <canvas-panel> component on a web page renders one IIIF Canvas, and provides properties, events and functions to support user interaction with the content on the Canvas, as pure IIIF and web annotations.
Canvas Panel is not a viewer (not on its own, anyway) - it has no concept of digital objects, or IIIF Manifests and structure. But you can quickly build viewers with it, and we’ll show you some examples of this in this presentation.
Canvas Panel is to a IIIF Canvas as OpenSeadragon or Leaflet are to the IIIF Image API.
Documentation is at https://iiif-canvas-panel.netlify.app/docs/intro
Arvest: a multi-user IIIF-driven environment for multimodal document analysis.
IIIF was conceived first for image interoperability. Nonetheless, recent advances for integrating 3D objects, sounds and videos shifts the original image framework to a multimodal framework. As researchers working with cultural heritage collections, we are confronted with a wide variety of documents : texts, photographs, video recordings, sketches, maps, audio, etc. Our need is not only to compare or quote different images, or to annotate an image with texts. We wish also to be able to compare a sketch with an extract of a video recording, to annotate a text with a sound, to navigate from one document to another, be it a text, an image, or a time-based object. We wish also to extract data from this document without loosing the connection with the original source. IIIF may be the framework to answer such challenges which concern not only research but also teaching and collections curation.
Since 2022, we have been working to bring multimodal annotation features to the IIIF community using Mirador. Departing from a fork by Tokyo University (https://github.com/2SC1815J/mirador), we added audio and video playback. We also created support for annotations of a Canvas with another Manifest. This allowed the creation of Manifest collection navigation interfaces, in the form of interactive network graphs, that we presented as a prototype at the IIIF Conference 2023.
Since, we have continued development to keep up with recent Mirador updates to MUI5 and React17. The first prototype led to two contributions: (1) a new plugin which is a major refactor and update of an image annotation plugin that now supports video and audio; (2) An online multi-user platform called Arvest, that will be publicly available as of September 2024.
Arvest, combined with Mirador and our annotation plugin, proposes a IIIF-driven environment for the creation and navigation of multimodal document networks. The users can navigate collections of images, video, audio and documents through annotations of different natures – from textual captions and image annotations, to annotations that are linked to other Manifests. A project in Arvest is represented as a IIIF Collection of Manifests, meaning that full interoperability is still insured.
We wish to render the use of IIIF accessible to a wide range of non techno-fluent users. As a fully functional online multi-user environment, Arvest allows anyone with an email to create an account and start creating and sharing Manifests from their media in a matter of minutes.
Our current roadmap is to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven workflows within the tool. In the beta version, this is achieved with an open API that allows users to consult, upload and modify media, Manifests and annotations from afar. The subject of future development shall look to propose curated workflows and methods within the tool, streamlining complex computational workflows for a wide range of users. With this API, we wish to propose Arvest as an open tool that can combine with other methods and projects in a fully IIIF-driven environment.
Transdimensional mutations for audio/moving media annotations in IIIF Content Search
This technical presentation will focus on how Archipelago, an OSS Repository system developed by the Metropolitan New York Library council for the past 5 years that integrates IIIF tightly in all its concerns, allows time based Audio and Video, transcripts, to be converted natively into W3C compliant Annotations for its internal IIIF Content Search discovery (Version 1 and 2) APIs, by mutating back and forth temporal dimensions into spatial ones (x,y), encoding and storing them as discoverable OCR in MiniOCR format into a backend Solr Server. This approach allows us to reuse the OCR Highlight plugin developed by the Bavarian State Library Team which already powers textual annotations of image based resources and thus reuse all the supporting code that drives our ingest, pre and post processing workflows and discovery.
Publishing and Annotating Text and Images in Large Historical Handwritten Text Recognition Collections
The spectacular increase in quality and availability of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) produces large historical collections of scanned images with matching HTR transcriptions. At KNAW Humanities Cluster we process and publish several of such collections, a.o. 17th-18th century Resolutions of the Dutch States General (parliament) and 5 million pages from the archives of the Dutch East India Company. For both collections the scans are provided by the Dutch National Archive, using IIIF.
