IIIF

What is IIIF?

IIIF is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. IIIF is also an international community, backed by a consortium of leading cultural institutions, who develops and implements the IIIF API’s.

IIIF enables heritage institutions to share high-resolution images online with deep zoom, annotations, and side-by-side comparisons. It also fosters interoperability between previously isolated catalogs.

before IIIF: images and metadata are stuck in local management systems and on local websites.

Problem: systems are not interoperable with each other. They do not communicate.

IIIF extracts the information out of the systems.

Institutions package the images and metadata in a uniform jacket of JSON code (the ‘manifest’). The JSON code is prepared according to IIIF international standards.

The IIIF community is developing independent tools and websites that recognise the manifests to bring in images in a unified environment.

IIIF @ RMAH

One of the objectives of the CUNE-IIIF-ORM project would be to provide the opportunity to sustainably embed IIIF into the RMAH data infrastructures and digitization workflows.

Integration of IIIF standards into the museum infrastructure

The implementation of IIIF standards offers significant benefits for the sustainable retrieval, presentation and reusability of digital collection data. To make the integration within the museum as efficient and structured as possible, this process was divided into two core tasks.

Task 1: Collection analysis and publication strategy

The first step in this task is the preparation of a guideline document containing criteria to determine which objects are suitable for publication in IIIF format. Based on these guidelines, an analysis of existing collections will then be carried out. The aim is to identify which collections should be prioritised for IIIF publication.

Task 2: Creation and implementation of an automated workflow

For successful IIIF integration, it is essential that existing systems – in particular the Collection Management System (CMS) and the Digital Asset Management System (DAM) – are thoroughly analysed. Both systems contain metadata that needs to be linked to images to achieve complete IIIF manifests.

An automated workflow will be developed that synchronises metadata from both systems. This workflow is applicable to both existing and newly added objects. This uses AI technology to analyse images and automatically match the correct metadata to the correct image. This significantly increases the accuracy and efficiency of the publishing process.