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.
IIIF allows researchers to work with digital images – manuscripts, photos, newspapers, paintings – across repositories and institutions. IIIF allows researchers to bring together, compare, and annotate high-quality, deeply zoomable images of now-broken books and now-scattered collections – without interfering with repositories’ control over the images and without running afoul of intellectual property concerns. This has made IIIF an excellent framework for teaching initiatives, as exemplified—among others—in Benjamin Albritton’s “Fellow Travelers: The Canterbury Tales and IIIF”, which lays out pedagogical approaches to medieval manuscripts in the IIIF universe; and in the Bodleian Libraries’ collection of use cases, which reflects on IIIF’s uses in an art history or manuscript studies classroom.My presentation draws on these initiatives: I present an undergraduate-focused teaching module that—instead of focusing on the subject matter illuminated by IIIF-compliant images—focuses on IIIF itself and the light it sheds on the lives and risks of digital archives. Rather than use IIIF in a history of the book or Chaucer course, the module discusses IIIF in a Digital Humanities 101 classroom, in an undergraduate-focused introduction to digital archives.
The module consists of the following: 1. Lectures: Making Digital Archives and Sustaining Digital Archives. Along with other standards and strategies, IIIF is featured in discussions of public access to cultural heritage and in discussions of data sharing and preservation initiatives, from LOCKSS to linked open data.
2. Role-playing Scenarios: these scenarios invite students to act as data curation consultants at different stages of a digital humanities project, from collection digitization to the creation and exhibition of a scholarly argument in digital form. This presentation provides a brief overview of the emerging module (lecture notes and scenarios); makes it openly available; and invites the expertise of the IIIF community to crowdsource a richer and more realistic collection of problem-based learning scenarios.
By the end of this module, students will be familiar with key terms: archive, metadata, migration, emulation, open-source, LOCKSS, dark archives, data silos, linked data, URI, interoperability, Dublin Core, MARC, MODS, IIIF. Students will understand the importance of portable data, open-source software platforms, and community building in the lives of DH projects and of digital collections. And they will be familiar with IIIF—and with the questions and problems to which IIIF provides answers.