To prepare these texts for research we need a far more complex text model than simply treating text as a collection of strings associated with image regions on scans or canvases.
The paper discusses the Text Model and IIIF-inspired Text Referencing API that we designed, implemented and applied for a range of projects. It also covers how we use IIIF, the Text API and Web Annotations to publish our collections online.
The (Feminist) Art of Integration: Judy Chicago's Archives and IIIF
This presentation will delve into the process of creating an aggregation of digital archives using IIIF. It will highlight the Judy Chicago Research Portal as a case study, focusing on the technical intricacies and collaborative dynamics involved in unifying diverse digitization implementations across five institutions. In just 15 minutes, we will discuss the challenges and successes of synchronizing varied digital practices to create a seamless and rich repository of feminist art. This session will provide practical strategies and innovative insights for leveraging IIIF in building expansive, interoperable digital collections. By examining the successful aggregation of distinct archival resources from across the country into a cohesive whole, attendees will be equipped with actionable knowledge to drive similar transformative projects in the realm of digital humanities.
Building Maktaba: A Digital Collection of African Arabic Manuscripts in Translation
The Building Maktaba project aims to make accessible 7,000 African Arabic manuscripts provided from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Northwestern University (NU). In the first steps of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded pilot project, twenty select items demonstrate a IIIF-focused solution that unify the manuscripts from both institutions, annotate them with Arabic transcriptions, English translations, and contextual essays, provide them as a single IIIF Collection, and publish IIIF content and associated scholarly work to a statically generated site using Canopy IIIF. Visitors to the public Maktaba collection site will find a unified browsable collection of annotated manuscripts along with scholarly essays analyzing the manuscripts. The workflows, tools, and techniques presented can be adopted by Digital Humanities projects combining IIIF collections with scholarly output.
Unlocking Treasures: The Urgency of IIIF Integration for Indonesia's Manuscript Legacy
In the heart of Indonesia, where 22,700 precious manuscripts have been digitized across the country, a digital treasure trove remains untapped. The National Library of the Republic of Indonesia (NLRI) safeguards 6,066 of these manuscripts, yet their presentation lacks the vigor and accessibility needed to engage a global audience. Our proposal, "Unlocking Treasures," passionately advocates for the urgent integration of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to revitalize Indonesia's manuscript legacy.
Keywords: IIIF Integration, Manuscript Presentation, Cultural Heritage, Digital Accessibility
Fostering Open Culture Globally: The Synergy between Creative Commons and IIIF in Cultural Heritage Institutions
In the ever-evolving landscape of cultural heritage, the intersection of Creative Commons (CC) and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) stands as a pivotal force, propelling the global movement towards open culture. This session seeks to deepen the dialogue between these crucial components of the Open Culture Infrastructure, bringing together active participants from cultural heritage institutions worldwide. The focus is on fostering collaborative discussions that address critical issues such as copyright, licensing, and the strategic steps involved in transitioning towards an open paradigm.
Bridging Text and Space: Leveraging the IIIF Presentation Standard for a Better Understanding of Early Modern Archival Material
Incorporating additional artifacts such as maps is essential to fully unlock the Dutch East India Company's (VOC) vast paper archives (1605-1799). While letters, reports, and ledgers offer historical insights, identifying the toponyms they mention proves challenging due to shifting place names.
The GLOBALISE project tackles this challenge by connecting the massive textual corpus of VOC archives with colonial maps, thereby enhancing the understanding and interpretation of these spatial references in the written archives. This approach involves three layers, each resulting in a set of web annotations that are combined according to the IIIF Presentation standard:
1. Georeferencing using the Allmaps tool, superimposing the early modern view of colonies onto modern maps.
2. Detecting toponyms by recognizing and transcribing labels from maps, and linking them to places mentioned in written archives and external resources.
3. Classifying geospatial iconography such as icons and symbols representing settlements, plantations, and more, advancing our understanding of the early modern Dutch colonial view of the world.
