IIIF Archives Community Group

Note: This Community Group is closed

About

Archival collections, both born-digital and digitized, are increasingly being shared online for researchers to access remotely in whole or in part. These collections are often heterogeneous and may include a variety of material types, including images, textual materials, A/V, objects, and software. Similarly, they are found across wide range of institutions, ranging from small community archives and historical societies to governments, and would greatly benefit from many of the features enabled by IIIF. Archival description is usually based on aggregates and hierarchies of context and thus presents a number of new use cases for IIIF implementation.

In addition, archival materials are increasingly displayed with full-text from OCR or crowdsourced transcriptions, so they also can be annotated with a textual layer. Enabling access to archival materials through IIIF also offers exciting opportunities for collaborative cross-institution storytelling, and allows researchers to recreate dispersed collections and create new collections based on specific research questions.

By participating in the Archives Community Group, you will help set best practices for IIIF and archival content and influence the international collaborations for providing archival content via open APIs.

Goals

  • Promote usage of IIIF for archival materials internationally and across all types of institutions
  • Provide a venue for demonstrations of new implementations of IIIF for archival materials
  • Demonstrate best practices in the use of IIIF for archival materials, including creation of IIIF Presentation API resources from existing archival description
  • Explore and exploit possibilities for the use of IIIF in crowdsourced annotation programs for archival materials
  • Gather and document use cases from existing and new IIIF community members that demonstrate the need for and opportunities presented by the interoperability of archival collections and tools, including ones consist of born-digital and other diverse material types
  • Communicate and disseminate the work of the group to the larger IIIF community, as well as allied professional communities

Organization

Chairs:

  • Alison Harvey (Cardiff University)

Communication channels:

Call notes and group documents:

IIIF Archives Community Group Folder

Call connection information: