Short update from IIIF Showcase, Vatican, 2017-06-06

1. Discovery of
IIIF Resources
Simeon Warner (Cornell University)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7970-7855
IIIF Showcase: Unlocking the World’s Digital Images
6 June 2017

2. NASA Image, International Space station
https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/501409main_iss-lg.jpg

3. 335 million IIIF
resources
distributed over
100+ institutions
2017 adopters survey:
http://iiif.io/news/2017/05/25/newsletter/#iiif-adopters-survey

4. ... and just last week
+ 30,000 images from the J Paul
Getty
trusthttp://news.getty.edu/article_display.cfm?ar
ticle_id=6172
+ 70,000 images from the Yale
Center for British Art
http://britishart.yale.edu/news
... and I suspect an increasing rate of increase

5. Stumbling upon IIIF resources

7. “IIIF only” search not supported
• No way to limit searches in commodity search
engines to IIIF content only

9. Scope of Discovery work?
• IIIF-wide aggregators
o Services like PontIIIF
o Large online content vendors (aggregate IIIF
content and other content)
• Selective aggregators
o Subject specific (e.g. musiclibs, or a portal for
17th century manuscripts)
o Virtual collections that span institutions
• Shared interface for tooling
o Support search tools loosely coupled to rest of
ecosystem, aggregate own content

10. Discovery TSG
established Q4 2016
Well attended bi-
weekly calls

11. 1. Crawling and Harvesting
How does a service find and get descriptions of all
available IIIF resources?
IIIF allows remote content use – no need to harvest
images etc., just descriptions
• Format for publishing lists of resources
• Recommendations for processing those lists
• Validation service that checks the lists
• Registry of institutions’ lists
• Reference implementations for list generators and
consumers

12. Harvesting approaches...
• IIIF Collections
• Sitemaps
o with ResourceSync
o with IIIF Extensions
o with HTTP layer Extensions
• Schema.org
• ActivityStreams 2.0
All have pros and cons... ongoing discussion in
Discovery TSG calls (and later this week...)

13. Harvesting discussions informed
by experiments including:
• Europeana and National Library
of Wales
• NCSU
• ResourceSync
https://www.slideshare.net/NunoFreire2/new-approaches-for-data-acquisition-at-europeana-iii

14. 2. Content Indexing
IIIF Presentation API provides information to support
presentation only – does not facilitate fielded or
advanced search
But... provides facilities for linking to external
descriptions of the objects (in native metadata
formats)
• What common metadata formats do IIIF communities
use?
• What is best linking approach?
• How should one link back to the IIIF resource?

15. XYZ
METS/
ALTO
METS/
ALTO
seeAlso
METS/
ALTO
DC
DC
DC
DC
seeAlso
XYZ XYZ
seeAlso
Common IIIF Presentation
API descriptions
Community specific
metadata
Newspapers
DPLA / Europeana
Community XYZ
???

16. Great instructions for data
providers on musiclibs:
• use IIIF descriptions
• use related to link back to
provider site
• use attribution, license,
logo
• use seeAlso for structured
metadata

17. 3. Change Notification
After successful initial harvesting, how can services
stay up-to-date with changes?
• Avoid re-crawling
• Easier to stay up to date in a timely fashion
• Easier on the providing organization
• More efficient to index only known changes
Expect work on notifications only after harvesting and
indexing. Might involve a central hub for distribution of
notifications

18. 4. Import to Viewers
IIIF designed to allow re-use in different contexts, with
different viewing applications, as appropriate to user
needs
• Specification of how content providers and
discovery applications can allow the user to import
the IIIF content into externally hosted viewers
• Recommendations around consistent UI/UX patterns
• Validation service for the import process
• Reference implementations for generators and
consumers

19. Recent call for
import use cases
Now 16 to review

20. Sub-group (Drew, Ed, Rashmi,
Simeon) to:
• Review existing and new
use cases
• Consider changes to the
current approach
• Draft a v0.1 specification for
TSG and broader review
before standard editorial
process

21. That’s all
folks…More information:
http://iiif.io/community/groups/discovery/
http://iiif.io/community/groups/discovery/charter/
and links therein
Adirondacks, NY, USA, early snowfall 2015-10