First IIIF meeting mainly focused on the Image API. The group was very small but contained institutions that were interested in experimenting. They tended to be larger institutions like the National Library of Norway, Stanford and British Library.
Even early on there were regular conference calls every two weeks on a Wednesday and most communication was done on a google group called iiif-discuss.
Similar small group which started discussions on what became known as the Presntation API but started life as the Metadata API.
Discussing use cases and preparing for IIIF version 2.0. The meetings were usually 2-3 days with the first day used as an outreach session with the participants presenting the benefits of IIIF. The other days were a small group working through use cases and changing the specifications to fit the new requirements.
The community started a routine of alternating between North America and Europe for meetings. Following a similar pattern of a day of outreach and then hands on working for the rest of the time.
This is where the first community group formed around Manuscripts. It allowed for detailed discussions on how to implement and use IIIF mainly for medieval manuscripts. The had separate meetings at working meetings and also met around other conferences.
To support the continued development of IIIF, 11 institutions started a new Consortium to provide guidance and funding to start hiring staff and setup infrastructure.
The founding members were University of Oxford, the British Library, Stanford University, ARTstor, Die Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (The Bavarian State Library), Cornell University, La Bibliothèque nationale de France (The National Library of France), Nasjonalbiblioteket (The National Library of Norway), Princeton University Library, Wellcome Trust and Yale University
The first IIIF conference. This turned into an annual event which also switched between Europe and North America. The conferences moved away from being working meetings and more into demonstrating the different ways people were using IIIF.
The IIIF Community moved to using Slack for discussions. This had many benefits including quicker discussions and separate channels for the community groups but we did see a dramatic reduction in traffic to the iiif-discuss email list.
The New York conference highlighted the need to support Audio Visual material with IIIF. To achieve this a new group was formed to focus on the issues. It started by gathering use cases and prioritising them based on how many of the use cases were shared between multiple institutions. Thanks to funding from the British Library and a Mellon Grant this work continued for a number of years with travel for three in person meetings being funded.
Sheila Rabun started as a Community and Communications officer and took responsibility for organising the community calls and also in person events including the second much larger IIIF conference.
The first IIIF working meeting which was similar to early meetings in that it encompassed an outreach session followed by hands on working sessions.
Megan O'Hearn starts as the IIIF Community and Event Coordinator.Details
This was initially intended to be a physical conference in Boston but due to COVID quickly turned to a virtual event using Zoom. Program