IIIF Community Newsletter, Volume 1 Issue 2

  Sheila Rabun    |      February 28, 2017

Community Snapshot

  • IIIF-Discuss = 641 members
  • IIIF Slack = 257 members
  • IIIF Consortium = Pennsylvania State University and the University of Basel Digital Humanities Lab are the newest additional founding members to join the IIIF Consortium (IIIF-C), bringing total membership to 41 institutions. The IIIF-C continues to welcome founding members. See the IIIF Consortium information page for details and how to join.
  • Search process for a IIIF Technology Coordinator is underway.

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 this quick, 5 minute, Basic IIIF Adopters Survey.
  • We are also gathering information to assess and inform IIIF on-boarding and training materials, through the Extended IIIF Adopters Survey, expected to take 10-15 minutes to complete.

Community Events

IIIF Events in Edinburgh, Scotland

The National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh Library and University Collections, are co-hosting two IIIF events in Edinburgh on the 16th and 17th of March, 2017:

March 16, 2017: IIIF Technical Workshop

  • An unconference for developers already working with IIIF or considering an implementation, hosted by the University of Edinburgh at Argyle House, will bring together colleagues who have implemented IIIF services, are developing the Framework and associated tools, and working on community initiatives. The workshop will provide opportunities to discuss implementations, issues, initiatives and developments and the forthcoming Annual IIIF conference in June. Registration is free, but capacity is limited.

March 17, 2017: IIIF Showcase: Improving Access to Image Collections

  • An outreach event for developers and early adopters to explain the background and value of IIIF, its growing community, and the potential of the Framework and the innovative ways in which it can be used to present digital image collections. There will be presentations from Edinburgh University Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Durham University, University College Dublin, The Bodleian Library, Digirati, Cogapp and others. Registration is free, but capacity is limited.

2017 IIIF Conference

The 2017 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference in The Vatican is intended for a wide range of participants and interested parties across the IIIF community. A Call for Sponsors is now open, with an initial deadline of March 15. The conference will consist of pre-conference meetings for Mirador and Universal Viewer, followed by two events with separate capacity and registration:

June 6, 2017: IIIF Showcase: Unlocking the World’s Digital Images

  • An outreach event intended for all interested parties, especially those who are new to IIIF and want to quickly get up to speed and understand the community and its benefits. Registration is free, but capacity is limited.

June 7-9, 2017: IIIF Conference

  • The IIIF Conference includes plenary presentations and parallel sessions for content curators, repository managers and administrators, software developers, and researchers from across the IIIF community. Registration for the 3-day conference is $195 per person; IIIF Consortium members receive a discounted rate (contact srabun@iiif.io for details).

June 5, 2017: Pre-Conference Meetings

  • The Mirador Viewer and Universal Viewer group meetings will take place on Monday, June 5, prior to the Showcase and Conference. Registration is not required, but if you plan to attend, please RSVP via the Showcase and/or Conference registration forms.

IIIF and IPTC

A recent call with representatives from both IIIF and the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), the global standards body for news media, has resulted in plans for exploration of the alignment of IPTC metadata and IIIF models, with a goal of identifying IPTC attributes relevant to IIIF and how IIIF APIs relate to IPTC standards. This work is expected to help all stakeholders (IIIF community, IPTC members, DAMS providers, imaging community) get a sense of how the two frameworks relate to each other. If you would like to help with this effort, please contact Sheila Rabun (IIIF Community and Communications Officer) at admin@iiif.io.

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:

Europeana IIIF Task Force

Europeana has launched a IIIF Task Force led by the Austrian National Library, to encourage understanding and adoption of IIIF among Europeana content providers and bring awareness to IIIF and the Europeana Data Model. Read more about various Europeana partners’ experiences with IIIF.

Technical Work

IIIF Design Principles

The IIIF Editors have published a list of IIIF design principles that serve to guide the development of IIIF technical specifications.

IIIF Authentication API 1.0

Published: Version 1.0 of the IIIF Authentication API

A/V Technical Specification Work

The IIIF A/V Technical Specification Group has identified a technical approach for moving forward with an extension of the IIIF Presentation API to include a time dimension, allowing for interoperability for A/V materials. A synopsis of the group’s work and approach to date is recommended reading for anyone interested in IIIF for A/V. A subset of the A/V group met in London recently for focused work on the British Library’s Mellon grant for IIIF A/V, resulting in an initial set of fixtures. The group is currently seeking A/V material to test, unencumbered by rights issues that would prevent reuse, and suitable for all audiences, such as:

  • A variety of single formats in common use today (mp4, webm with common codecs)
  • MPEG-DASH and HLS file sets (no live streaming yet though)
  • Media accompanied by common sidecar files (webvtt appears in a few examples)
  • No objections to anyone turning your webvtt to web annotations and also publishing those
  • Sets of mixed media if you have them - oral history interviews plus transcriptions, albums and images of their covers and inner sleeves; again unencumbered by rights (appreciate that might be tricky for some things)

See the A/V group page for details on how to join in the discussion and learn more.

Discovery of IIIF Resources

The work of the IIIF Discovery Technical Specification Group is now underway, with bi-weekly calls planned for the foreseeable future. See the IIIF Discovery group page for more details and information on how to join the group activities.

Community Groups:

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 Conference in June.

Manuscripts Community Group

The IIIF Manuscripts group monthly calls are an excellent venue for sharing practices and experimentation for IIIF and manuscripts. On the most recent call, colleagues at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, gave a demo of The Jubilees Palimpsest Project, using the IIIF Navigator for interoperable image delivery. Join the group to see more demos and share your work!

Museums Community Group

The IIIF Museums group is compiling an FAQ for museums interested in adopting IIIF, as well as examples of existing IIIF implementations and use cases in museums. The following museums are currently working with IIIF: Art Gallery of Ontario, Harvard Art Museums, Yale Center for British Art, The Frick Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art, Paul Mellon Center, The Getty, National Gallery of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Newspapers Community Group

The IIIF Newspapers group has been discussing textual data and IIIF, with a focus on OCR data as IIIF annotations, and distinguishing granularity between words, lines, and paragraphs. Pennsylvania State University is currently migrating their historic digital newspaper collection to the Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI) software, which complies with the IIIF Image API.

Software Developers Community Group

The IIIF Software Developers group meets every other week to share their work and ideas for IIIF-compatible software and re-usable components. Shaun Ellis of Princeton has documented the libraries and components built by members of the group at https://iiif-commons.github.io/. The group is currently also planning “getting started with IIIF” training sessions, to be delivered at Code4Lib and the upcoming IIIF Conference.

Implementations and Adoption

New Releases

Innovations & Ongoing Work from Across the IIIF Community

Edited by:

Sheila Rabun, IIIF Community and Communications Officer

With contributions from:

Tom Cramer (Stanford University Libraries)
Tom Crane (Digirati Ltd)
Régis Robineau (Biblissima)
Rashmi Singhal (Harvard)