Annotating Cultural Heritage via IIIF

This 1.5 hour course is an introduction to annotations and IIIF given as part of the Learn@DLF event on the 9th of November 2021.

Annotations have a long history of adding context and commentary to cultural heritage materials. It’s now easier than ever to get started annotating digitized materials via the International Image Interoperability Framework, better known as IIIF.

The IIIF standards are a set of a community-driven technologies developed by world-leading research, national and state libraries, archives, museums, companies, and image repositories. The combination of standardized ways of accessing images and A/V material and its integration of the W3C web annotation format puts IIIF in a unique position to support the development of annotation tools and many have been released as open source.

In the context of IIIF, annotations can be textual commentary on an image, but they also include so much more. Images themselves can be annotations, as can audio or moving image streams. Likewise, annotation can take the form of links to other resources, geographic coordinates, and much more.

This session will cover how annotations work with IIIF and how you can use off-the-shelf tools to run crowdsourcing or remote teaching use cases for annotating your (or anyone's) IIIF collection. It will also cover how annotations are stored, including “annotation stores” and options for implementation.

No prior knowledge of IIIF is required for this session, which should be accessible to those with confidence using the Web. Prior knowledge of HTML and JSON syntax is useful but not required.