Community Snapshot
- IIIF-Discuss = 772 members
- IIIF Slack = 573 members
- IIIF images online = 350+ million
- IIIF Consortium = 47 founding institutions. Welcome to OCLC, our latest institutional member. The IIIF Consortium (IIIF-C) continues to welcome founding members through December 2017 (please email admin@iiif.io or see the IIIF-C FAQ for more information).
Announcements and Actions
Farewell and Thank You
As of November 17, Sheila Rabun will be stepping away from her position as the IIIF Community and Communications Officer. A search is underway to fill the position. In the meantime, please direct any emails to admin@iiif.io.
Save the Date - 2018 IIIF Conference
The 2018 IIIF Conference will be held in Washington, DC, May 21-25, 2018, co-hosted by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Please mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details!
IIIF Consulting: American Art Collaborative
A recent consulting collaboration with Sara Brumfield and Ben Brumfield of Brumfield Labs, and Jason Ronallo, head of Digital Library Initiatives at NCSU Libraries, to provide IIIF technical consulting for eight institutions from the American Art Collaborative (AAC), has yielded improved documentation for technical implementers, as well as a framework for continued implementation consulting for future prospective adopters. Read more.
JPEG2000 & OpenJPEG Survey
The first phase of work to improve OpenJPEG, an open source JPEG2000 codec, has drawn to a close, resulting in the latest release of OpenJPEG, version 2.3.0. Please see the call for feedback on the latest release, and complete the JPEG2000 & OpenJPEG survey.
IIIF Code of Conduct Team
Thank you to the 2017-2018 IIIF Code of Conduct Team volunteers:
- Glen Robson (IIIF Technical Coordinator)
- Ruth Bowler (The Walters Art Museum)
- Karen Estlund (Pennsylvania State University)
- Yong Liu (Hebei Academy of Social Sciences)
- Katherine Lynch (University of Pennsylvania)
- Sarah Lorenzon Ferreira (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
- Julien A. Raemy (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève)
- Jack Reed (Stanford University Libraries)
- Emma Stanford (Bodleian Libraries)
Newsletter Submissions
The IIIF Community Newsletter 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.
IIIF Software Developers Survey
Are you a software developer working with IIIF, or preparing to work with IIIF? Please complete the IIIF Software Developers Survey to help the IIIF Software Developers Community Group improve documentation and prioritize topics for discussion.
Potential for IIIF 3D Community Group
Discussions about 3D and IIIF have continued across multiple venues over the last several months. If you are working with 3D and/or are interested in participating in such as group, please complete the IIIF 3D Community Group Expression of Interest.
IIIF Adopters Survey
Are you researching, experimenting with, or fully supporting IIIF at your institution? Please help us scope the IIIF Universe and levels of adoption across the community by completing our 5 minute “Basic IIIF Adopters Survey”.
Community Events and Outreach
IIIF Translations
In an effort to reach a broader and more international audience, IIIF community volunteers have been working on translating information about IIIF, such as the IIIF Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Over the past few months, the general IIIF FAQ has been translated into Spanish by Pedro Urra, Professor at Havana University, with the help of some team members of the Cuban National Library. In addition, both the general FAQ and the IIIF Consortium FAQ have also been translated into French by Régis Robineau, Biblissima Portal Coordinator, and Julien A. Raemy, Research Assistant at the HES-SO University of Applied Sciences in Geneva. The translations are still work in progress and their authors are seeking help from the community to review them.
Europeana IIIF Task Force Report
The EuropeanaTech community IIIF Task Force has worked to better determine how Europeana and the Europeana Network as a whole should be involved with the IIIF community, and what kind of IIIF-related developments should be undertaken. After a final round of review, the task force has released their final report and recommendations at https://pro.europeana.eu/project/preparing-europeana-for-iiif-involvement
IIIF Showcase and Workshop at the V&A in London, November 2017
The Victoria & Albert Museum hosted a successful IIIF Showcase and Workshop on November 2, 2017, with over 90 participants. See summary of events.
IIIF Tour of Japan, October 2017
A series of IIIF events in Japan the week of October 16-20, 2017 provided forums for sharing and learning about IIIF and related activities at multiple Japanese cultural heritage institutions in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Fukuoka. Read more.
IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto, October 2017
The IIIF community convened in person at the University of Toronto for the annual IIIF Working Meeting. Participants made progress on technical specifications, documentation and training, and community roadmapping - see notes and slides, as well as a summary from the meeting.
IIIF Workshop at the National Library of Poland, September 2017
An Innovative Libraries workshop, part of the Digital Cultures Conference organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, featured speakers from across the IIIF community. See the Conference website.
IIIF New England meet-up at Harvard, September 2017
The IIIF team at Harvard hosted a regional IIIF meet-up on Friday, September 29 to connect with other institutions who have adopted or are adopting IIIF, to share interests, and to look for areas of potential collaboration. See notes from the event.
