The document discusses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) which aims to make digital images, manuscripts, and other cultural heritage objects more accessible and shareable online. It describes how IIIF defines common standards for presenting digital objects through the use of manifests, canvases, and annotations. Manifests provide metadata to drive viewing experiences across institutions. Canvases define spaces for content, and annotations allow information like descriptions, transcriptions, and related resources to be linked to canvases. This allows digital objects to be recombined and explored through annotation.

1. “You know, for content”

2. An Introduction to IIIF
Tom Crane
Technical Director
Digirati Ltd

3. Let’s just put stuff online…

4. Common themes
• Book readers/viewers/page turners
• Deep Zoom
• Transcriptions, OCR, full text
• Annotation, comments, content creation related to the object
• Linking to other objects
• Some bespoke format for delivering a sequence of images to a
bespoke viewer

5. Tens of thousands of silos of non-interoperable content
Grain elevators, Caldwell, Idaho, by Lee Russell, 1941.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsac.1a34206/

6. The reinvention of wheels
• Billions of digitised hi-res images of cultural heritage
• Millions of resources – books, maps, manuscripts…
• Thousands of beautiful snowflakes*
• We want to share the best tools and platforms
• We want to mix content and share resources across institutions,
across the world
• We want to bring our own tools to use with other people’s digital
objects

7. The Presentation API

8. The Presentation API

9. How do we do that?
Let’s make a standard!
Hmm, we’ve got all of cultural heritage to worry about. And more.

11. What happened there?
• I think it went downhill after someone said “author”

12. • How can I provide enough information for a software client to
present a complex digital object, AND provide a good user
experience?
• Don’t get entangled in descriptive metadata standards… especially in
libraries, museums and archives.
• We’re doing something else.
Regroup…

13. Descriptive Semantics Presentation Semantics
The Human Presentation API is just how we navigate the world

14. More Human Presentation API

15. Digital Surrogate
I still have my cultural awareness when looking at a digital surrogate
…but the computer needs assistance in presenting that digital
surrogate to me
It needs to be mediated by metadata that can
drive a viewing experience so my human cultural awareness can take
over again

16. IIIF: Two Core APIs
“get pixels” via a
simple, RESTful,
web service
Just enough metadata to
drive a remote viewing
experience
Image API Presentation API

17. • Descriptive metadata
doesn’t help us get
pixels on screen
• Read the pages
• Look at the brush strokes
• See the film grain
• IIIF Presentation provides
• A model for describing digital representations of objects
• A format for software - viewing tools, annotation clients, web sites - to
consume and render the objects and the statements made about them
• The model defines a shared abstract space for rendering this content

19. Manifests for things
A book. A painting. A film. A
sculpture. An opera. A long-
playing record. A manuscript. A
map. An aural history field
recording. A videocassette of a
public information film. A
laboratory notebook. A diary.
A manifest is what you open in
your player/viewer/annotation
workbench

20. A IIIF manifest
• …is a markup document for presenting digital objects
(not describing them)
• It’s also JSON. It’s also linked data.
• Driven by cultural heritage use cases, but not limited to them
• By publishing a manifest, you publish a list of one or more abstract
spaces to the web, which you can paint content on via annotation.
• Other people can make statements about - annotate - these spaces too.

21. Canvases for views,
Annotations for content
By publishing this:

22. …you define a 2D space for content:
(0,0)
(3110, 2102)

23. Familiar concept of annotation

24. IIIF Concept
{
"@id": "https://wellcomelibrary.org/iiif/b22031261/canvas/c0",
"@type": "sc:Canvas",
"width": 10000,
"height": 15000,
...
}

27. Same canvas, multiple images

28. Recombination through annotation

33. Annotations provide content
• Any web resource
• Images, video, sound, text
• The same mechanism for association with the canvas is used for all
the other things we want to say, or other people want to say

34. Saying things about objects and collections
• Why is this object in the exhibition?
• Here is a blog post about this painting
• There’s no video available here, but this is the screenplay for this
missing 20 minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons
• …and here are some production stills for 49m23s-51m17s
• “Tourteletes in fryture” means “Small fig pies basted with honey”
• Here is the curator’s essay for this collection
• Here is a transcription of this letter
• Here is an article about this correspondence
• These four engravings are all views from this location

36. All these things can be said with annotations

37. Another perspective
• This slide deck could be a IIIF manifest
• Each slide could be a canvas
• Text, images, audio and video annotated onto each canvas is the content
• I could put an image of a digitised manuscript page on each slide, send you the
deck representing the whole manuscript, and you could make notes on it
• Unlike .ppt, IIIF is JSON
• Specifically, JSON-LD: it’s also linked data
• It’s a lot easier to do things on the web with it
• Canvases have stable IDs so I can talk about your stuff
• We can do things with what people say about the stuff…

38. How do we find all these annotations? - The Search API

39. …so far only two dimensions:
(0,0)
(3110, 2102)

40. British Library
Save our Sounds
Images: British Library

41. I have a vinyl album (LP)
It has two discs, each with 2 sides
I have made digital transfers of the discs; one file per side
I have made digital images of the sleeve, the liner notes and the disc labels.
AV archival item

42. Scenario 12
• I have two cassettes, each with two sides.
• They contain a single oral history interview.
• The interview starts on the first side of the
first cassette and ends on the final side of
the second cassette.
• I have made digital transfers from the
cassettes; one file per side.
• I have a plain text transcript with timing
indicators

43. Annotate time-based media onto the canvas
You can do this today, but you can’t target the time dimension
Without that only the very simplest use case is possible

46. “You know, for content”