IIIF in Japan

  Sheila Rabun and Asanobu Kitamoto    |      August 21, 2017

A IIIF event in Tokyo, Japan at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) drew over 120 people from across the region on July 27, 2017, to learn about the basics of IIIF, examples of successful cases of IIIF adoption, available software, challenges, and expectations, and discuss potential for increased IIIF adoption in Japan. Organized by the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH) with support from the Japan Society for Digital Archive, the goal of the gathering was to share experiences from the 2017 IIIF Conference in the Vatican with Japanese colleagues, and to urge relevant organizations in Japan to get involved in IIIF activities. The University of Tokyo and the Kyoto University Library Network are founding members of the IIIF Consortium, and there is potential for increased adoption of IIIF across the country.

Speakers at the July event included active IIIF community participants such as Akihiko Takano and Asanobu Kitamoto of the National Institute of Informatics, Kiyonori Nagasaki of the University of Tokyo, semantic web expert Masahide Kanzaki, and Hiroshi Sugino of NTT Data. Interests and current activities were also presented from Kyoto University Library (Chifumi Nishioka), Keio University Library (Shin Irie), National Diet Library (Tomoko Okuda), Tokyo National Museum (Ryoji Murata), and National Institute of Japanese Literature (Kuninori Matsuda). Detailed information about the event schedule, presentations, and links to slides can be found online in both Japanese and English.

This gathering has laid the foundation for a series of IIIF events in Tokyo and Kyoto during the week of October 16, 2017, with details to be announced on the IIIF-Discuss email list.