The British Library's implementation of the IIIF-based Universal Viewer. Presentation for 'Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts: British Library and Beyond', London, November 2016
Escorts Service Basapura ☎ 7737669865☎ Book Your One night Stand (Bangalore)
Digitised Manuscripts and the British Library's new IIIF viewer
1. Digitised Manuscripts and the
British Library's new IIIF viewer
Dr. Mia Ridge, @mia_out
Digital Curator, British Library
digitalresearch@bl.uk @BL_DigiSchol
Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts: British Library and Beyond
London, November 2016
2. Overview
• The 'old' manuscript viewers
• The Library's new viewer
• Underlying standards - what is IIIF and the
Universal Viewer, and why do we care?
19. What is IIIF?
IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has
the following goals:
• To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and
rich access to image-based resources hosted around
the world.
• To define a set of common application programming
interfaces that support interoperability between image
repositories.
• To develop, cultivate and document shared
technologies, such as image servers and web clients,
that provide a world-class user experience in viewing,
comparing, manipulating and annotating images.
Source: http://iiif.io/about
20. What problems does IIIF solve?
Grain elevators, Caldwell, Idaho, by Lee Russell, 1941.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsac.1a34206/
I have been acting as product owner, helping represent the needs of users in regular meetings with project team (e.g. developers)
functionality of Digitised Manuscripts and the Universal Viewer, and your name came up. The idea is to go through these platforms and explain how they can (or can’t) be used.
You may be familiar with this interface currently used for digitised manuscripts. Has zoom, page controls to move next, back, start, end. Also navigate by folio number, get the link. You can pan around the image.
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_2737_f069r
Can display More Information.
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_2737_f069r
Can also view in various 'two page' views - as if the book was open, or both sides of the page.
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_2737_f069r
This is a more modern viewer designed for use with articles in the content management system. It's easier to see the information, and you can navigate by thumbnail more easily. It links back to the full manuscript site.
http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/hispano-moresque-haggadah-or-2737
This is the new viewer (with different material from the BL's collections). Several new features - always depending on whether an action is allowed for a particular item - including print (to bridge the gap for people used to reading room PCs), download (yay), the ability to send feedback, share/bookmark the direct link, embed on blogs and other webpages, display in full screen mode
Lots of debate over what metadata to display, and headings have to work for both printed heritage and unpublished manuscript items. Manuscripts not yet in the Digital Library System so may labels change as see them in reality. Adding 'Citation' display to encourage people to cite the item they actually consulted.
Share, bookmark. Added instructions based on usability tests. Including social media icons to encourage more sharing. Embedding has been successful for Wellcome for e.g. directory of prostitutes on newspaper site.
Full text search with autocomplete. Based on OCR. Need to deal better with errors in next version when review search results screen.
Will work differently when manuscripts have transcriptions as won't know exactly where on the page the search term is found.
Am working to have full text transcription download too.
A lot of the functions we've added might be specific to our needs, so they can be turned on and off in Settings, or at the system level. Also multilingual.
Tested with the longest manuscript scroll we knew of. Highlight box lets you jump around, need to think about metadata and chapters.
Usability testing involves showing typical users the interfaces in development and asking them to complete key tasks. Informal with reference desk staff, then with readers at Wellcome Library, offering free tea or coffee to readers. Formal with an agency. Updated interface as a result; also shared results back with community . Highlights reel helped convince others of need to improve user experience at particular points.
Underlying all this...
A community and a collection of web standards for manipulating and serving image resources (Image API), as well as structuring collections of these images (Presentation API).
Until recently, each cultural heritage institution has created their own silo: a repository of data and a bespoke viewer to consume it. The British Library alone has over 35! Makes it easy to share and re-use images. Not necessarily an interchange format for aggregators like Europeana, DPLA.
From IIIF for Deans etc - what problems is IIIF trying to solve?
Widening the re-use of cultural heritage objects in and beyond the cultural heritage community by using established and standard protocols
Decreasing the barriers to accessing digital objects bypassing time, clicks, interfaces, manual processes
Scholars (users) working with items from multiple repositories in one system for research, annotation, and teaching
Creating exhibits from multiple sources
Supporting framework and viewers/tools to attach standards-based annotations to images, such as commentary or tags
The Library's new viewer is a version of the Universal Viewer tailored for BL collections and users. 'Universal' is an aspiration - long way to go yet but big plans.
The Universal Viewer is just one of many potential players that implements the IIIF standard.
Mirador enables image annotation and comparison of images from repositories dispersed around the world. Can add a published IIIF manifest link to side-by-side viewer; added IIIF link on 'share' screen so can view next to items from other collections.
BL involved since the beginning in 2011, along with Bodleian and Stanford, We released some open source tools to help kick start an ecosystem
Consortium founding member in 2015, helping govern
Over 5 million images available
The model underpinning IIIF is the idea of a shared canvas, and our internal data model for digitised content maps closely to this (which isn’t a coincidence)
We helped develop the original Image and Presentation specifications in co-operation with the other partners