IIIF enables research and storytelling for two new digital projects at the Getty
Guest post by David Newbury, Head of Software, the J. Paul Getty Trust
Working at Getty, you’re never too far from an interesting collection of images: like most cultural heritage organizations, we’ve got shelves and shelves of interesting objects — and we’ve been lucky enough to have the resources to digitize at least a bit of it.
Recently, I’ve got to work with an amazing collection of photographs by the artist Ed Ruscha. For the past fifty years, Ed has been taking photos of some of Los Angeles’ most famous streets. He puts a camera in the back of a truck and drives down the street, taking photos of first one side, then the other. Ed’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip is probably the best-known result of this work — but there are hundreds of thousands of photos, many of which nobody has ever seen before.
The challenge for our team has been figuring out how to build a digital experience that makes sense of this vast collection. The archive contains over 500k negatives, 140k of which have been digitized, cataloged, and arranged in the way that Ed and his team stored and organized the material.
Preserving that arrangement is so important: the arrangement helps us visualize Ed’s process. It helps tell the story of how he stored the images on old film reels, and it lets us track the order he photographed the streets. We can use the arrangement to find which part of the collection he used to make his books: that some negatives have been cut out and spliced back onto the end of the reel. It’s an amazing window into Ed’s mind and artistic process.
The photos are not only a document of an artist’s working practice, though; they’re also a wonderful visual history of Los Angeles. To tell that story, we could order the images as pictures of a street on a given year. Re-ordering the images this way hides Ed’s process, but shows us a photographic geography of the city. “Next” and “Previous” map to East and West. What had been an artist’s archive becomes a drive down 1966’s Sunset Boulevard.
Neither of these is “correct”: each ordering tells a different story about the collection. If we had to lay these images out in on a table, we’d be forced to choose between these stories: technology means that we don’t have to make that choice! We can generate multiple orderings and represent each one as a IIIF Manifest.
Within the GLAM space, the IIIF Presentation API commonly serves as a proxy for an object — the pages of a manuscript or the front and back of a photograph. With the Ruscha collection, our default “object” is a single photo negative. If an external researcher wants to compare this image against a copy of Ed’s book held in another library, our digitized negative will carry our context with it — the catalog record, the link back to the collection, and the artist’s copyright.
We can also have another Manifest that represents each of the reels that the negatives were stored on, and another for each of the streets. These alternate presentations are not proxies for an object: instead, they’re presentations of images. Each represents a specific, deliberate order that communicates an idea through the context of the surrounding images. IIIF didn’t invent the idea of a multiplicity of contexts, but the standard makes it simple to do so consistently across applications.
And those applications matter: they’re what allow us to build experiences on top of those images and their contexts. A Manifest can be viewed within a IIIF viewer like the Universal Viewer: it excels at providing cross-collection functionality. But the same Manifest can be used as part of a unique experience — one designed to provide context to a given ordering. At Getty, we’ve built two such experiences to highlight the two perspectives on the Ruscha photographs.
First, we use IIIF throughout the Research Collection Viewer, our new archival viewing platform. Ruscha was one of the test cases for the Viewer — we knew if we could tell the story of this collection, we’d have a platform that can help scholars dive into the most complex of archives. Here, we use two manifests: one to represent the object, and another to represent the archival context. We use them to display the images on the page, and we also provide them to users to further their research with tools like Mirador.
Second, together with our partners at Stamen Design, we built 12 Sunsets. 12 Sunsets is designed to tell that story of Los Angeles and to give you that sense of exploring the history of Sunset Blvd. You can use it to drive a car up and down the street, watching the thousands of images scroll past, and can choose which year (or years) you want to see. In many ways, you can experience yourself what it must have been like to be Ed Ruscha as he took those pictures fifty years ago.
12 Sunsets does not expose IIIF to the user — it doesn’t need to meet the goals of the experience. But IIIF meant we didn’t have to do anything new to serve up these thousands of images, and it meant that the work we did to accommodate the crazy demands it puts on our infrastructure improved the experience across Getty.
As a technical standard, IIIF lets us spend more time building experiences and less time managing images — it’s a huge benefit. But more importantly, IIIF makes it easy for us to take advantage of digital’s ability to show images in different contexts — to tell the stories that we think matter. And that’s the real win for us.
