IIIF Community Newsletter, Volume 2 Issue 3

Community Snapshot

IIIF Discuss = 959 members
IIIF Slack = 953 members (Join Slack)
IIIF on Twitter = 1,362 followers
IIIF Consortium = 52 founding members, 1 associate member.
- Newest members: LYRASIS, National Institute of Japanese Literature, National Institutes for Humanities and Qatar National Library

Announcements and Actions

IIIF Managing Director Hired

Welcome Josh Hadro! Josh joined IIIF on November 26, 2018 as our first Managing Director. The role of Managing Director is a new one for IIIF, driven by the need for dedicated leadership in coordinating IIIF’s growing activities and expanding community. Josh comes from the New York Public Library, where he served as Associate Director for Digital Policy and Deputy Director for NYPL Labs; prior to that he worked in publishing as the Executive Editor at Library Journal. He has dived right into work, in his second week he was helping present the benefits of IIIF at the Edinburgh outreach event, and leading a roadmapping exercise for the 80 participants at IIIF Working Group meeting (more on both, below). Funding for the Managing Director role comes from the IIIF Consortium members - thank you!

IIIF Wikidata Property

Since November 14, 2018, Wikidata (the Linked Open Data sister project of Wikipedia) has a ‘IIIF manifest’ property. Since that date, Wikidata volunteers have added IIIF manifest URIs to more than 25,000 of the almost 500,000 artwork entities on Wikidata. Creative works from over 100 cultural institutions’ collections (query: http://tinyurl.com/y7qox5gd) are now linked to their IIIF manifests on Wikidata.

IIIF Showcase and Workshop in Sweden - save the date!

On March 11th 2019, a IIIF showcase and workshop will take place at the Swedish National Heritage Board. This event will be organised by the Swedish National Heritage Board, the Nationalmuseum and the Swedish National Archives. Link to event page: https://www.raa.se/evenemang-och-upplevelser/vara-andra-seminarier-och-konferenser/dela-bilder-pa-webben-med-iiif/.

Bern IIIF Showcase Event at the Swiss National Library - save the date!

On May 15th, 2019 will be held a IIIF Showcase Event in the Dürrenmatt Room at the Swiss National Library in Bern. This event will be organized in the context of the Towards IIIF-Compliance Knowledge in Switzerland (TICKS) project conducted by Julien A. Raemy and René Schneider in Geneva at the HES-SO University of Applied Sciences, Haute école de gestion de Genève.

Presentations will be given in English by individuals representing international and Swiss organizations. More information by the beginning of 2019 will follow. In the meantime, make sure to mark this date in your agenda.

2019 IIIF Conference in Göttingen, Germany

The 2019 IIIF Conference will be held in Göttingen, Germany, June 24-28, 2019. This event will be hosted by the University of Göttingen and the Göttingen State and University Library. 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.

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 Events and Outreach

IIIF-Texas Regional Event

On October 9, University of North Texas Libraries and Brumfield Labs hosted IIIF-TX, a regional meeting for IIIF practitioners in Texas and Oklahoma. The day-long conference attracted forty participants from the region, and alternated between presentations exploring the APIs and lightning talks focusing on specific projects or implementations. The growing community of institutions adopting IIIF was represented by speakers from Texas State, Texas A&M, the Harry Ransom Center, UT-Austin and the Portal to Texas History (UNT).

IIIF Outreach - Handschriftenportal 2018

In the context of the upcoming project Handschriftenportal, which aims to create a national manuscript portal for Germany, a IIIF outreach event took place in Leipzig on October 15 and 16. The event was was mainly held in German and focused on manuscript holding libraries, museums and archives in Germany. During the event, presentations on various international relevant projects related to IIIF were held by participants from Germany, France, Switzerland and the United States. The background and the conceptual ideas behind the new German manuscript portal were explained by several members of the project and discussed by the audience. Approximately 70 participants attended the event, which was organized by the Leipzig University Library.

IIIF Washington D.C. Regional Event

On November 2, 2018, The Folger Shakespeare Library, the Smithsonian, and the National Art Gallery hosted the first regional IIIF event in DC. The afternoon began with lightning talks on each institution’s IIIF implementation and compliance, and continued with discussions focused on identifying and describing our IIIF images for inclusion in a future IIIF showcase-style collection. The afternoon concluded with discussion of things we look forward to seeing in the wider community. Documentation and presentation slides from this event can be found in the regional event’s Google Drive folder. The group will continue to work on the DC Showcase Collection and post when ready. Stacey Redick presented a summary of the event at the working meeting in Edinburgh. Slides from that presentation can be found in the Google drive folder for the working meeting.

Fall 2018 Working Meeting in Edinburgh

The Fall 2018 IIIF Working Meeting was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, December 3-6, 2018. This event was hosted jointly by the The University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland.

