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Introduction to IIIF

Event

Your name/email

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What is IIIF?

International

Image

Interoperability

Framework

(triple-eye-eff)

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A model for presenting and annotating content such as images and audio/visual files (with lots of other benefits!)

A global community that develops open APIs, implements them in software, and exposes interoperable content

What is IIIF?

Broadly, IIIF is a globally-adopted open source standardized model for delivering many types of image-based resources on the web in many different formats so that audiences can interact with them. It provides a lot of benefits to the institutions that use it, and when implemented across many institutions provides additional benefits across institutional boundaries.

But, IIIF is more than a standard: it is also an open, global community of software developers, librarians, researchers, educators, museums, universities, creative agencies, and more that work together to develop open APIs, implement them in software, and expose images and A/V files. It’s a grassroots effort between many different institutions to solve their shared problems with delivering, managing, sharing, and working with their resources.

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Hundreds of institutions around the world are using IIIF

(...that we know of!)

https://bit.ly/iiifmap

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International Leaders

Universities & �Research Institutions

Cambridge

Cornell

Ghent

Gottingen

Harvard

Michigan

Oxford �Princeton

Stanford

Edinburgh

Toronto

Wellcome Trust

Yale

Museums & Galleries

British Museum

National Gallery of Art

The J. Paul Getty Trust

The Walters Art Museum

Yale Center for British Art

...and many more!

Aggregators/Facilitators

Artstor/ITHAKA

CONTENTdm

Europeana

Internet Archive

JISC

Wikimedia Foundation

State & National �Libraries

Austria

British Library

Denmark

Egypt

France

Israel

Japan

Netherlands

New Zealand

Scotland

Wales

Qatar

United States (LoC)

Vatican

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Images are fundamental carriers of information.

Why do we need IIIF?

Odilon Redon. Ophelia. 1906. Art Institute of Chicago. | Rob Stevenson, Spotted turtle showing carapace. 2004 (CC-BY 3.0) via Artstor | Asymmetric cell division in a live zebrafish embryo. 2015. Wellcome Collection (CC-BY) | New-York tribune. February 16, 1919. Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division.

So why do we need IIIF? Digital images are fundamental carriers of information across the fields of cultural heritage, STEM, and others. They help us understand complex processes through visualization. They grab our attention and help us quickly understand abstract concepts. They help document many the past--and the present--and preserve it for the future. They are also ubiquitous: we interact with thousands of them every day both in real life and on the web. In short, images are important and we interact with large volumes of them online.

I should stop here to clarify that when I say images I dont just mean things like photographs or paintings that might immediately come to mind. Rather, I’m referring more broadly to image-based resources like scanned newspapers and books, audio and video materials, maps, manuscripts, sheet music, drawings, scrolls, and of course photographs and paintings.

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Image delivery on the Web has historically been hard, slow, expensive, disjointed, and locked-up in silos.

The Problem: A World of Silos and Duplication

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The Problem: A World of Silos and Duplication

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IIIF provides a solution.

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Deep zoom with large images

https://purl.stanford.edu/hs631zg4177

First, starting with a common need - the ability to make available large image files for users to view as a whole and then zoom in on details quickly and easily. The example on this slide is of a Japanese Tax map created in 1837. Its meant to be read in the round by someone standing in the middle--you can see the scale when this gif zooms out--and for reference, the map is eleven by seventeen FEET, and the person standing next to it, Wayne who works in the library at stanford, is six feet four inches tall. This image is a composite of 158 individual images measuring a total of 34,342 x 22,939 pixels, and the file size is 1.27 First, starting with a common need - the ability to make available very large image files for users to view as a whole and in zoomed detail. IIIF allows just enough of an image to be delivered to a viewer--going from a whole image to just the part that they are zooming in on--much the way that Google Maps works when you zoom in from the view of a city, to a particular neighborhood or intersection. The example on this slide is of a Japanese Tax map created in 1837. Its meant to be read in the round by someone standing in the middle--you can see the scale when this gif zooms out--and for reference, the map is eleven by seventeen FEET, and the person standing next to it, Wayne who works in the library at stanford, is six feet four inches tall. This image is a composite of 158 individual images measuring a total of 34,342 x 22,939 pixels, and the file size is 1.27 Gigabytes. Without IIIF, an end user might have to download an extremely large file to view, but with it there is a smooth and easy viewing experience. So in a technical sense IIIF solves the problem of how to make this huge file available, but it also allows an end user to view the entirety of the map in high resolution, then zoom into the different tax zones as if just as if they were standing in the middle and looking out over the different areas then leaning in to read the details--providing them a digital version of the experience the viewer should have standing in the middle of the map which we of course would not do to a delicate archival materials.

https://purl.stanford.edu/hs631zg4177

http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/digital-library-blog/2015/11/adventures-oversized-imaging-digitizing-omi-kuni-ezu-jin-jiang

https://purl.stanford.edu/ff139pd0160 🡪 PURL with Wayne

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Compare images

https://www.theleidencollection.com/viewer/david-and-uriah/

From the beginning there was this idea of enabling research.

And the idea of enabling scholarship has been baked into IIIF since its creation. One extremely common method of working with images is comparison, which IIIF enables. This particular example is a letter written by Alexander Hamilton from the collection of the Library of Congress, comparing a regular scan of the letter with a multispectral version to highlight the underlying text that had been scratched out or overwritten.

Better example: https://prtd.app/#72f604db-6869-4c08-91ce-7c79502a7f35

Multispectral possibilities – Infrared, Ultra violet, raked lighting, X-ray, etc.

http://mirador.britishart.yale.edu/?manifest=https://manifests.britishart.yale.edu/Osbornfa1

https://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/browse/collections/digbiomed/

Zebra Fish Embryo: https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b20432033#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0

Seal: https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b2043313x

Seal skull: https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b20433141

Computed Tomography (CT) scans of the head of a seal from the Wellcome Library�https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b20433141 | https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b2043313x

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Across sites

Le manuscrit 5 de la Bibliothèque municipale de Châteauroux, c. 1460.

Folio in BVMM, miniature in the BNF.

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Collect items that belong together

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Reunify

Biblissima | http://demos.biblissima-condorcet.fr/chateauroux/demo/

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Search within

Franks, Kendal; Royal College of Surgeons of England. The Germ Theory. via Wellcome Library.

Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/)

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Annotate

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:HarvardX+MCB64.1x+2T2016/d16e07a5cec442eeb7cd9dfcb695dce0/

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Crowdsource

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Connect

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wd-image-positions/item/Q21614047/P18

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Guide

exhibit.so

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Mirador instances on display at McMullen Museum, Boston College.

Enrich

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All with the application of your choice

Indigenous Digital Archive: https://omeka.dlcs-ida.org/

And because all of these examples I’ve described are open and interoperable, we can do this work with all sorts of readers and tools. The Indigenous Digital Archive, which is a project from the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the New Mexico State Library Tribal Libraries Program, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center gives researchers the option to open resources in two different viewers. A viewer like Mirador allows comparison and opening documents in a book view, while the Universal Viewer provides deep zoom that is helpful with examining images.

UV: http://universalviewer.io/examples/

Mirador: http://sul-reader-test.stanford.edu/drag_and_drop/

The collection link is:

http://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/collection/XXXXX

where XXXXX is a keyword. I have some pre-canned searches that do more sophisticated searches based on our collection.

So:

Hebrew

Incunabula

Ephemera

HistoryandPolitics

WesternManuscripts

Oriental

Greek

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https://geoservices.leventhalmap.org/movie-maps/#trolley-wayfinder

And beyond just images!

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But how does it work?

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)