IIIF Friday fun: New implementations and grants
Every week great new digital collections debut online, frequently accompanied by world-class interaction design that provides top-notch engagement with cultural heritage materials. But this week was exceptional in the volume of exciting releases, so we thought we’d do a quick Friday Fun round-up, IIIF Edition.
J. Paul Getty Trust’s “12 Sunsets” and Research Collections Viewer
The hits just keep coming from the Getty (a IIIF Consortium member), which earlier this Spring released the Animal Crossing Art Generator to great Internet acclaim.
This week they released “12 Sunsets,” a collaboration with the Stamen design firm, providing an elegant, interactive connection to the history of Los Angeles through the lens of iconic artist Ed Ruscha and some 65,000 photographs taken along Sunset Boulevard over the course of 50 years.
We were fortunate enough to get a lovely write-up of the project from David Newbury, Head of Software at the J. Paul Getty Trust, who also made the important connection to the Getty’s new Research Collections Viewer, and highlighted IIIF as a crucial piece of infrastructure that makes the development of tools like these easier than if they had to reinvent similar mechanisms.
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.
Congratulations to the entire team at the Getty for the wonderful work on these projects.
Exhibit tool from University of St Andrews
IIIF isn’t always the simplest technology for end users to grok (though we’re working on improving this!), but another release from this week from the University of St Andrews features a promising tool for teaching and presenting with IIIF materials: https://exhibit.so/
According to the site they’ve just debuted:
A IIIF storytelling tool from The University of St Andrews. Created by Mnemoscene with support from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.
Exhibit was developed in response to the challenge of providing an engaging and interactive experience using the museums and special collections. It addresses the sensory and tactile encounters students would have with this original material. Currently in beta testing, Exhibit is built using the Universal Viewer, an open source IIIF viewer used internationally by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
See an example here: https://exhibit.so/exhibits/CroUAX4iXUatej7Jy8aP
Other compelling aspects include the ability to use multiple images/manifests in an exhibit, and an impressive integration of 3D models made possible by this project’s use of components from the Universal Viewer (there is still no formal 3D integration in terms of IIIF specs, though there’s a very active community group exploring this).
National Gallery of Art
On the IIIF Slack #Museums channel, someone from the National Gallery of Art (a IIIF Consortium member) shared the new Maps section of The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma, “A Project of the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, in Association with the Archivio di Stato di Roma and the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca.”
What I love about the interaction on this page is the simple “shopping cart” design element that lets users add maps of interest to a queue, which then gives them the option of opening them all at once in a Mirador viewer for comparison.
Curation Board from the Center for Open Data in the Humanities
I’d also like to highlight another tool from the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (affiliated with IIIF Consortium member The National Institute of Informatics) which was featured in the last IIIF Newsletter, described here by my colleague Meg O’Hearn:
IIIF Curation Board
A new tool–the IIIF Curation Board–has been added to the IIIF Curation Platform. The IIIF Curation Board mimics a whiteboard or a light table that allows you to freely place curated images on a flat surface, assisting in image grouping.
The descriptive text in that link is in Japanese, but the interaction speaks for itself, which you can see here: http://codh.rois.ac.jp/software/iiif-curation-board/demo/?curation=https://mp.ex.nii.ac.jp/api/curation/json/e3f02f2f-152d-433c-9af4-427dfa05e915&lang=en
AudiAnnotate Project
And finally, a note of congratulations to UT Austin’s Tanya Clement and her project team for winning a $450,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the team’s AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project. We on the IIIF staff side are quite excited to help advise on this work and see it spur further adoption and extension of the IIIF A/V capabilities. An essay published this week by Professor Clement describes a bit more of the context and process.
— Josh Hadro, Managing Director, IIIF Consortium
For more links to great IIIF projects as they are developed, sign up for the IIIF Newsletter, and consider joining the IIIF Consortium to help us support and promote amazing projects like these.