Presentation slides and session notes can be found in the IIIF Google Drive. Overall, there were:

139 participants in the IIIF Showcase
78 Working Meeting participants from 111 different institutions/organizations in 13 countries
14 lightning talks
44 presentations
10 panel and discussion sessions

Many thanks again to our hosts and the Program Committee.

Report from the University of Edinburgh:

As consortial members, it was a good opportunity for both the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh to raise their profile within the community, and for delegates from all over the world to see Edinburgh in winter while making the most of face-to-face discussions regarding recent developments and the future direction of the framework. The Showcase took place in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and this reasonably light-touch session offered an introduction to the concepts and tools and for the host institutions to talk about what they’ve produced so far. It was also IIIF’s new managing director Josh Hadro’s first week in the job: a great way for him to see the community in action! The afternoon saw candidates repair to the NLS and Main Library for breakout sessions in key content areas (Archives, Museums, Digital Scholarship) as well as deeply technical and ‘getting started’ sessions. To finish, everyone then made for St Cecilia’s Hall for a round-up of the day; this was an appropriate setting, as we’ve employed IIIF in the museum’s corresponding collections site.

The Working Meeting ran over the succeeding three days, in the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI) and Main Library. This was a smaller undertaking than the Showcase, but it still attracted 70 delegates. There were some really meaty discussions about the direction of the framework: cookbooks and use cases; updates to the Mirador viewer; enhancing the APIs and registries (including more work on authentication and various types of search), and looking at the amazing potential of 3D and AV. Discussions about the direction of the community and outreach group took place. The first meeting of the Technical Review Committee, that rubber-stamps the specs, took place at the event, in the Teviot Dining Room.

IIIF Conference at the National Library of Norway

Following the Fantastic Futures conference on AI in Libraries, 140 attendees participated in a half day IIIF Showcase event at Oslo, with presentations delving into IIIF’s use in libraries, maps and a national library context. The afternoon was dedicated to 6 parallel track workshops, including new ones focused on IIIF for music, and leveraging IIIF with AI. This was our first large scale event in Scandinavia, but won’t be the last. As one participant remarked: “IIIF seems so elegant and powerful. Why would anyone not use it?” The video recordings are available at: https://mediasite.nb.no/Mediasite/Play/978e0127b3664d40bdc40007f044128c1d.

IIIF Presence at Conferences and Meetings

Active community participants are encouraged to represent IIIF at conferences, workshops and events around the world. Recent and upcoming IIIF appearances include:

M.A. Matienzo and Rebecca Hirsch participated in the SAA Archives Records 2018 Conference in Washington D.C. held from August 12-18.
Rafael Schwemmer from text&bytes had a presentation titled “Interoperabilität von geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschungsplattformen durch IIIF” at the “Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschungsplattformen in der Schweiz im Kontext von Open und FAIR Data” which was organized by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW) in Bern, Switzerland on November 2.

Technical Work

Experimental IIIF Change Discovery Endpoint by OCLC Research

OCLC Research is hosting an experimental IIIF Change Discovery API endpoint for around 14 Million CONTENTdm IIIF Manifests. A presentation about the service from the IIIF Working meeting in Edinburgh can be found here and information about the current IIIF Change Discovery API v0.2 is available here.

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.

3D Community Group

The IIIF 3D Community Group has met eight times since its formation in March of 2018. The call regularly attracts around 20 participants, and particularly compelling agendas have attracted over 30 participants from a great diversity of institutions worldwide. The group has become a locus of collaboration and information sharing among cultural heritage institution who are interested in sharing and interoperability of 3D data.

During the calls the group has seen compelling demonstrations of web-based 3D platforms that are being developed in and for the cultural heritage domain with interoperability in mind. Demonstrations and presentations have included the latest from the Web3D consortium, the Visual Computing Lab’s Visual Media Service, Sketchfab Labs, the next generation of the Morphosource platform, the Smithsonian’s forthcoming open source 3D viewer and production pipeline and latest IIIF 3D experiments by Mnemoscene. The 3D Community Group has together started documenting a comparison matrix of 3D web viewers used by cultural heritage organizations as well as a matrix documenting how viewers specifically handle spatial annotations. The group is also embarking on an effort to document 3D interoperability use cases.

Participants in the IIIF 3D Community Group have established productive collaborations with other 3D standards initiatives, including the CS3DP, LIB3DVR and ReACH initiatives. We are also talking more about IIIF at conferences and events with a 3D and VR focus, such as the 2018 Digital Heritage Conference. Creation of 3D data by IIIF institutions is clearly on the rise, as is the appetite for open standards to support the sharing of 3D data. We are anxious to see what transpires in the year ahead.

