ARCHiVe

Course Tag: Digital Library

Access to image-based resources in the context of the IIIF protocol

key details

17, 23 September
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

Reference

  • Fondazione Giorgio Cini
  • Factum Foundation

about

Access to high-resolution image-based resources is fundamental for research, scholarship, and the transmission of cultural knowledge.

The IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standard is a set of technical specifications designed to enable the sharing, reuse, dissemination, and scientific research of digital images. Numerous projects and institutions worldwide have adopted IIIF to make collections accessible and interoperable online. IIIF supports the uniform presentation of images of cultural heritage items, allowing for display, manipulation, measurement, and annotation by scholars and students worldwide. Although initially conceived in libraries and primarily used by academics, IIIF also benefits a wider public.

Programme

September 17, 2024

Improving the access of cultural heritage through IIIF

  • Gennaro Ferrante | Università Federico II, Napoli
  • Flavia Bruni | Università di Chieti-Pescara
  • Ilenia Maschietto | Fondazione Giorgio Cini
  • Dario Peluso | Fondazione Giorgio Cini
The lecture aims to present a selection of projects on a variety of scales leveraging IIIF to improve the accessibility of collections. The examples show how IIIF connect cultural heritage scattered in different parts of the world, providing users high-quality image-based resources, ready to be compared, shared, reused, annotated and studied.
The first example is Europeana and its latest strategies (including Europeana Pro and the Europeana API), a project funded by the European Union that provides access to millions of items from institutions across Europe, allowing users to interact with them dynamically.
The second is the Illuminated Dante Project, born within the University Federico II of Naples, a systematic survey of early illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy virtually united on the same platform, carefully described and put in context. The project includes a digitization campaign, and the first clear classification and explanation of the illustrations that these precious artefacts contain.
The third is the work in progress of the new Digital Library of Fondazione Giorgio Cini which showcases the digital collections of the Venetian institution, IIIF compliant and based on contentDM, a software to store and display digital collections conceived by the largest international library network (OCLC, also full member of IIIF Consortium).

September 23, 2024

3D image-based resources and IIIF

  • Thomas Flynn | IIIF 3D Community Group
  • Richard Allen | Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University
  • John Barrett | Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University
  • Dylan Schirmacher | Bodleian Imaging Services, Oxford University
The IIIF standard, originally designed for 2D images, is being extended to support 3D content. This evolution allows for the sharing, viewing, and annotation of 3D models using the same principles that have made IIIF popular for 2D images. This represents a significant step forward in making rich, interactive media more accessible and usable across a wide range of disciplines.
The lecture introduces the work of the IIIF Consortium and the community, particularly the IIIF 3D Community Group, being the role of IIIF community and users extremely relevant to the development of software and technologies. Moreover, the lecture addresses technical aspects of the recent challenges faced by developers in presenting three-dimensional images within IIIF-compliant viewers. The ARCHiOx team provides updates from the Digital Bodleian platform and shares insights into the ongoing research on implementing 3D viewers with material qualities—such as texture, moving lights, and reflectance—to enhance user experience and deepen the understanding of the artefacts’ materiality.
1/2 Access to image based resources in the context of the IIIF protocol
2/2 Access to image based resources in the context of the IIIF protocol

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries

De scientia venandi per aves, MS 446, fol. 1r (1450 –1475) © Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
Treatise on falconry, MS arabe 2831, fol. 1r (1444) © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
Kitāb na‘t al-ḥayawān, MS Or. 2784, fol. 229r (13th century) © British Library, London
MEFA digital archive, ContentDm view

key details

14 September 2023
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

Reference

  • Factum Foundation
  • University of Oxford

About

Cristina Dondi, Professor of Early European Book Heritage at the University of Oxford, where she also leads the 15cBOOKTRADE project, will present a research on the lost Benedictine Library that was once part of the monastery at San Giorgio Maggiore, now home to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and ARCHiVe – Analysis and Recordings of Cultural Heritage in Venice. The monastery was suppressed in 1806 and its rich collection of manuscripts and incunabula was dispersed. Dondi and colleagues have identified the location of over 180 important works and continue to add new titles as they are located in museums, libraries and private collections.

While Dondi’s research is focused on a disbanded library, the work of the Middle-East Falconry Archive (MEFA), commissioned by the Mohammed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund (MBZRCF) and carried out by Factum Foundation based within ARCHiVe, is centred on bringing all known medieval Arabic manuscripts on Falconry together online in one place.

Carolina Gris (Factum Foundation, Madrid-Venezia) will present a summary of the first two years’ work and discuss the role of IIIF and inter-library sharing to make specialist areas of interest available to a wider audience of both scholars and general interest users. This approach to the creation of specialised repositories of knowledge is paving the way to a new future for libraries and library users.

lecturers

Cristina Dondi

Cristina Dondi is Professor of Early European Book Heritage, and Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She is also the Secretary of CERL. In 2009 she created the international database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI). She is the editor of Printing Revolution and Society, 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe (Venice, 2020, open access), and, together with Dorit Raines and Richard Sharpe, of How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Europe, 16th–19th Centuries (Turnhout, 2022).

Carolina Gris

Carolina Gris is responsible for coordinating and implementing 3D digitisation projects for Factum Foundation in Italy and other locations in Europe.
She has taught theoretical and practical workshops on digital preservation, and has lectured and published on new modes of access to cultural heritage. She has managed the Middle East Falconry Archive (MEFA) since 2021.

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries