Tag Archives: library

Edinburgh hosts international IIIF event

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Jointly with the National Library of Scotland, the University hosted the annual IIIF Showcase and Working Meeting from December 3-6. As consortial members, it was a good opportunity for both institutions to raise their profile within this fast-growing community, and for delegates from all over the world to see Edinburgh in winter while making the most of face-to-face discussions regarding recent developments and the future direction of the framework.

The Showcase took place in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and this reasonably light-touch session offered an introduction to the concepts and tools and for the host institutions to talk about what they’ve produced so far. It was also IIIF’s new managing director Josh Hadro’s first week in the job: a great way for him to see the community in action! The afternoon saw candidates repair to the NLS and Main Library for breakout sessions in key content areas (Archives, Museums, Digital Scholarship) as well as deeply technical and ‘getting started’ sessions. To finish, everyone then made for St Cecilia’s Hall for a round-up of the day; this was an appropriate setting, as we’ve employed IIIF in the museum’s corresponding collections site.

The Working Group meeting ran over the succeeding three days, in the ECCI and Main Library. This was a smaller undertaking than the Showcase, but it still attracted 70 delegates. There were some really meaty discussions about the direction of the framework: cookbooks and use cases; updates to the Mirador viewer; enhancing the APIs and registries (including more work on authentication and various types of search), and looking at the amazing potential of 3D and AV (e.g. subtitle support, musical notation written as a piece plays), which is something we at the University are well placed to start work on. Discussions about the direction of the community and outreach group took place, as well; this session was led by our (until very recently) very own Claire Knowles, now Assistant Director at Leeds University Library. The first meeting of the Technical Review Committee, which rubber-stamps the specs, took place at the event too, in the huge Dining Room at Teviot.

With increasing engagement across the industry, IIIF’s future looks very bright indeed.

Thanks to everyone that helped out over the week, with a particularly big round of applause to IIIF’s Technical Co-ordinator Glen Robson, who is well-known to many people in the Library due to his previous incarnation as Development Manager at the National Library of Wales.

To (self-indulgently) end the post, here is a little hi-res illustration of the work that we have done at Edinburgh with IIIF.

This is heavily annotated! If you click the speech bubbles, you will turn on annotations, some of which link out to relevant websites (links have a dotted line under the text). Also, the Mirador viewer does comparison very well, so if you

  • click the four-square icon in the top left
  • select ‘Add Slot Right’
  • click ‘Add Item’
  • double click the manifest (‘IIIF Highlights…’)
  • select the right image

…you can see the previous version of this picture to see where improvements were made. All of this will go better if you make it full-screen!

Library Digital Development investigate IIIF

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Quick caveat: this post is a partner to the one Claire Knowles has written about our signing up to the IIIF Consortium, so the explanation of the acronym will not be explained here!

The Library Digital Development team decided to investigate the standard due to its appearance at every Cultural Heritage-related conference we’d attended in 2015, and we thought it would be apposite to update everyone with our progress.

First things first: we have managed to make some progress on displaying IIIF formatting to show what it does. Essentially, the standard allows us to display a remotely-served image on a web page, with our choice of size, rotation, mirroring and cropped section without needing to write CSS, HTML, or use Photoshop to manipulate the image; everything is done through the URL. The Digilib IIIF Server was very simple to get up and running (for those that are interested, it is distributed as a Java webapp that runs under Apache Tomcat), so here it is in action, using the standard IIIF URI syntax of [http://[server domain]/[webapp location]/[specific image identifier]/[region]/[size]/[mirror][rotation]/[quality].[format]]!

The URL for the following (image 0070025c.jpg/jp2) would be:

[domain]/0070025/full/full/0/default.jpg

Poster

This URL is saying, “give me image 0070025 (in this case an Art Collection poster), at full resolution, uncropped, unmirrored and unrotated: the standard image”.

[domain]/0070025/300,50,350,200/200,200/!236/default.jpg

posterbit

This URL says, “give me the same image, but this time show me co-ordinates 300px in from the left, 50 down from the top, to 350 in from the left, to 200 down from the top (of the original); return it at a resolution of 200px x 200px, rotate it at an angle of 236 degrees, and mirror it”.

The server software is only one part of the IIIF Image API: the viewer is very important too. There are a number of different viewers around which will serve up high-resolution zooming of IIIF images, and we tried integrating OpenSeaDragon with our Iconics collection to see how it could look when everything is up and running (this is not actually using IIIF interaction at this time, rather Microsoft DeepZoom surrogates, but it shows our intention). We cannot show you the test site, unfortunately, but our plan is that all our collections.ed.ac.uk sites, such as Art and Mimed, which have a link to the LUNA image platform, can have that replaced with an embedded high-res image like this. At that point, we will be able to hide the LUNA collection from the main site, thus saving us from having to maintain metadata in two places.

deepzoom

We have also met, as Claire says, the National Library’s technical department to see how they are doing with IIIF. They have implemented rather a lot using Klokan’s IIIFServer and we have investigated using this, with its integrated viewer on both Windows and Docker. We have only done this locally, so cannot show it here, but it is even easier to set up and configure than Digilib. Here’s a screenshot, to show we’re not lying.

eyes

Our plan to implement the IIIF Image API involves LUNA though. We already pay them for support and have a good working relationship with them. They are introducing IIIF in their next release so we intend to use that as a IIIF Server. It makes sense- we use LUNA for all our image management, it saves us having to build new systems, and because the software generates JP2K zoomable images, we don’t need to buy anything to do that (this process is not open, no matter how Open Source the main IIIF software may be!). We expect this to be available in the next month or so, and the above investigation has been really useful, as the experience with other servers will allow us to push back to LUNA to say “we think you need to implement this!”. Here’s a quick prospective screenshot of how to pick up a IIIF URL from the LUNA interface.

