Sebastiaan Schoonebeek is Digital Collections Team Software Developer at University of York. He attended the IIIF Annual Conference Archiving with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.
This year’s International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Annual Conference at the University of Leeds brought together a vibrant community of researchers, developers, and digital preservation practitioners. Over three packed days, institutions from around the world shared their work with IIIF and related technologies.
3D was the most trendy topic at the conference. There were plenty of impressive examples showing how IIIF can be used to present 3D scans of objects and environments. These sparked a lot of interest, especially around viewer tools and integration with existing image-based collections.
But it was annotations and how to make them accessible and findable that really caught my attention. Many attendees shared similar challenges: how to structure annotations, how to link them to metadata, and how to ensure they are usable for research. It’s clear this is an area where the IIIF community is actively experimenting and learning.
Other key topics included Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), maps, and updates about IIIF version 4. The new support for audio timelines, for example, shows how IIIF is expanding beyond traditional image viewers.
At the University of York, we’ve used OCR in the past to extract text from printed documents, but the HTR developments shared at the conference open up a new chapter for us. Tools like eScriptorium, Kraken, and HTR-flow were discussed in depth, and it was great to see how they’re being used in real-world projects. For us, the potential lies in using HTR to extract content from handwritten manuscripts and link it directly to IIIF manifests as annotations.
Linked data was another area of interest, particularly for aligning Dublin Core metadata with IIIF. It was very interesting to see how you can link Dublin Core metadata in an IIIF manifest and provide an extra layer of content for researchers.
The conference gave me useful insights into how we might enhance our IIIF collections at York. I’m looking forward to applying what I’ve learned to make our resources more accessible and more useful to researchers. I am also grateful for all the new connections I made during the conference which would otherwise be impossible. Thanks to the DPC Career Development Fund member self-identified grant, I was able to attend this amazing conference.
Acknowledgements
The Career Development Fund is sponsored by the DPC’s Supporters who recognize the benefit and seek to support a connected and trained digital preservation workforce. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support to this programme and ask applicants to acknowledge that support in any communications that result. At the time of writing, the Career Development Fund is supported by Arkivum, Artefactual Systems Inc., boxxe, Cerabyte, Evolved Binary, Ex Libris, HoloMem, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Preferred Media, Preservica and Simon P Wilson. A full list of supporters is online here.