By weaving together text and maps, GLOBALISE allows researchers to better interpret spatial references in archival documents, and thus better understand (Dutch) colonial history and its impact on geopolitics. Publishing its enrichments via IIIF standards ensures open access and collaboration.
Presentation Plus: Working at the Edges of the Presentation API
In support of a planned exhibition opening in Spring 2024, the Getty Digital team undertook a project to present a photo album that had been disassembled and digitized in pieces as a reconstituted digital object through IIIF. Though this type of "bring the illumination back to the manuscript page" example has existed since the early days of the IIIF Presentation API, this talk will cover some of the practical challenges involved in producing the resources necessary to implement it and the end result of the project as a set of tools and workflows, as well as highlight the present state of the development of a new image viewer at Getty to support an extended set of presentation use cases.
DIY IIIF: A Sample of Standalone, Static, and Skunkworks Implementations
Not all IIIF needs to be institutional-grade or institutionally-stewarded. What about the public librarian who wants to publish a digital collection on GitHub pages? The digital humanist between jobs with a great idea for an exhibit? Or the research engineer who wants to support a handful of projects without going through special collections acquisitions?
This lightning talk will provide a few examples of "DIY IIIF'' projects as models for starting from scratch. We'll look at a few static sites with self-contained IIIF Level 0 resources and we'll also inspect a GitHub-based workflow (Aperitiiif) for quickly publishing IIIF collections for nimble downstream research. In the process, we'll consider how to lower structural barriers to supporting IIIF independently of the proverbial GLAM man. 🤘
Handling special AV annotations: captions, subtitles, audio description, transcripts, and translations
Members from the IIIF A/V Community Group have identified use cases for IIIF clients that require new mechanisms in order to identify and enable specific functionality in IIIF viewers for annotations that contain captions, subtitles, audio description, transcripts and translations. Key use cases include distinguishing between captions/subtitles, which should be available to display over top of a video, and transcripts, which should be displayed in a separate widget for search and download. Accessibility requirements are an important component, and audio description tracks that contain descriptions of important visual information should also be made clearly available to users in IIIF viewers. Potentially relevant for use cases outside of A/V, content owners may also want to clearly distinguish between transcriptions and translations across formats, including newspapers and manuscripts.
The IIIF AV Annotations Technical Specification Group was formed to address these use cases and is currently discussing possible extensions and/or revisions for the IIIF Presentation API with the IIIF Editorial Board. This lightning talk aims to share the results of these conversations and trigger discussions in other IIIF communities that may have similar use cases for annotations in IIIF resources.
IIIF and the Global South: Reaching out to the Un/Underrepresented
Integrating Clover IIIF viewer into collections management software CollectiveAccess
CollectiveAccess is an open-source collections management application used by hundreds of projects. To meet the needs of disparate collections, it supports a wide range of media including IIIF images, video, audio, 3D, and PDFs. Many users also describe their holdings through captioning and annotation of media. In winter 2023, we started working with Grand Rapids Public Library to add to CollectiveAccess new search and display capabilities for their newspapers collection. This newspaper viewer had to provide support for PDFs and METS/ALTO files, text search with highlighting of search terms, page/issue/publication navigation, as well as seamless integration with the rest of the library collection. After considering various multimedia viewer options, we arrived at a standards-based solution leveraging IIIF protocols and Clover IIIF Viewer.
We collaborated with developers from Northwestern University Libraries to integrate annotations, Content Search 2.0, and newspapers from the IIIF standards and cookbook recipes for both software projects. We also contributed features not covered by IIIF specs, such as custom CSS styles and PDF support via a custom display. We hope our collaboration can show how open-source projects can work together to meet the needs of collections that have different types of media and use cases.
CONTENTdm: Updated support for IIIF and expanding metadata management capabilities
As libraries, archives, and museums continue to transition to linked data, there is the need for managing both structural metadata and descriptive metadata. In this session, we will discuss the structural IIIF linked data developments happening in CONTENTdm as well as the descriptive metadata linked data advancements we are making. Together, these technology solutions will help data curators better manage, share, and reuse digital materials.
