IIIF Community Newsletter, Volume 3 Issue 3

  Julien A. Raemy    |      October 02, 2019

Community Snapshot

Announcements and Actions

IIIF is currently looking for a Community and Event Coordinator

There is now a job listing posted for a Community and Event Coordinator to join Josh Hadro, Managing Director, and Glen Robson, Technical Coordinator, on the IIIF Consortium staff. For all questions regarding the position, please contact admin@iiif.io. Please help us spread the word!

Videos from the 2019 IIIF Conference

Some of the recorded sessions of the Göttingen Conference from Monday 24 June (Showcase) and Wednesday 26 June (plenary session) are still being uploaded to the IIIF YouTube channel. We would like to thank our local partners at the Göttingen State and University Library who helped arrange some great A/V recording and editing services.

2019 IIIF Working Meeting in Ann Arbor, MI, USA

The IIIF Showcase and Working Meeting in Ann Arbor, which is hosted jointly by the University of Michigan Library and ITHAKA will take place from November 4 to 7, 2019.

Here are the links to register for this exciting and free event:

2020 Annual IIIF Conference in Boston, MA, USA

The 2020 IIIF Conference will be held in Boston, MA, USA, June 1-4, 2020. This event will be hosted by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Please mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details!

Organising 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 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 https://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.

Below are only the updates obtained by the respective co-chairs of the 3D, Museums and Outreach Groups. To follow the latest developments of the other groups, have a look at their dedicated channels on Slack and through their monthly or quarterly calls.

3D Community Group

A summary of the IIIF 3D Community Group’s activities since the last newsletter:

  • Handover of Group Chair from Stuart Snydman underway, including a refresh of group goals and monthly meeting focus.
  • A successful and thought provoking 3D breakout session at the 2019 IIIF Conference in Göttingen.
  • Continuing demonstrations of existing 3D viewers and their updates from Universal viewer, Smithsonian Voyager 3D, Sketchfab, X3dom and Xcite (X3D).
  • Publication and review of Sketchfab Cultural Heritage survey results.
  • Actively moving to link up with existing ‘3D for cultural heritage’ initiatives including Europeana’s 3D task force.

Museums Community Group

The Museums Community Group’s recent calls have had a focus on DAMS. Many institutions are looking to implement a DAMS and are wondering how IIIF fits into this, while at the same time many DAMS providers are interested in IIIF and asking for use cases to inform IIIF integration into their software. September’s call featured a demo by Dylan Freking from NetX. Dylan talked in detail about their manifest generation feature in addition to future features on the docket like creating manifests for a collection of images. Stay tuned for news about more guests from the DAMS community joining our calls.

David Newbury (J. Paul Getty Trust), Emmanuelle Delma-Glass (Yale Center for British Art), and Thomas R. Raich (Yale University Art Gallery) will be presenting IIIF: Collaboration and Community Built Technological Innovations at MCN in San Diego, CA in November. Also in November, Tina Shah will feature museums and their use of IIIF during the Showcase in Ann Arbor, MI.

Outreach Community Group

After a Summer break, the IIIF Outreach Community Group met in September to review the Awesome IIIF list and merge a couple of pull requests. Please continue to submit pull requests at https://github.com/IIIF/awesome-iiif as the Outreach Group will be regularly reviewing them from now on.

Julien A. Raemy has stepped down as one of the Co-Chairs of the Group. We wish to pass on our huge thanks to him for all of his work and commitment to the group as one of the founding Co-Chairs. Julien has been instrumental in keeping the newsletter and translations work continuing for the community. If anyone would like to find out more about the Outreach Group’s work please contact Claire Knowles at c.knowles1@leeds.ac.uk or via the Outreach channel on Slack.

Implementations, Adoption, Innovations and Ongoing Work Across the IIIF Community

First digital library in Serbia that has implemented IIIF

The Heritage Digital Collection in “Milutin Bojic” Library is the first digital collection in Serbia which uses IIIF for delivering digital objects through Mirador. Thanks to developers of ResCarta Toolkit, they have now have integrated a IIIF-compatible viewer and a shareable IIIF Manifest. The heritage digital collection is based on ResCarta and can be seen on https://zavicajna.digitalna.rs. There are currently 2000 objects, most of them local newspapers.

