The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) 2017 Conference in The Vatican is intended for a wide range of participants and interested parties, including digital image repository managers, content curators, software developers, scholars, and administrators at libraries, museums, cultural heritage institutions, software firms, and other organizations working with digital images and audio/visual materials. The conference will consist of two events with separate registration:
IIIF Conference, 7-9 June (3 days of plenary and parallel sessions). The pre-conference Mirador Viewer and Universal Viewer group meetings will take place on Monday, June 5, prior to the Showcase event and conference.
The long term preservation of digital media, especially of still images and moving images, still poses a serious problem. The traditional digital archiving requires separate archiving masters which usually represent high quality, high resolution images which are preserved according to the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) standards. However, in order to allow access to the images, several variants of the same images in different quality and resolution levels have to be prepared and made available. Since also the access infrastructure represents an important asset, it needs to be preserved also (at least backed up). As a result, a basically redundant dual infrastructure for preservation of digital data has to be established and maintained. Using the IIIF framework these two preservation infrastructures collapse to one only, since most implementations of the IIIF-framework allow to use the preservation master as base for access. This however requires, that the IIIF master contains and preserves all relevant metadata. The open source SIPI (Simple Image Presentation Interface) provides some extra features to support long term preservation. Thus a proper implementation of the IIIF framework in memory institutions may significantly reduce the burden and cost of long term preservation.