Archives Community Group

The Archives Community Group was set up in July 2018 following evidence of growing interest in IIIF as a means to provide access to archival collections, reflected at the IIIF Conference in Washington D.C. It aims to help establish best practice for IIIF archival content and influence international collaborations for providing archival content via open APIs. The group holds monthly calls to provide updates, discuss ideas and host demos, and has a Slack channel with 47 members. It recently hosted a well attended showcase event in Edinburgh.

Manuscripts Community Group

The IIIF Manuscripts Community has been extremely active since the last newsletter, with major projects at multiple institutions adding to the broader IIIF landscape. In no particular order, a small selection of those projects are:

Biblissima has released a manuscript aggregation portal that brings together content from major European institutions https://iiif.biblissima.fr/collections/
The Polonsky-sponsored “The France and England project: Medieval Manuscripts between 700 and 1200” exposes a large number of manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque national de France and the British Library in a common IIIF-friendly portal.
The Parker Library has launched a crowd-sourcing effort using the From the Page platform, focusing at first on the eleven Parker manuscripts currently on display in the British Library’s “Anglo Saxon Kingdoms” exhibit https://fromthepage.com/theparkerlibrary/anglo-saxon-kingdoms
The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana has released a preview of its Mellon-funded project which brings together IIIF images and annotations, the Spotlight exhibit platform (including configurable Mirador widget), and curatorial narratives to tell the many stories of this world-famous collection https://spotlight.vatlib.it/test-exhibit-for-demonstration

At the recent IIIF Working Group meeting in Edinburgh, we discussed these projects and many more from participants at Ghent, Oxford, Durham, Edinburgh, the German Manuscripts Portal, and others. The common focus on exposure of, and discovery of, manuscript resources for manuscript audiences will fuel the group’s 2019 goals. We are especially interested in shared solutions around: hosting, aggregation in multiple portals, and specific (and thorny) problems around dates and identifiers. Notes from that meeting are available at http://bit.ly/2Pm0XjR.

We are also looking forward to multiple workshops in the new year, to follow on successful manuscript-focused workshops at Cambridge, Kalamazoo, Yale, Stanford, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in 2018. If you want to host a workshop at your institution, or are interested in helping develop a manuscript-focused IIIF teaching curriculum, please let us know! The Manuscripts Community Group will continue with quarterly calls in 2019, with the majority of the call time focused on demonstrations and questions from the community.

Museums Community Group

Richard Palmer, Senior Web Developer, Digital Media, V&A, London, will become a new co-chair of the Museums Community Group as Michael Appleby has stepped down. Tina and Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass are still the other two co-chairs. IIIF is now an official Special Interest Group of Museum Computer Network. The Chair is Stefano Cossu, Getty Trust, the co-chair is Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Yale Center for British Art. This year is the first time that the SIG was created and held a SIG panel at the MCN conference, with Stefano Cossu, Getty Trust, Deborah Howes, National Gallery of Art, DC, Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Yale Center for British Art, Luca Carnia, V&A, and Rob Sanderson, Getty Trust. The IIIF MCN SIG also held an informal lunch during the conference.

Newspapers Community Group

IIIF Newspapers Community Group 2018 in Review

The IIIF Newspaper Community Group had participation from 20 organizations in 2018 and was co-chaired by Karen Estlund from Penn State University and Glen Robson from IIIF. Activities during the year focused on the following efforts: Showcasing and discussing implementations of IIIF with newspapers including presentations from the Library of Congress, Europeana and the Newspapers in Samvera project.

Participation the the Text Granularity Working Group
Coordination with the ALTO board
Discussion with providers of digital newspaper viewer software on implementing IIIF
Advisory support for grant projects, such as the Newspapers in Samvera Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Grant
Expansion of rationale for levels and features of IIIF API implementations with a user-centered question and outcome approach

Moving into 2019, the IIIF Newspaper group will focus on providing the cookbook for the current specifications, continuing to share work and lessons with each other, and lobbying for continued vendor implementations.

Outreach Community Group

The Outreach Group continue to meet monthly and support those organising local events. In the New Year the group will be focusing on: information for those new to IIIF; the IIIF website; and events both online and in-person. A year on from the formation of group, it will review its charter at the start of the year to ensure it is fit for purpose.

The translation process of the IIIF FAQs is currently on hold and will resume in 2019. For the moment, we have already received unreviewed translations of the general FAQ from members of the IIIF Community in French, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. If you are interested in participating in the translation effort, you can follow this frame request and contact one of the Outreach Group co-chairs for further details.

Software Developers Community Group

No update at the moment. Follow the Software Developers Community Group’s developments on the IIIF Slack channel (#softwaredevs) and through their monthly calls.

