Wikimedia Foundation GLAM team/Office Hours/September 2020

September meeting: IIIF on Wikimedia Commons

The September meetings were about potential GLAM use cases for IIIF. On Monday 21 September 2020 we were joined by staff and members of the IIIF consortium and Evan Prodromou, Product Manager in the Foundation's Platform team. Evan gave a general introduction to the Foundation's new API service. For the second meeting on Tuesday 22 September 2020, we were joined by staff and members of the IIIF consortium and Jason Evans shared his experience with IIIF at The National Library of Wales.

Presentations

Jason Evans introduced potential GLAM use cases for IIIF, using his work at the National Library of Wales (slides)

Discussion

The National Library of Wales has been contributing to Wikimedia for five years and there are already 20,000 images from its collections available on Wikimedia Commons. When Wikidata approved a property for the IIIF manifest, the institution contributed 15,000 items to Wikidata with IIIF manifests.

The IIIF metadata started to get used by others, including an Italian website that is now displaying all the NLW images, without actually having a digital copy of those works, and is also pulling in all the metadata that is associated with those manifests.

Jason also demonstrated how IIIF allows you to clearly state where in an image something is depicted. The image position can be saved in Wikidata and then queried, or even extracted in a IIIF manifest to be used on other platforms.

Therefore the use of IIIF, according to Jason, would accomplish three goals: enhance Commons data, improve import and export options, and have more potential for reuse.

This subject attracted more than 60 participants across the two meetings, including Wikimedians, affiliate staff, and GLAM professionals from the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum, DPLA, The Getty, Wellcome Collection, National Gallery UK, Huntington Art Gallery, Harvard Library, V&A, British Library, and Princeton University Library. These attendees were polled to determine the most interesting IIIF use cases for Wikimedia Commons.

You can also view the collective notes in Etherpad.

Poll results

What IIIF use case is most interesting for Wikimedia Commons? (Participants could select up to 3 options.)

Monday meeting

1. Dynamic redisplay of images (e.g. zoom, crops, etc) for reuse on Wikipedia and elsewhere: 65%
2. Aggregating Wikimedia images with other IIIF-compatible sources: 48%
3. Wikimedia Commons as a free IIIF server for GLAMs and other contributors: 42%
4. Better image provenance and linking back to sources: 42%
5. Simplifying bulk contribution of images to Commons: 35%
6. Directly annotating media on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia: 32%
7. Embeddable Wikimedia Commons viewer for other sites: 13%
8. Availability of rich IIIF viewers for files hosted on Commons, e.g. Internet Archive Book Reader: 13%
9. Something else: 10%

Tuesday meeting

1. Wikimedia Commons as a free IIIF server for GLAMs and other contributors: 83%
2. Simplifying bulk contribution of images to Commons: 58%
3. Directly annotating media on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia: 50%
4. Embeddable Wikimedia Commons viewer for other sites: 33%
5. Better image provenance and linking back to sources: 25%
6. Dynamic redisplay of images (e.g. zoom, crops, etc) for reuse on Wikipedia and elsewhere: 17%
7. Aggregating Wikimedia images with other IIIF-compatible sources: 17%
8. Availability of rich IIIF viewers for files hosted on Commons, e.g. Internet Archive Book Reader: 17%
9. Something else: 8%