About
User-created annotations are a powerful but underused part of IIIF, particularly for scholarly use-cases. The standard robustly supports annotations, but the lack of consistent patterns for implementation has meant that the ecosystem of tooling does not yet exist to support that use case. We believe that we could address some of the underlying barriers to a more robust infrastructure for scholarly communication by forming a community group to help identify use cases and a minimal pattern for user annotation of shared images, generate prototypes, and create a set of cookbooks for how to store, integrate, and filter annotations created by scholars and work across IIIF resources anywhere on the web—enabling image viewers, annotation stores, and annotation tools to build on a shared model for implementation.
Having these patterns would enable image viewers to implement a standard protocol and user experience for integration, would allow annotation stores to provide access to multiple viewers, and would allow annotation tools to be developed in a way that promotes both scholarship and interoperability. It would also empower the IIIF Consortium to consider ways to develop an annotation infrastructure aligned with member value.
We propose the creation of a community group focused on undertaking the user research and collaboratively developing the needed cookbooks.
The community group will also be responsible for producing a set of recommendations for next steps, potentially including a plan for implementing the changes across the ecosystem needed, options for developing a prototype for scholarly annotation, and/or an outreach campaign to validate the use case within the scholarly community.
Goals
- Refined use cases of IIIF annotations in support of scholarship of visual culture presented as part of the Exec Committee’s strategic pillar
- A report on existing patterns used by annotation store providers and viewer developers, providing inputs for patterns that could standardize on a UX affordance for annotation integration
- Defined patterns for annotation usage in viewers, annotation stores, and tools
- UX Implementation cookbooks for implementers
- Written recommendations for next steps towards implementation of scholarly annotations
- Support the IIIF-C’s efforts to implement a hosted IIIF Annotation store
Chairs
- David Newbury, Getty
- Rashmi Singhal, Harvard University
Communication Channels
- Online Zoom calls third Monday of every month at 8:00am Pacific, 11:00am Eastern, 4:00pm GMT, 5:00 CET. See IIIF Community Calendar for details
- Virtual meetings announced on the IIIF-Discuss email list
- General discussion on the #annotations IIIF Slack channel