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

e-manuscripta now displays IIIF Manifests on their platform

e-manuscripta, the digital platform for manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives, has both implemented the IIIF Image API and the IIIF Presentation API. The corresponding IIIF manifest can be found with each of the currently 75’000 titles that are published online by the seven participating institutions. All these texts, letters, drawings, photographs, manuscript maps, musical notes or special materials are available for an import into any IIIF-compliant viewers.

The Historic National Museum of Brazil implemented the Image API

The Museu Histórico Nacional (Historic National Museum) of Brazil, located at Rio de Janeiro just released a collection of 500 paintings in the Web, many of them never released to the public before. Among this paintings, 82 images were part of the Google Culture and Arts project and have high resolution images. These images are now published using the IIIF Image API and the website allows user to deep zoom them. This work was conducted between a partnership between the Museum, Ibram (Brazilian museums institute) and the Federal University of Goiás Links: Museu Historico Nacional paintings collection homepage: Below are samples of IIIF-compliant images:

The Mahabharata Scroll (University of Edinburgh)

The University of Edinburgh digitised the Mahabharata Scroll in 2017-18. This is a 72m long, 13cm wide version of the Mahabharata poem from 1795, and is made available via LUNA IIIF and the Universal Viewer. Its total area is 6.4bn pixels! More information in a blogpost and a video.

IIIF Timeliner: a tool for music pedagogy

Digirati and Indiana University have been working on a tool for music pedagogy (try it out by loading https://dlib.indiana.edu/iiif_av/jwd/chopin.json) The tool is a conversion to IIIF of an existing piece of desktop software, Variations Audio Timeliner. It is used to describe the structure of a piece of music, which is modelled as nested IIIF Ranges, and shown using a “bubble” user interface. It can be used standalone, but can also post work back to a larger system such as Avalon. The documentation shows how the application is constructed and the source code is available on GitHub. The current release is an MVP and we will be testing and improving the UI over the next few weeks.

Goobi viewer implements the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs

The Goobi viewer is a complete 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 or TEI. Images are served and consumed using the IIIF Image API. A IIIF Presentation manifest is generated automatically for every object or record, no matter which source format. The Goobi Community is discussing further developments for example in the community forum at https://community.goobi.io.

IIIF Collections of Manuscripts & Rare Books

Biblissima launches a prototype to search for digitized manuscripts and rare books (prior to 1800) across IIIF-compliant digital libraries. The first version aggregates about 60,000 digital materials from Gallica (BnF), Digital.Bodleian, e-codices, the British Library manuscripts from the Polonsky project “England and France 700-1200”, the BVMM (Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux), and manuscripts from the Europeana Regia project. More will follow in the next few weeks.

IIIF360, a new support and expertise service around IIIF in France

IIIF360 is a range of services which offers consulting, hosting and development services on IIIF technologies, co-operated by Biblissima, the Campus Condorcet and Huma-Num. It is being launched on an experimental basis and is mainly aimed at higher education/research and cultural heritage institutions in France. For more information and contact: https://projet.biblissima.fr/en/resources/iiif-360.

IIIF Upgrade at the Qatar Digital Library

The Qatar Digital Library site has upgraded its support for IIIF: as well as the Image and Presentation APIs, it now also supports the Content Search API, and features localised Arabic versions of both Universal Viewer and Mirador. The Content Search API is also used to drive the “quick look” preview of document fragments that match a given search term. E.g. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100000000555.0x000248/search/aviation

Mirador Update

We are pleased to announce that development of the next version of Mirador - Mirador 3 - will begin in January of 2019. Over the past year the Mirador community has made significant progress on design and proof of concept work to prepare for this next version. The new version will have many of the same objectives and capabilities as previous versions, but will be rebuilt from the ground up. Mirador 3 will be a collaborative effort that will include contributions from developers, designers and testers from institutions worldwide, including Leipzig University Library, the Bavarian State Library, Princeton University Libraries, Stanford Libraries, Harvard University, Yale University and others.

Mirador 3 will bring together years of experience in developing interactive IIIF viewers, with forward looking designs and architectural patterns. Mirador 3 aims to improve the user experience, make customization easier for adopters, and provides a plugin pattern for enhancements and creative new uses.

If you are interested in participating or hearing more, join the conversation on the #mirador Slack channel, join the Google Group and find the project on Github at https://github.com/ProjectMirador/.

IIIF at Stanford

The Stanford Libraries has made it easier to find and use IIIF-compatible resources by featuring them on the homepage of its online catalog, SearchWorks. By clicking the “IIIF Resources” link on the SearchWorks homepage, you will be directed to a search result that makes available over 390,000 (and growing) digital resources that contain IIIF-compatible images. From there you can further refine your search using facets such as date, language, topic, genre, region, and more. The IIIF icon is readily available in search results to support drag and drop into IIIF-compatible viewers. On results pages, IIIF-compatible resources are presented in the Universal Viewer.