IIIF Community Newsletter, Volume 1 Issue 4

  Sheila Rabun    |      August 30, 2017

Community Snapshot

Announcements and Actions

IIIF Technology Coordinator Hired

Glen Robson has been appointed the new Technology Coordinator for the IIIF community; he will start in this new role in September, 2017. In this role, Glen will serve as a dedicated expert helping to provision and maintain IIIF’s technical infrastructure and tools (such as the IIIF.io website, and API validators). He will help identify and address IIIF-related technological issues and opportunities as they arise, and act as a general resource to the community to facilitate adoption, new integrations, and other advances. A special part of Glen’s role will be helping new players (IIIF-C members, other institutions, software providers) to become IIIF-compatible. See full announcement.

Save the Date - 2018 IIIF Conference

The 2018 IIIF Conference will be held in Washington, DC, May 21-25, 2018. Please mark your calendar and stay tuned for more details!

Call for Volunteers: IIIF Code of Conduct Team

The IIIF Code of Conduct has been revised to include a description of community norms and expectations in addition to anti-harassment and reporting guidelines. Volunteers are needed to be part of the IIIF Code of Conduct. To volunteer to be part of the team, please complete the volunteer form before Monday, September 4. Volunteers will be notified of their status by Friday, September 8.

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.

Survey: Gauging Interest in Potential 3D Community Group

Based on recent discussions at the IIIF Conference in the Vatican, a survey is now underway to gauge community-wide interest in forming a IIIF 3D Community Group. If you are working with 3D and/or are interested in participating in such a group, please complete the [IIIF 3D Community Group Expression of Interest][3d-survey] survey.

IIIF and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine)

As interest in IIIF grows into the STEM community, interested parties are looking to organize a call to scope the current and prospective use cases for STEM and IIIF. If you are interested in joining the call, please complete the call planning poll (now closed).

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”. Many thanks to the 73 institutions who have completed the survey so far. Survey results indicate that there are currently over 345 million images on the web that comply with one or more IIIF APIs. This number is growing on a daily basis as many institutions are continuously adding additional IIIF images to their digital repositories. The IIIF Community List has been updated, and there are over 100 institutions participating in the IIIF community.

Upcoming Community Events and Outreach

IIIF Events in Toronto, October 2017

The IIIF community will convene in person for two events at the University of Toronto this fall. Attendance for both events is free, but capacity is limited, so registration is required to ensure that we do not exceed the venue capacity:

IIIF Meet-up at Harvard, September 2017

The IIIF team at Harvard is planning a regional IIIF meet-up on Friday, September 29, from 9:00am-1:00pm, to connect with other institutions who have adopted or are adopting IIIF, to share interests, and to look for areas of potential collaboration. For more details or to RSVP, please contact Randy Stern at randy_stern@harvard.edu.

IIIF Showcase and Workshop at the V&A in London, November 2017

The Victoria & Albert Museum is hosting two IIIF events on Thursday, November 2, 2017: a morning Showcase geared toward individuals and institutional representatives interested in learning about the basics and benefits of IIIF, and an afternoon technical workshop for sharing among developers already working with IIIF. For more info and to register, see details.

Recent Community Events and Outreach

IIIF Bay Area Museums Meet-up, July 2017

On July 18, 47 attendees from 22 institutions in the San Francisco Bay area convened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to share and discuss current usage and increased adoption of IIIF. See more details.

IIIF in Japan, July 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. Read more.

2017 IIIF Conference, June 2017

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference in The Vatican, June 5-9, was a success! Presentation slides and session notes can be found in the IIIF Google Drive. Overall, there were:

  • 275 participants across the IIIF Showcase and Conference events
  • 216 Conference participants from 130 different institutions/organizations in 18 countries
  • 57 parallel sessions (presentations, workshops, discussions, and lightning talks)
  • 20 plenary lightning talks
  • 25 demo stations

Many thanks again to our 2017 IIIF Conference sponsors:

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:

  • National meeting of Directors of Public Libraries in Cuba, May 2017
  • Music Encoding Conference, May 2017
  • Archiving Conference, May 2017
  • Early Modern Manuscripts Online: New Directions in Teaching and Research at the Folger, May 2017
  • NISO Virtual Conference: Images: Digitization & Preservation of Special Collections in Libraries, Museums and Archives, June 2017
  • Workshop zur Interoperabilität von digitalen Objekten und Metadaten (Workshop about interoperability of digital objects and metadata), hosted by the University of Basel, June 2017
  • Open Repositories, June 2017
  • Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2017
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 2017
  • Digipalooza, August 2017
  • International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (IIIF for medievalists workshop), July 2017
  • Science Coding Conference (Intro to IIIF), August 2017
  • DH Montreal Pre-Conference: Shaping Humanities Data, August 2017
  • Catholic Biblical Association Annual Meeting, August 2017
  • Introduction to IIIF Workshop at EdUI, September 2017
  • Comité international de paléographie latine (IIIF for medievalists workshop), September 2017
  • Digital Cultures Conference, Warsaw, September 2017
  • IIIF panel at CIDOC, September 2017

Technical Work

IIIF Presentation 3.0 and A/V Technical Specification

The IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group continues to discuss issues related to IIIF Presentation API version 3.0 which will include a canvas time dimension and other adjustments to accommodate A/V resources within the existing framework. Experimentation for IIIF A/V is underway with proof of concept tests in the Avalon Media System (see a demo), an open source A/V resource management software developed and maintained by Northwestern University and Indiana University libraries, based on Samvera and Fedora technologies. Proof of concept tests have been constructed by Masahide Kanzaki, an expert in Linked Open Data (LOD) and author of several textbooks on LOD in Japan. The British Library is also experimenting with IIIF A/V. 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 will be meeting in September at the Getty Center in Los Angeles to review progress and discuss next steps. The group will meet again at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto, October 11-13. Updates from the IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group can be found on the IIIF Discuss email list. Independent experiments are encouraged and the group welcomes any and all feedback via the email list.

Discovery of IIIF Resources

The IIIF Discovery Technical Specification Group recently finished a review of discovery-related use cases in the iiif-stories GitHub repository, to refine the scope of work. A recent survey by Brumfield Labs of the various ways in which linking properties are being used in manifests across the IIIF community has revealed a need for clarified documentation in version 3.0 of the IIIF Presentation API. The group is working towards identifying a preferred mechanism for crawling and harvesting IIIF collections and objects, and will make plans for moving forward at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto, October 11-13. Work on formalizing the import of IIIF resources into viewers from existing discovery environments is planned for the fall.

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), has established a bi-weekly call schedule (every other Tuesday at 1pm Eastern, see group page for details) for focused work on specifying levels of granularity for annotations. After comparing the general granularity structure and requirements of various OCR outputs, the group plans to test multiple OCR extraction processes and outputs, map them onto IIIF manifests, and compare results. The group will meet in person at the IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto.

OpenJPEG Improvement Project

The OpenJPEG improvement project is well underway, with OpenJPEG v. 2.2.1 just released on August 9, 2017 as part of the collaborative effort to facilitate improvement of OpenJPEG. Project status can be tracked via GitHub. The project team welcomes additional funding institutions to contribute to future phases and sustain the effort to bring OpenJPEG up to speed with proprietary implementations of the JPEG 2000 standard. To learn more and get involved, please contact Glen Robson, IIIF Technical Coordinator, at glen.robson@iiif.io.

IIIF Consulting: American Art Collaborative

The IIIF Consortium is partnering with the American Art Collaborative (AAC) to provide technical consulting for eight AAC museums as part of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. In collaboration with Sara and Ben Brumfield of Brumfield Labs, and Jason Ronallo, head of Digital Library Initiatives at NCSU Libraries, the museums will receive hands-on guidance and specific recommendations for implementing IIIF. The documentation and learnings from this engagement will be used to improve the IIIF Quick Start Guide as well as launch a service for implementation consulting for future prospective adopters. For more info, contact Glen Robson at admin@iiif.io.

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. All of the community groups will be meeting in person at the 2017 IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto, October 11-13.

Manuscripts Community Group

In addition to a multitude of manuscript-related presentations, the IIIF Manuscripts Community Group held a two-hour meeting with over 45 people at the 2017 IIIF Conference in The Vatican. The group plans to focus on metadata and manifest best practices, outreach in the manuscripts community, and follow the work of the IIIF Text Granularity Specification Group. The IIIF Manuscripts group will meet in-person again at the 2017 IIIF Working Meeting in Toronto, October 11-13.