Can you break it down for me?: IIIF for Managers
Existing IIIF literature describes how to introduce IIIF to engineers and deans, researchers, and CIOs, but, as IIIF has become more established in the last decade, there is little literature about the management of legacy systems as well as the need to manage people who are responsible for keeping them afloat. In essence, this paper seeks to address that gap, presenting a possible framework for ‘IIIF for Managers’, designed to assist those who are responsible for their staff who are engaged in the maintenance, creation and implementation of IIIF resources, yet lack the specific expertise held by those that they manage.
Nurturing Inclusive Access to GLAM Collections through Continuous Accessibility Testing and Community Engagement
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) has played a pivotal role in advancing the accessibility and interoperability of digital resources in the cultural heritage sector. IIIF powered digital image viewers, such as Mirador and Universal Viewer, have become integral components in the dissemination of open scholarly research, playing a critical role in presenting and sharing digital collections of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) institutions worldwide. Despite their widespread adoption, there is a need to ensure that these viewers adhere to accessibility standards, making them usable by individuals with diverse abilities. By addressing accessibility concerns, we not only adhere to ethical principles but also unlock the full potential of these viewers for a broader audience.
Scrolling Along the Eastern Silk Roads: IIIF adapted to ancient scroll-format manuscripts
In the early 20th century, Cave 17 in China’s Dunhuang Mogao Caves was unsealed, revealing thousands of manuscripts, documents, paintings and more that had lain undisturbed since their 11th century concealment. These artefacts, which have now become critical for understanding life along the Silk Roads in ancient Asia, were dispersed across institutions worldwide by early 1900s explorers.
In the 90s, the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) was formed to unite international partners in the pursuit of conserving, cataloguing, and digitising Eastern Silk Road collections – including the Dunhuang finds. The Programme also makes images and metadata accessible through the IDP database and website https://idp.bl.uk. Thirty years later, the British Library contracted cultural sector digital specialists Surface Impression to update the IDP website in order to greatly enhance access to these collections worldwide.
IIIF was key to the new development, given its flexible presentation frameworks and its ability to dynamically handle dispersed items. But this project came with its own challenges! There are many uniquely formatted items in the collections, including the 5 metre (16.5’) wide Diamond Sutra scroll (a 200:1 aspect ratio), which required custom presentation solutions.
This presentation explores creative and technical strategies for diverse materials within IIIF. It will examine how the IIIF community can innovate display methods while maintaining interoperability. It will be wide ranging and exploratory - including design, tech, viewers, curatorship and managing a complex digital project in the current technological landscape.
Creating a better balance: respectful reuse and AI/ML Tags in IIIF Manifests
We are living through yet another transformative era when the fundamental drivers of Internet content creation, curation, and reuse are shifting as massive AI and ML applications reform our shared digital landscape. In response to these shifting sands, we need to rethink the ways we can best provide quality research and reuse interactions for our richly described content shared through IIIF APIs and related Manifests. The unregulated consumption of data and resources by AI-powered bots and harvesters is increasingly more tenuous and challenges our well established ideas of what openness means. We propose the implementation of standardized “no-AI'' or “regulated AI” tags in IIIF Manifests that could be applied in repository environments across the globe. Similar to the initiatives crafted by other creative content communities to limit the scraping of images and text using “noai” and “noimageai” meta HTML tags, we propose that the IIIF Community considers implementing a set of tags within the standard IIIF API frameworks to help better regulate AI/ML content scraping and non-consented or attributed use of IIIF powered content in AI/ML applications. We strongly believe in the value of creating consensus and shared practices in our own community for combating this significant challenge.
Possibilities and anxieties in IIIF-powered georeferencing of map collections
Georeferencing, or the ability to match scanned images of maps to their real-world geographies, has become an increasingly desirable workflow at map-holding institutions. The Allmaps software ecosystem uses WebGL and IIIF to warp maps on the client side of a web browser, reducing many of the barriers to georeferencing that are inherent to traditional desktop georeferencing (e.g., ArcGIS, QGIS). While Allmaps represents a next-generation tool for georeferencing, it is not a panacea. In this presentation, we reflect on frictions that we’ve encountered when discussing Allmaps as a georeferencing solution with other map-holding institutions, including its possibilities and the anxieties it raises for prospective users. We begin with a brief overview of the Allmaps software ecosystem, drawing concrete examples from the LMEC case to highlight possibilities for using Allmaps with digital map collections. Then, we highlight three anxieties that are commonly encountered when proposing Allmaps as a georeferencing solution at other institutions. By way of conclusion, we sketch out a governance structure for Allmaps - and potentially for other software projects that use IIIF - that might ease some of these anxieties for prospective users.
