The Western European heatwave coincided perfectly with this year’s IIIF Conference in Göttingen, causing many a delegate to hastily clamour to the thrift stores to obtain more appropriate attire for 36° temperatures. As usual, it was a vibrant week of sharing and showcasing; indeed, the conference displays exactly the tenets IIIF holds true to its heart.

Edinburgh were heavily involved again: on the planning committee, moderating sessions and giving two presentations. The first of these was a lightning talk about the possibilities of IIIF V3 Presentation API (and AV): with duration and time as a co-ordinate on the canvas, we can bring video and audio into our manifests as well as images and text. The three examples shown were Rhinos (embellishment of art), Recitals (contextualisation of musical instruments) and World Cup Finals (storytelling- the most ‘fun’ of the three (well, it is if you like football, and Scotland’s men’s team’s ability to crumble as badly  as the women’s))- to watch any of these, press Load URL JSON to bring the manifest in, and then press Play. The second talk was delivered jointly with Dieter Van Hassel from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, on the subject of Digital Objects in Archives Space, and the possibilities of embedding the Universal Viewer in that application.

A number of interesting possibilities cemented themselves in our minds this week. These included:

• (From a workshop) possibilities of overhauling our collections sites to use Mirador 3 as their content viewer now it is almost ready to use.
• (From a workshop) making use of Goobi in the light of the digital library workflow overhaul, DLIB001 (some very useful offline conversations took place around this project in general).
• Making use of Transkribus, the Handwriting Text Recognition tool, with its IIIF possibilities.
• Now we are nearly at the stage of being able to publish Rare Books and Archives manifests through a firm endpoint, pushing the content out to the Biblissima aggregator at the BnF.
• Making use of the great work with search and OCR that Mike Bennett has been doing on the Scottish Session Papers project to enhance manifests for Archives, Rare Books and Museums objects.
• Building on with the work of the Coimbra Collections site in our ability to serve up multiple institutions’ IIIF content (here Göttingen and Durham have given us their manifests to allow this).

It was, of course, another hugely worthwhile conference: there’s plenty of interesting development to come in IIIF both within the community and our institution. We’ll keep you informed as things happen.

Scott Renton- Library Digital Development