Museums Community Group

The IIIF Museums Community Group continues to hold a monthly call to discuss mutual topics of interest, including technical implementation, documentation, and outreach. At the Vatican conference, the group’s conversation focused on topics related to multispectral imaging, image panoramas, and 3D. The next museums group call is Tuesday, September 5 - see the group page for details.

Newspapers Community Group

The IIIF Newspapers Community Group met in person at the 2017 IIIF Conference in The Vatican to review the guidelines for best practices in newspapers and IIIF, discussed text granularity and automated article recognition, and shared demonstrations on what different institutions are currently working on. Group calls have moved to a quarterly schedule; the next call is scheduled for Wednesday, September 27. Stay tuned to IIIF-Discuss and the IIIF Community Calendar for future call times.

Software Developers Community Group

The IIIF Software Developers Community Group met in person at the Vatican and had over 50 people attend the group meeting, with free-form discussion on various proposed use cases and pain points with implementations. The group call occurs once every four weeks, with a goal to focus on one topic at a time per call, so participants can join based on relevant topics. The group has just launched a survey to gauge the current interests and status of the IIIF developer community.

Implementations and Adoption

New Releases

  • The J. Paul Getty Museum has published over 30,000 images using IIIF (see blog)
  • Yale Center for British Art recently announced the addition of more IIIF images to their online collections
  • Colby College Museum of Art has added IIIF support to their collections
  • Manuscriptorium Digital Library at the National Library of the Czech Republic now supports the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs
  • eLife Sciences now supports IIIF for all images (using Loris 2.x to serve all images) (visit their blog for implementation details)
  • University College Dublin digital library has added image thumbnails and IIIF icon
  • Wolsey Manuscripts using IIIF and Mirador
  • Artstor Digital Library enhancements include support for IIIF and comparison
  • University of Toronto has released two Omeka plugins: IIIF toolkit for Mirador and CSV export, with a bulk uploader coming soon
  • Bodleian Libraries’ IIIF Manifest Editor Tool now has a discovery element (watch demo)
  • Ex Libris’ Alma resource management software now supports IIIF Image and Presentation APIs using the Universal Viewer (see release notes)
  • Biblissima Châteauroux reunification demo has been updated using the latest Mirador version, in French and English
  • Beyond Words website launched using proprietary viewer that supports IIIF functionality for non-IIIF images.

Innovations & Ongoing Work from Across the IIIF Community

Edited by:

Sheila Rabun, IIIF Community and Communications Officer

With contributions from:

  • Benjamin Albritton (Stanford)
  • Michael Appleby (Yale Center for British Art)
  • Ben Brumfield (Brumfield Labs)
  • Sara Brumfield (Brumfield Labs)
  • Luca Carini (Victoria & Albert Museum)
  • Tom Cramer (Stanford)
  • Tom Crane (Digirati)
  • Jon Dunn (Indiana University)
  • Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass (Yale Center for British Art)
  • Shaun Ellis (Princeton)
  • Andy Irving (British Library)
  • Bruno Kinoshita
  • Asanobu Kitamoto (Center for Open Data in the Humanities)
  • Tomáš Klimek (Manuscriptorium Digital Library, National Library of the Czech Republic)
  • Opher Kutner (ExLibris)
  • Ioannis Moutsatsos (Novartis)
  • Kiyonori Nagasaki (University of Tokyo)
  • Richard Palmer (Victoria & Albert Museum)
  • Julien A. Raemy (HEG-GE)
  • Régis Robineau (Biblissima)
  • Glen Robson (National Library of Wales
  • Tristan Roddis (Cogapp)
  • Rob Sanderson (The J. Paul Getty Trust)
  • Rashmi Singhal (Harvard)
  • Stuart Snydman (Stanford)
  • Emma Stanford (Oxford Digital Bodleian)
  • Randy Stern (Harvard)
  • Jon Stroop (Princeton)
  • Katherine Thornton (Yale)
  • Greg Turner (Interaction Consortium)
  • Jeffrey Witt (Loyola University Maryland)
  • Petr Zabicka (Moravian Library)