IIIF Presence at Conferences and Meetings
Active community participants are encouraged to represent IIIF at conferences, workshops and events around the world. Those planning to present on IIIF at a conference or meeting, please fill out the “IIIF Representation at Conferences and Meetings” Survey. Recent and upcoming IIIF appearances include:
- IIIF and Mirador workshop at XXe Colloque international de paléographie latine at the Yale Beinecke Library, September 2017
- International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, September 2017
- IIIF Panel at CIDOC, Tbilisi Georgia, September 2017
- 4Science IIIF training session in Italy, September 2017
- Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum, October 2017
- BIREDIAL-ISTEC International Conference, October 2017
- HEAnet National Conference, November 2017
- Museum Computer Group (MCG) Conference, November 2017
- Museum Computer Network (MCN) Conference, November 2017
- BELSPO-funded INSIGHT project (Intelligent Neural Systems as Integrated Heritage Tools) launch event, November 2017
- DAM LA, November 2017
- Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), December 2017
Technical Work
Transition from HTTP to HTTPS
Several institutions in the IIIF community, including University of Heidelberg, Oxford Digital Bodleian, Harvard Art Museums, the University of Edinburgh, and the Vatican Library, among others, have switched from HTTP to HTTPS for their IIIF collections. Read the compelling case for serving your IIIF content over HTTPS by Jack Reed (Stanford).
IIIF Presentation 3.0 and A/V Technical Specification
As part of the ongoing “Save Our Sounds” project at the British Library, with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, representatives from the IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group and IIIF Editors met in late September at the Getty Center in Los Angeles to review proof of concept work on A/V implementations, discuss open issues related to the Presentation 3.0 spec, and prepare for the IIIF Working Meeting. The IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group then met in October at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto to ratify several issues for moving forward - see notes from the meeting. Version 3.0 of the IIIF Presentation API will incorporate support for A/V interoperability.
Discovery of IIIF Resources
The IIIF Discovery Technical Specification Group met in October at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto and decided to pursue Activity Streams as the best prospective approach for crawling and harvesting IIIF manifests - see notes from the meeting.
IIIF Text Granularity Technical Specification Group
The IIIF Text Granularity Technical Specification Group, chaired by Peter Binkley (University of Alberta) and Michael Appleby (Yale Center for British Art) met in person at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto. The group considered various levels of granularity and the difficulties of applying them to manuscript material or to some non-Western languages. The discussion has moved tentatively in the direction of considering text granularity as a specific example of the general problem of providing information about annotation lists so that users can decide what to do with them. There was also a call for additional use cases from the community; please feel free to submit additional text granularity use cases via Github or raise them for discussion on the biweekly call.
Specifications Timeline
The following is the sequence and anticipated timeline for IIIF technical specifications agreed at the Toronto Working Meeting. Progress toward new specifications is contingent upon available community input, review, and the development of implementations demonstrating new features per the Community Process.
- Presentation API 3.0 and Image API 3.0 – Significant changes in the Presentation API to support A/V and also to change from Open Annotation to the now-standardized W3C Web Annotation model. The Image API will be updated at the same time because of parallel changes.
- Feature freeze end-2017
- Draft specifications May 2018 (in time for discussion at DC meeting)
- Ratify and release Fall 2018
- Community effort to create cookbook recipes and migration documentation
- Search API 2.0
- Updates required to match Presentation API 3.0, especially related to the change from Open Annotation to the W3C Web Annotation model.
- Start work after release of Presentation API 3.0 with anticipated release in 2019
- Auth API 1.1
- Update with non-breaking improvements in 2019
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 </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.
Manuscripts Community Group
Continuing with discussions from the recent in-person meeting in Toronto, the IIIF Manuscripts Community Group has been working to identify best practices for manuscript metadata fields in order to provide a consistent user experience for manuscripts researchers.
Museums Community Group
The IIIF Museums Community Group continues to share IIIF use cases, new implementations have been released at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Clyfford Still Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum recently hosted a IIIF event in conjunction with the Museum Computer Group (MCG) conference in the UK, and the Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference in the US featured many IIIF-related activities and discussion.
Newspapers Community Group
The IIIF Newspapers Community Group is now meeting once a quarter and focusing on demos and answering questions for implementers. The IIIF newspaper guide is near final stages and will be online soon. (A draft is available on github.) Stay tuned to the IIIF Discuss email list for call scheduling announcements and drafts. If you’re willing to give a demo, please suggest on the #newspaper slack channel or ping Karen Estlund or Glen Robson.
Software Developers Community Group
The IIIF Software Developers Community Group has created a IIIF tag in StackOverflow and encourages questions in that forum to spread knowledge about IIIF. The group is still conducting a survey to gauge the current interests and status of the IIIF developer community.
Implementations and Adoption
Feature: IIIF Content and Technology at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) aka BSB
BSB CONTENT:
- BSB IIIF Bookshelf
- NEW: Most famous German encyclopedia of the 18th century, Zedler‘s “Universal-Lexicon“, and some 50 other contemporary dictionaries
- List of other IIIF-providers around the world
- Introduction to IIIF and Mirador (with videos)
BSB TECHNOLOGY:
- Mirador-Plugins, in action in the BSB IIIF Bookshelf:
- NEW: Plugin “PiwikTracking” for statistically tracking of Mirador events (e.g. page turning of book pages in Mirador)
- NEW: Plugin “ImageCropper”: Adds an overlay to the canvas for retrieving and customizing the image url for the selected area.
