Everything You Always Wanted to Know About IIIF* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
Hello and welcome.
What follows is an account of all the questions that were asked as part of my session at the Museum Computer Network conference 2017, in which I invited participants to ask anything they wanted to about the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Questions were selected using the Lean Coffee format and answered by myself and/or IIIF experts that were embedded in the crowd.
Questions are in popularity order, and I’ve added a few at the end that we didn’t have time to cover during the session (there were fifty Post-Its so quite a range to choose from!). Here goes.
Q: What’s your 30 second ‘elevator pitch’ for IIIF?
A: IIIF frees up your images to be creatively reused. Because scaling, cropping and zooming become trivial operations, you’re free to concentrate on the important task of providing a great user experience. You also benefit from great image viewing software written and maintained by other people, so no need to reinvent the wheel.
That was only 18 seconds, so I’d use the remaining time before we reached our floor to ask them what’s stopping them joining the bandwagon :)
Q: How do I get started with IIIF?
A: Begin by reading this quick-start page on the IIIF site. Then the next bit is generally to select and install suitable server software, then upload your images to it in a compatible format (JPEG2000 or pyramidal TIFF). Voilà, you have implemented the IIIF Image API!
If you want to go further and implement the Presentation API too, you need to generate some JSON manifests, as described below.
Q: What about Digital Asset Management Systems?
A: IIIF support from DAMS is a hot topic. Early this year, the community sent an open letter to DAMS vendors, signed by over forty different institutions, requesting better IIIF support. Currently only a few vendors fully support it (Luna Imaging is at the forefront), but more will hopefully follow soon.
In the meantime, DAMS can still be very useful in the pipeline to prepare images. E.g. bulk-exporting in JPEG2000 format, or in other high-res versions suitable for conversion and upload to your own servers. You may also be able to use ‘shims’ to allow you to retrieve images directly from your DAMS even if it doesn’t yet support the Image API URL syntax.
Q: Where are good IIIF resources and tutorials?
A: One good place to start when looking for IIIF-related resources is iiif-awesome, a curated set of links to external pages, grouped by theme.
It includes a tutorials section with constantly updated links, and with more workshops being run all the time (and publishing their output), this should get better over time.
If your questions aren’t answered there, hit the iiif-discuss mailing list and ask for more specifics. To find fellow museum professionals who are using IIIF already, the Museums Community Group has a mailing list, Slack channel and regular screenshare meetings.
Q: Are there any fun or creative uses of IIIF?
A: Why, yes there are! The experiments and fun section of iiif-awesome lists over a dozen different examples where people have used IIIF to create radically different experiences from the standard zoomable-viewers.
There’s also an example of a beautifully simple comparison interface from the V&A.
Finally, I myself have given a talk called “fun with IIIF” several times. You can see a PDF version, or follow the #funWithIIIF hashtag on Twitter for the latest installments.
Many people suspected this question as being a plant, but I promise it wasn’t!
Q: What resources and skillsets do you need to implement IIIF?
A: For the Image API, you need someone capable of installing and configuring a compatible server. If you’ve got access to a sysadmin who can set up and configure a normal web server, you’re in the right ballpark. For the presentation API, you just need someone who understands JSON, and can read and understand the spec to generate manifests for your collection objects.
Q: How do I set up and manage an image server?
A: Once you’ve got a suitable server machine and installed software such as IIPImage, it’s simply a matter of getting your images onto its hard drive or attached storage. This means you need to develop a workflow where you can output high-res master images in either JPEG2000 or pyramidal TIFF format, and upload these to the server each time a new one is created.
Q: What is a manifest?
A: The long answer is here, but you can quickly get the gist by looking at other peoples’, such as this example from the Wellcome Library. Essentially, a manifest is just a JSON file that consists of several main sections, most of which are optional depending on your use-case. These are:
- top-level attributes that are boiler-plate required values, or e.g. ‘label’: the title of the image, or ‘license’: the associated copyright license
- ‘metadata’ that allows you to provide arbitrary key-value pairs that will be displayed by viewers such as Mirador and Universal Viewer. These don’t have to conform to any metadata schema, just simply provide the information you want to present.
- ‘sequences’ that provide the image(s) that your manifest describes, as a list of ‘canvases’.
- ‘structures’ that optionally group images into sections. E.g. chapters of a book.
- ‘service’, ‘related’, ‘seeAlso’ sections that optionally provide links to related resources or associated IIIF services such as the content search or authentication APIs.
Q: What about CMS integration?
A: The Omeka CMS has great IIIF support, both for consuming IIIF manifests and viewing images. As for Drupal, the IIIF Image Field module provides the ability to mix in IIIF resources to your content types.
Q: What about performance? Can you serve hundreds of concurrent image requests?
A: Yes, and many institutions do exactly this (e.g. the Wellcome Library, the British Library). The short answer is to use a combination of clustering and caching. The longer answer depends on what is supported by your image server software and hosting provider, and which technologies your developers are most comfortable with.
Q: What about audio and video?
A: Support for time-based media is actively being incorporated into the Presentation API version 3.0. The spec is in draft at the moment, but due to be finalised within the next few months, and several sample implementations exist already.
Q: What about 3D?
A: presenting 3D items is on the radar for the IIIF specifications, but there are some fundamental hurdles to overcome. Realistically, it is unlikely to become part of the official specs for a couple of years. In the meantime, however, there is lots of exciting work going on in the 3D space (pun intended), and Universal Viewer has some support for displaying 3D models (e.g. this example).
That’s it! Unfortunately we ran out of time, but if you still have burning questions you need answered, I’d suggest you ask the friendly iiif-discuss mailing list. Or, feel free to contact me directly at tristanr@cogapp.com.
I’d also like to say a big thank-you to all the other members of the IIIF community who were on hand during the session to add their own responses and examples.
Finally, once I got back to the office, I laid out all of the Post-Its in order of number of ticks. You can see all fifty of them on this page (on a background of a photo of space, just for fun), which make interesting reading to find out just what’s on museum people’s minds when it comes to IIIF in late 2017…