IIIFMenu

We still need to investigate more viewers (for practical use) and servers (for investigation), and we need to find out more about the Presentation API, annotations etc., but we feel we are making good progress nonetheless.

Scott Renton, Digital Developer

Bridging Gaps at the British Museum

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IMG_1790The overwhelming setting of the British Museum played host to this year’s Museums Computer Group “Museums and the Web” Conference, and as usual, a big turnout from museums institutions all over the UK came, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. The theme (“Bridging Gaps and Making Connections”) was intended to encourage thought about identifying creative spaces between physical museums collections and digital developments, where such spaces are perhaps too big, and how they can be exploited. As usual, there was far too much interesting content to cover fully in a blogpost- everything was thought-provoking, but I’ve picked out a few highlights.

Two projects highlighted collaboration between museums, which can be creatively explosive, and immediately improve engagement. Russell Dornan at The Wellcome Institute showed us #MuseumInstaSwap, where museums paired off and filled their social media feeds with the other museum’s content. Raphael Chanay at MuseoMix, meanwhile, arguably took this a step further by getting multiple institutions to bring their objects to a neutral location (Iron Bridge in Shropshire, Derby Silk Mill), and forming teams to build creative prototypes out of them across the digital and physical spaces. Could our museums collections be exploited in similar ways? Who could we partner up with?

I like to think that our “digital and physical” teams in L&UC collaborate very effectively. Keynote speaker John Coburn from TWAM (Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums) spoke of the importance of this intra-institution collaboration. You will (almost) never find a project that is run entirely from within the digital or physical sphere (Fiona Talbott from the HLF confirmed this- 510 of 512 recent bids had digital outputs relating to physical content), and the ability of the digital area and the content providers to communicate and work together is key. One very good example of this was the Tributaries app, built with sound artists, the history team, archives and so on, to put together an immersive audio experience of lost Tyneside voices from World War I. He also spoke of their TNT (Try New Things) initiative (also creatively explosive!) where staff sign up to do innovation with the collections, effectively in their spare time. With the Innovation Fund encouraging creativity, how do we work this into our daily lives? Can we? If not, how do we incentivise people to do it outwith their spare time? One of the gloomier observations of the day was that, with austerity, there is less and less money in the sector, which is likely to get worse after next month’s spending review. This austerity can breed creativity, though, and it’s good for digital, because people need to ‘work smarter’.

Another really interesting project is going on at the Tate, where they are combining their content with the Khan Academy learning platform. Rebecca Sinker and colleagues showed us how content can be levered and resurrected through a series of video tutorials around the content (be they archival, technical, biographical etc). Pushing the collaborative textual content from the comments area on the tutorials through to social media allows further engagement and new perspectives on the museum objects. Speaking personally, I have had little exposure to our VLE, but I’m quite sure that developing an interface between it and our collections sites could be highly beneficial.

That’s all the tip of the iceberg, though, so take a look at the programme link at the top to find out about lots of other interesting projects.

Outside of the lecture theatre, I had some really interesting conversations with people who have exactly the same problems as ourselves: building image management workflows, incorporating technological enhancements to content-driven websites, and thinking about beacon technology (the sponsors, Beacontent, deserver top marks for the name at least). Additionally, a tour of The Samsung Digital Discovery Centre– where state of the art technology meets British Museum content to improve the experience for children, teenagers, and families- was highly informative.

Scott Renton, Digital Developer

Where’s Dolly? Another metadata game

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DollyTile

The Towards Dolly project, showcasing research from genetics at the Roslin Institute, has helped surface lots of interesting material within the library, not least at the current exhibition. One of its outputs was the Science On A Plate subproject, a Wellcome-funded digitisation of 3,500 glass plate slides.

We’ve put these into our metadata games infrastructure, to allow social tagging of the slides, and- while they are well-described- improve their keywording to allow superior faceting in the LUNA application, making the collection more searchable. The game follows the same methodology as the Tag It! Find It! art game- tag ten images, and vote on ten, and build up a high score. It has the additional incentive though, of a hidden Dolly The Sheep image. The lucky user who comes across this image first will be lavishly rewarded (i.e. they will almost certainly get an L&UC calendar!)!!

The game was launched in time for a talk given by Gavin Willshaw, Clare Button and Claire Knowles at The Central Library– a great example of our Library engaging with the wider community- on Tuesday September 29, and will be featured again at Ada Lovelace Day on October 13. You don’t need to be at these events to play the game though- it’s there for you to have a go at any time you like, at librarylabs.ed.ac.uk. You’ll need to login via EASE.

Scott Renton- Digital Development

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