Practical applications of IIIF as a building block towards a digital National Collection

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Even more than text, images are critical in engaging (digital) audiences with cultural heritage, to illustrate stories, present collections, explore old manuscripts and documents, or illuminate colourful parts of our history. Presenting or sharing small groups of images is technologically straightforward, but as the quality, size and quantity of images increase, implementation and delivery rapidly becomes more complicated. For example, it can be problematic and costly to download gigabyte-sized images on a mobile network. The complexity increases as users combine images from different institutions or countries. There are also many IPR and technological concerns when memory institutions are asked to provide high resolution copies of their images for collaborative projects. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) continues to be developed to help solve these and many more issues. It provides a standard framework for institutions to present their own content in a consistent, trackable manner, using freely available software. IIIF resources from multiple institutions can be virtually combined (without sending images to each other) to provide shared presentations, allowing users to explore huge zoomable images on different devices without needing to copy or download whole images. However, though well described, setting up and re-using IIIF resources can still be complex, particularly for smaller institutions or individual researchers. In addition, better understanding of how to deploy IIIF to combine virtual collections across institutions and how to support more diverse audiences is needed. This research project will assess current use of IIIF systems across the sector and gather requirements and ambitions for further development via a series of targeted workshops and surveys. These will be used to produce a landscape report and to inform the design and development of a small selection of working IIIF technology pilot demonstrations. A: Working with and presenting datasets and research outputs from different institutions, focusing on resources created within a separate ongoing research project on Tudor/Jacobean portraits. B: Examining how IIIF resources can be used as supplementary information to support and enrich online publications or exhibitions. C: Demonstrating how individual non-technical researchers can create new aggregated IIIF presentations based on existing resources (overcoming a significant barrier to its adoption). This work will involve specific user analysis, with different potential use communities, in order to feed user needs and feedback into the resulting report. The project will also explore what new IIIF tools/services are needed in the sector and how they might be created, used and maintained. An important premise is to involve both tech and non tech people, to develop use cases as well as defining tools. Workshops1: Showcase and discuss current best practice. Explore how IIIF resources are currently used for research and public engagement (and by whom), identify available resources/tools, and how people would like to use these in the future. 2: Discuss the potential of shared IIIF services. Explore what IIIF related services are available or could be useful/required for institutions or researchers new to IIIF to present public/private images via IIIF, considering shared image repositories, improved image servers, training & knowledge requirements etc. 3: Developing practical IIIF solutions. A practical workshop and discussion designed to create working examples of aggregating, using and presenting IIIF resources, and develop use cases showing how end users can exploit these tools.4: Towards a National Collection: Developing a road map for the future. A shared workshop bringing together work from the proposed PID and Linked data projects and others, to develop a clear proposal of how the outcomes of these might be used in developing and maintaining a digital National Collection