IIIF: you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs!

Abstract

Library and University Collections adopted IIIF as a consortium member in 2016. This was an important step for the division: we've seen it as a vital framework and standard for beautification of digital resources streamlined, more sensible content workflows annotation and teaching potential sharing images and data with other, open-minded institutions …and we feel that in our constant drive to be at the forefront of library tech, it’s definitely something we should use.

Since last year’s Repo Fringe, when we were talking about all of this theoretically, we’ve made a fair bit of progress. We went live in December when our image repository- LUNA- was upgraded to a IIIF-compliant version. Since then… the first tranche of our collections.ed websites have had the OpenSeadragon viewer embedded, saving clicks through to the LUNA system the Vernon CMS is attritionally having its jpegs replaced with iiif urls, saving space and hassle two brand new sites (St Cecilia’s Hall and the Coimbra group) have been built using IIIF from the ground up- the latter using the Cantaloupe server (as it houses a lot of non-Edinburgh material) on-the-fly manifest creation is being generated for museums objects and special collections the Mahabharata scroll is viewable in that format using Universal Viewer the Scottish Session Papers are incorporating IIIF and Tesseract OCR metadata games is getting a facelift exhibitions are moving to IIIF-enabled Omeka and most impressively… we have developed Polyanno, a world-leading tool for annotation, translation and transcription, which is proving popular amongst the big players in the community.

Our memorandum with the NLS means we have an obvious basis to show how we can collaborate with other institutions, which is one of IIIF’s major strengths. We would hope, though, that IIIF’s open-ness means we can start to interoperate globally in the virtual space.