Crowdsourcing and commentary with IIIF and W3C web annotations

The rapid adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) by institutions worldwide means that millions of digital objects (comprising billions of images) are exposed to the web using a standard that allows people to make statements about them, in the form of annotations. We can consume the source material for research and crowdsourcing in standards-compliant tools, and share the output from this work as interoperable W3C annotations. 

This talk looks at some projects that have adopted this approach, such as the National Library of Wales crowdsourcing platform and the Royal Society's "Science in the Making" archive site.

All welcome and there will be drinks and discussion after the talk. Attendance is free but we kindly ask that you register for the event.

Speakers

Tom Crane is the Technical Director of Digirati Ltd, a UK consultancy specialising in innovative solutions in the publishing and cultural heritage sectors. He has been building web applications since 1996, when he joined an early London web agency. In the years since he has led projects for clients including Microsoft, Sony, The Home Office, The Arts Council, Oxford University Press, English Heritage, The Wellcome Library, The British Library, the National Library of Wales, The Royal Society and others. He is one of the editors of the specifications for the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs and a prominent contributor in that community. 

Dr Matt McGrattan is Head of Digital Library Solutions for Digirati. Before working for Digirati, Matt was Head of Technical Strategy at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Matt has extensive experience of running digital library projects and was the project manager, and technical architect, of Digital.Bodleian, the library's flagship project for delivering digitised content. Matt has worked on projects across the library and museum sector in Oxford, and has experience of large-scale digitisation and content delivery projects including major collaborations with institutions such as the Vatican. Matt was a member of the Executive of the IIIF-C (IIIF Consortium) representing the University of Oxford. Prior to the Bodleian, he worked on projects at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and has worked in the IT sector since 1990. In parallel to his work in cultural heritage IT, Matt was formerly an academic at the University of Oxford. He was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Oxford and specialised in the Philosophy of Science with doctoral research in the area of biology and medicine. 

Digirati's recent work has focused on client and server applications built on open standards, such as a crowdsourcing platform for the National Library of Wales based on IIIF and the W3C Web Annotation Data Model, and a platform for the Indigenous Digital Archive project (Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, New Mexico) that enables public participation in the creation and description of archives.