Harvard Digital Collections

Harvard Library has released Harvard Digital Collections, a new Blacklight-based, dedicated search and discovery interface that makes over 6M digital objects, including images, text, and media, freely available to the public with a goal of sparking curiosity, creativity, and experimentation. You will find explicit IIIF call outs in the “Tools and Related Links” box on the individual item detail pages. Feedback welcome and encouraged! They will be working in early 2020 on v2 of the platform, so keep your eyes open for new enhancements including raw-text download, crowdsourcing metadata enhancements, and creating sets of material for transformation, analysis, and reuse.

Europeana Media on the road

Europeana Media is a collaborative project in which 6 partners work on bringing IIIF/AV-based universal playout to the common cultural platform https://www.europeana.eu/, building on the experience of audiovisual networks such as EUscreen, the European Film Gateway and Europeana Sounds. This fall, the project will take part in a variety of workshops and panels at the IASA/JTS conference in Hilversum (NL), the FIAT/IFTA conference in Dubrovnik (HR) and the AMIA conference in Baltimore (USA).

Prince Albert: His Life and Legacy

Royal Collection Trust has launched a new website ‘Prince Albert: His Life and Legacy’, comprising more than 17,500 photographs, prints and private and official papers relating to Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria. The majority are publicly available for the first time and shed fresh light on Albert’s contribution as Queen Victoria’s unofficial Private Secretary, a guide and mentor to some of the greatest national projects of his day, university chancellor, art historian, collector, and patron of art, architecture and design. It gives new insight into Albert’s achievements before his premature death at the age of 42, his impact on Victorian society and his influence on our world today.

As a first for the Royal Collection, the site presents uses Universal Viewer to present IIIF manifests, delivered via the Resourcespace DAM. The viewer addresses several long standing issues with the presentation of Collection objects on the main Royal Collection site and they have integrated the tool into their presentation there for gradual roll out as well.

Crowdsourcing campaigns with the Goobi viewer

The Goobi viewer is a Java based open source software to present digital collections online. It is used already in more than 50 institutions. You can ingest any XML based format like for example METS/MODS, LIDO, EAD or TEI. IIIF manifests are automatically generated and you need no further configuration.

The Goobi community has developed a campaign extension that allows generic crowdsourcing campaigns to be curated with the Goobi viewer content. In the beginning you define a set of records/objects for a campaign. The questions to be answered in the crowdsourcing campaign are formulated afterwards. The answers can relate to the entire record/object, a single image or an image area. Campaigns can optionally be limited in time; non-public campaigns that are only accessible to a certain group of users can also be configured. All successfully answered and reviewed responses are automatically added to the IIIF manifests as web annotations.

The Goobi viewer is available for free on Github at https://github.com/intranda. An updated “Goobi to go” target to try out for yourself as well as a further release notes with screenshots will be available in the coming days in the monthly Goobi viewer Digest and the Community Forum.

OpenLayers 6.0 with IIIF support has been released

OpenLayers 6.0 has finally been released. It’s the first OpenLayers version to support IIIF Image API services. It supports Image API versions 1.1 and 2.1 as well as 3.0 beta.

Edited by:

  • Julien A. Raemy (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève)

With contributions from:

  • Andrew Davis (Royal Collection Trust)
  • Claire DeMarco (Harvard Library)
  • Thomas Flynn (Sketchfab)
  • Josh Hadro (IIIF-C)
  • Lutz Helm (Leipzig University Library)
  • Claire Knowles (University of Leeds)
  • Julien A. Raemy (HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève)
  • Andrija Sagic (Head of Digital Development Department in “Milutin Bojic” Library, Belgrade, Serbia)
  • Tina Shah (Art Institute of Chicago)
  • Erwin Verbruggen (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
  • Jan Vonde (intranda GmbH)