- NEW: Plugin “Link to the current canvas”: Adds an extra button to every window that displays a link to the currently shown canvas
- Hymir IIIF Server: Migration from WAR + Tomcat setup to single file application execution (Spring Boot)
- Java domain models for IIIF APIs: Contains model classes for all currently available IIIF API entities, namely for the Presentation, Image, Content Search and Authentication APIs, as well as the additional services defined in the Service Annex (GeoJSON, Physical Dimensions)
New Releases
- The British Library’s Endangered Archives Program (EAP), funded by Arcadia Fund has released 6 million images via IIIF Image API with Presentation manifests displayed via Universal Viewer. See Cogapp case study for more details.
- The Clyfford Still Museum has implemented the IIIF Image API using Cogapp’s “slow looking” functionality for their online art collections - view demo, see blog post, and read the case study from Cogapp that explains the underlying technology (Luna).
- TIFY viewer, see demo
- Art Institute of Chicago went live with support for the IIIF Image API v. 2.0, using the Cantaloupe image server, JP2 access files, and a custom content shim which fetches and caches the JP2 from Fedora, if not already on local disk, and provides the local JP2’s location to Cantaloupe for serving.
- OCLC’s CONTENTdm latest release supports IIIF Image and IIIF Presentation.
- Rosetta (ExLibris) support for IIIF
- National Gallery of Art is now dynamically generating images using IIIF and IIPImage server, see example, and has also released a IIIF compare tool, see example
- Kyoto University Library Network released Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive (test version) using IIIF. For more details, please see the news release.
- A brand new Biblissima demo showcasing an experiment around Mirador and IIIF annotations: “The Ovid’s Metamorphoses in images: gods, crimes and loves with IIIF” (in French)
- Beyond Words: Illuminating Manuscripts in Boston Collections multi-institutional collaboration using annotated IIIF manifests and Mirador (see example)
Innovations & Ongoing Work from Across the IIIF Community
- Demo from Yale Center for British Art showing conservation images overlaid on a single canvas/view in Mirador
- LDN with IIIF data sharing draft specification
- Rerum Inbox for Linked Data Notifications
- Mirador Linked Data Notifications (LDN) demo
- Leaflet annotation example
- UCD video on how to use Mirador
- STEM applications of IIIF
- IIIF A/V proof of concept demo video
Recommended Reading
- “Storytelling with IIIF” materials from Cogapp:
- Blog post with embedded videos
- Screen recording of an abridged version of the talk that I gave during a community call
- PDF of the presentation
- Site with some interactive demos
- Intro to IIIF workshop materials from EdUi 2017, by Shaun Ellis
- Presentation on Discovery work at Europeana with IIIF: “Metadata Aggregation: Assessing the Application of IIIF and Sitemaps within Cultural Heritage” by Nuno Freire, Glen Robson, John B. Howard, Hugo Manguinhas, Antoine Isaac.
- Article about Mirador by Kiyonori Nagasaki
- Zegami blog post that goes into some detail on how we use pre-trained machine learning models for feature extraction, see code.
Edited by:
Sheila Rabun, IIIF Community and Communications Officer
With contributions from:
- Benjamin Albritton (Stanford)
- Michael Appleby (Yale Center for British Art)
- David Beaudet (National Gallery of Art)
- Peter Binkley (University of Alberta)
- Andrea Bolini (4Science)
- Ben Brumfield (Brumfield Labs)
- Sara Brumfield (Brumfield Labs)
- Tom Cramer (Stanford)
- Tom Crane (Digirati)
- Peter Clarke (University College Dublin)
- Patrick Cuba (Saint Louis University)
- Lisa Fagin Davis (Medieval Academy of America)
- Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass (Yale Center for British Art)
- Kevin Ford (Art Institute of Chicago)
- Nuno Freire (Europeana)
- Shane Huddleston (OCLC)
- Andy Irving (The British Library)
- Antoine Isaac (Europeana)
- Opher Kutner (ExLibris)
- Sebastian Mangold (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB))
- M.A. Matienzo (Stanford University)
- Kiyonori Nagasaki (University of Tokyo)
- Roger Noble (Zegami)
- Richard Palmer (Victoria & Albert Museum)
- Julien A. Raemy (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève)
- Jack Reed (Stanford University)
- Régis Robineau (Biblissima)
- Glen Robson (IIIF)
- Tristan Roddis (Cogapp)
- Jason Ronallo (NCSU)
- Emma Stanford (Oxford Digital Bodleian)
- Randy Stern (Harvard University)
- Jeffrey Steward (Harvard Art Museums)
- Tatsuji Tomioka (Kyoto University Library Network)
- Dieter Van Hassel (Royal Museum for Central Africa)
- Simeon Warner (Cornell University)
- Jeffrey Witt (Loyola University Maryland)
- Sonia Wronkowska (National Library of Poland)
- Roxanne Wyns (KULeuven)