Slides supporting my presentation at the IIIF Outreach event at the Rijksmuseum, October 18 2016. The presentation covered why we at Europeana have chose to join the IIIF community and adopt the protocol in our own stack. It includes examples of what we have developed and also what we have in the development pipeline.

1. Europeana & IIIFWhat have wee been doing with IIIF and why?
David Haskiya | IIIF Outreach - Amsterdam 2016
Danse de trois faunes et trois
bacchantes, Hieronymus Hopfer,
Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon,
Public Domain

2. What and who is Europeana?
• We’re a non-profit foundation - idealists and true believers
• A network of like-minded heritage and technology professionals
• An open data platform with many services and drawing on the
collections of nearly 4000 European GLAMs
• Europeana Collections, Europeana APIs
The GLAMwiki toolset
CC BY-SA
“We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it
easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning
or just for fun! ”

3. Outline of my talk
• Why do we support IIIF?
• How do we support IIIF?
• Community, Data model (EDM), Display, Distribution
• Ongoing and future development of interest
• Improved display/viewer
• Shared (IIIF) Image Service
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

4. Why support IIIF?
Netherlands, CC BY-SA
1911, Circus Museum
Troupe Banola leur dernière création

5. What our users say
• Immediate access to full and high-res imagery and multi-page
documents is something all users want (whether casual or
professional)
• Some users have specific needs and pain points
• Designers looking for visual inspiration
• Art historians looking closely, so closely, at a specific work of art, seeing the
shape of the brush strokes, the crackelations of the canvas
• Historically Europeana has been very metadata centric. Storing
and serving digital media, on behalf of partners, is a major step
towards an updated value proposition to partners and users
both.
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

6. Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

7. Why support IIIF?
“ We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it
easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning
or just for fun.”
• Supporting IIIF will help in fulfilling the mission.
• We believe that for all GLAMs who have missions relating to
public access and facilitating research IIIF will also support
their mission fulfilment.
When in doubt check your mission!
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

8. How will do we
support IIIF?
Netherlands, CC BY-SA
Circus Museum
Anonymous
Cirque de Moscou

9. Community
• We’re happy and proud to have joined the IIIF community as a
founding member!
• Within the community we are especially engaged in the
Newspapers special interest group and in prototyping using
IIIF in web discovery and metadata harvesting
• And we support the idea to try to extend IIIF to other types of
media, esp. audio-visual, sometimes called IxIF
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

10. Data model and harvesting
• We have updated our Europeana Data Model mapping guidelines to
include instructions on how to provide IIIF images and manifests (PDF)
as part of an EDM WebResource representation
• We have harvested and mapped two datasets - University of
Heidelberg and e-Codices, to include their IIIF manifests in the data
they provide to us
• We also have a couple of partners whose we IIIF-resources we display
via a bit of a workaround, e.g. Gallica/BNF.
• Get in touch with out Data Partner Services team if you have
IIIF-resources and want them displayed in Europeana!
• Let’s take a look at them and also our display!
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

11. Display & Distribution
• Our first viewer implementation in Europeana Collections is
deliberately simple
• Records with IIIF images and manifests provided to us in the
metadata are retrievable via the Europeana REST-API allowing
also 3rd-party developers to display IIIF resources via the
Europeana API
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

12. Ongoing and future
development?
Crazed Farmers during the
performance at Klub Gromka,
Janez Gerčar, Culture.si,
CC-BY-ND

13. Improved display
• Our viewer implementation is deliberately basic.
• UX research is needed before we go more ambitious. Simple is also a good
thing! If we add power and complexity we need to know it’s for a good
reason.
• But we have some ideas based on our experience so far:
• Better support for multi-page documents e.g. books and other texts
• Clearer pagination esp. in full-screen mode
• Support embedding of the viewer outside of Europeana (given certain
copyright criteria). Also to support increased use of the viewer on our own
sites, embedded, in virtual exhibitions and other Europeana web pages
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

14. Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA
Newspaper viewer

15. A small to medium GLAM
experience
“We scanned our maps in really high-quality. We knew that was the
only way to do it, if we hadn’t we’d have to rescan those same maps
all over again a couple of years from now.
The problem is that we can’t make those high-resolution maps
available in a good way on our website. They take ages to load and
sometimes don’t load at all while at the same time overloading our
server. We looked into developing a zoomable image service but the
technical difficulties and thus the cost was too high. So now we have
the high quality maps but can’t offer them to our users in they way
they would wish.”
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

16. Shared image service
• We have set up a IIIF compatible image server as part of and
for the Europeana Newspapers project.
• But, we have thousands of other data partners with image
collections. Should they all individually develop an IIIF-server?
Some can and will. But for most it’s beyond their technical or
financial capabilities.
• So we are developing a “Shared Image Service”, IIIF compatible,
for use by all Europeana data partners who want to support
IIIF, but don’t have the means to do so themselves. Let me
know if you’d like to alpha test!
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

17. Alpha test object - originally a
320 Mb TIFF

18. Alpha test object - originally a 320
Mb TIFF

19. Takeaways
• Why does Europeana want to support IIIF?
• Because it helps us, and our partners, fulfill our mission(s) and it helps
our users
• How does Europeana support IIIF in practice?
• By display, by sharing services and IIIF-resources, by joining and
supporting the community
• What are Europeana’s plans for further IIIF-related
development?
• Improved display and shareability of IIIF resources
• Increased use of the IIIF-viewer in exhibitions, blog posts and other
• Shared IIIF Image Service for partners
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA

20. October 18 2016
The Music Lesson, Louis Moritz,
1808, Rijksmuseum , Public Domain