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 printed books and manuscripts repository of the Goettingen State and University Library contains more than 60.000 digitized historical books, manuscripts, maps, and scholarly collections, with a total of 20 million pages. In the process of renewing the technical infrastructure and appearance of the repository it was obvious that the scientific community would benefit much more from a standardized API, allowing these documents to be easily used and shared across different institutions and technologies. It was concluded to implement the IIIF Image, Presentation and Search APIs. The project team created a front-end as an open source web application, with attention to reusability and modularity, enabling users to browse, search, and view the documents – along with the full texts where available. Manifests are generated directly from the search index based on Apache Solr. This approach is much faster than parsing large metadata files (METS/MODS) on-the-fly, especially in case of some massive documents with up to 10.000 pages. The results will be online in mid-spring, after the testing phase is completed. It is envisaged to use this solution in several other services with similar requirements like DigiZeitschriften (repository for German academic journals – https://www.digizeitschriften.de/startseite/), Nationallizenzen (repository for collaboratively licensed academic resources – http://nl.sub.uni-goettingen.de/), and the Specialized Information Services Programme of Mathematics (https://fidmath.de/en/), the latter of which aims to embed the manuscripts of the Central Archive for German Mathematics Bequests (https://fidmath.de/en/historical-mathematics/zamn/). The future goal is to combine these heterogeneous corpora via IIIF.