IIIF and 3D workshop
During this session, IIIF 3D TSG (Technical Specification Group) members will provide a detailed introduction to current proposed changes to the IIIF Presentation API specification that will enable robust presentation and display of 3D resources using IIIF concepts and tools. Practical demos will also be presented, including draft examples of IIIF Presentation documents encoding 3D resources and demos of viewers that support these documents to display 3D web content. Time will also be given for open discussion of proposed specification drafts, practical demos. The TSG is also eager to hear audience use cases that involve more advanced 3D implementations, especially those involving annotation, interaction, and/or animation, that are not currently supported by proposed specification drafts.
IIIF & end-users: increasing uptake and creating ambassadors
This session aims to offer tangible strategies and insights to increase the uptake of IIIF by end-users. For the most part, the available tutorials and training sessions focus on aspects (e.g., APIs or annotations) that require technical skills. The guides and tutorials for beginners on the Consortium’s website or GitHub are useful, but are also advanced in a sense that it takes a level of awareness about IIIF to visit a website dedicated to IIIF. So how can we reach the large masses of potential IIIF end-users. How can we promote the full potential of IIIF-compliant data? How can we create ambassadors within our institutions, regions and sectors?
The session will discuss the strategy of train-the-trainer workshops for end-users. The session will zoom in on one workshop in particular: the workshop that was developed for the Mmmonk project and that has been running since June 2022. It was designed by curators and data experts to stimulate the uptake of IIIF by end-users (i.e. create IIIF adopters), and to generate support and advocacy for IIIF (i.e. create IIIF ambassadors). The workshop is based on three principles to increase its effectiveness and appeal: teach only simple applications that require no technical skills, avoid technical jargon, and use relatable and inspiring examples and everyday scenarios. This approach puts into practice the recommendations by the D4H WG and the insights from the 2021 UX interviews on IIIF by Amy Deschenes et al.
Over the course of more than 15 workshops reaching over 300 participants, the workshop has evolved since its inception in 2022. We continuously integrated valuable feedback from participants, as well as relevant technical updates and innovations. Initially, the target audience were potential end-users in general, but in 2023 we decided to focus on staff working at GLAMs, academic institutions and industry associations due to the growing awareness that, even within institutions that have implemented IIIF, most collection managers, educators, communicators, photographers, administrators and even developers are not aware or only partially aware of what IIIF is and what the potential is for re-use of their digital images. Because this group could take up a key role as IIIF ambassadors, the workshop has been adapted with scenarios and examples tailored to their specific roles, while still avoiding any technical language or skills.
The session (2hrs) will consist of a train-the-trainer workshop (circa 60 minutes), followed by an open discussion based on insights gained from the Mmmonk workshop and other workshops (e.g., UK Research Libraries, BnF). To kick off the discussion and provide input for the further advancement of IIIF training and IIIF design, we will present the results of a quantitative survey on IIIF uptake conducted among the Mmmonk workshop participants.
Nastasia Vanderperren is IIIF expert at Meemoo, a non-profit organization that supports the digital archive operations of Flemish cultural, media and government organizations. Evelien Hauwaerts is medieval manuscripts curator at Bruges Public Library. They are both core members of the IIIF Network Association Flanders & Netherlands.
Connecting IIIF and Semantic Cultural Heritage Metadata for Discovery
Many of the core use cases of IIIF have been expressed not in terms of images and their presentation, but in terms of the digitized cultural heritage items. It has long been desirable to discover resources digitally available via IIIF by searching the properties and relationships of the real world objects, such as by creator, subject, classification or date. This Birds of a Feather session will discuss how organizations are using the Linked Art specification in conjunction with IIIF to obtain significant benefits through the joint adoption of these highly usable standards.
Linked Art has been designed and implemented over the past 5 years learning from and intentionally following the community best practices and design principles that IIIF has demonstrated to be so effective. It uses an existing, standard conceptual model and encodes knowledge using shared patterns in JSON-LD, made available via an easy to publish and consume web API. It has been adopted internationally by cultural heritage research and collecting institutions. We shall also discuss implementation experience and tools, and how to ensure the continued and rich connection between these overlapping communities and specifications.
Links:
* https://linked.art/
* https://lux.collections.yale.edu/
* https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/
* https://vangoghworldwide.org/
Where next with IIIF Collections?
A IIIF “collection” is a group of manifests (including other collections), and the idea has been present since version 2.0 of the Presentation API.
However, it feels like the uptake of modelling data in this way has been slow to take off, arguably because there are very few systems that can reliably and usefully process this kind of grouped, hierarchical information.
In this Birds of a Feather session I would like to make contact with other people who have considered IIIF collections to model their data, but have been put off by a lack of capable systems to display that information. We will discuss what the potential use cases are for using IIIF collections, followed by collectively forming a proposal for how they could be better represented by the standard viewers or alternative online systems.
Fish-of-a-School: IIIF for Educators
Crows have murder and geese their gaggle. Birds of a feather, in other words, have their flocks, while educators and fish of a scale school separately. The newly-formed IIIF Community Group for Education seeks more of its kind and welcomes others to explore yet unmapped seas below the surface of IIIF’s global purview, for there be dragons. A weekly working group has caught the odd fish or two, and we are casting our net more widely: for seasoned IIIF toolmakers, collectors, and standard-bearers who’d like to scale up to a bigger market; and IIIF-ish educators, instructional designers, and academic technologists at the farthest reaches of the GLAM sector.
The IIIF Community Group for Education represents educators, educational institutions, and cultural heritage institutions with educational functions as a group with coherent interests to be addressed in outreach and in the development of IIIF standards and related technologies. The group, with members from across the community and around the world, focuses on the creative and productive uses of IIIF resources and IIIF-enabled tools for teaching and learning. The group seeks to address the needs of educators, potentially one of the largest and most engaged audience for IIIF content, and recognizes the potential positive impact of IIIF-enabled resources and tools for experiential and active learning. Leveraging capacities of the broader IIIF community, the IIIF Community Group works to inspire the development of new tools that reflect the needs of educators and to serve as a focal point for knowledge-sharing among educators interested in using IIIF as part of coursework. The group welcomes instructors, academic technologists, and anyone else involved with the integration of IIIF tools and resources within the context of education or educational outreach.
Areas of focus include:
- Familiarity with IIIF as a matter of information literacy
- Curriculum and lesson plan sharing highlighting the many ways that IIIF tools and resources can be used as part of creative course assignments
- Document and develop IIIF-based instructional tools for teaching and learning, such as tools for the creation of “teaching collections”, additional tools for annotation and writing, and tools for digital exhibit creation.
- Identifying gaps and institutional needs, including IT infrastructure, instructional and academic technology support, in a wide spectrum of institution types.
This “fish-of-a-school” session will provide an overview of the group's current work, goals for the future, and serve as a space of networking for educators and education-related professionals, as well as a session of brainstorming to determine the immediate needs of educators. Participation in this session or in the related Community Group does not presuppose any technical skills or proficiencies. All are welcome.
A/V Annotation Birds of a Feather Meeting
IIIF has allowed annotation of images for years, but with the addition of audio-visual support with version 3.0, a world of new possibilities opens up. However, A/V annotations go well beyond a textual body targeting a region of a painting -- established usages such as captioning, subtitling, and speaker diarization come into contact with scholarly annotation for film studies or oral history. In addition, the WebAnnotation technical specification must interoperate with established standards like WebVTT or OHMS.
This meeting will discuss the range of annotation practices for A/V and connect practitioners as they navigate implementing them in IIIF.