Making IIIF Official at the Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Making IIIF Official at the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

107 pointsmoelf20 comments

IIIF is a great story of a small group of people who cared solving a bunch of minor frictional points for an entire field. It doesn’t add anything which was impossible before but driving the cost down to zero is a substantial contribution, too. I’ve especially liked how image servers and viewers are now drop-in replacements.

TIL: International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

I had initially thought this had to do with Innovative Interactive Fiction. Didn't count the "I"s properly.

I thought it had to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_File_Format

For those wondering what could be a practical use of IIIF, see this example:

https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/la-tapisserie-de-bayeux/decouvr...

This is powered by the IIP image server and the OpenSeaDragon viewer, both being IIIF compatible.

https://iipimage.sourceforge.io/documentation/server

https://openseadragon.github.io

I’ll add another: I’ve implemented IIIF (it’s pretty straightforward) on an existing web app but at one point got tired of that and deployed a copy of Cantaloupe in an AWS ECS auto-scaling cluster. The total time to switch was like an hour because a standard protocol means the URLs are identical except for the base URL. That kind of flexibility is really nice.

For viewers, https://universalviewer.io/ is also nice and a bunch of tools now do the right thing when they detect the IIIF metadata in a page.

https://iiif.io/get-started/talks/ Cool, although each museum hosting individually and encoraging direct linking means people won't have backups so if one of these small museums goes down, all the links go down. It'd be cool if they had a copy, or stored globally with all the high powered funding

(Even if it's stored in a backup place, the direct links mean if the DNS/server lapses, it all goes down?)

Self hosting is critical: these organizations’ reputations are on the line and they don’t want to be beholden to an outside company for access to their collections.

There are a number of preservation service and networks available, but cost is a big factor there since it’s hard enough to get funding for your own connections much less those of others, especially if the material isn’t in the public domain. I do think IIIF helps there, too, because it would let sites like IA recognize that they can download the biggest available image for a web page when they archive it. That’s not professional digital preservation level in many cases (smaller, lossy compression) but it might be the best you can get in some cases.

Nice. I always love the how creatively people have made use of image serving tools like this. Gallery of abused Amazon images: https://www.gertler.com/nat/abusedimages.html

^ A site full of Amazon affiliate links

> The upgrade also expands the Internet Archive’s IIIF support beyond images to also include audio, movies, and collections

Next step IIIF 3D? https://iiif.io/community/groups/3d/charter/

Why is this a thing, why is it needed?

assuming you read the actual blog post and follow-up links, what remains unclear?

Have you read the article? There’s half a sentence in like the fifth paragraph that might be explaining what it does or might just be making an aside comment. At no point do they say what it is. Just what they’re doing with it.

It’s like they’re talking about farming without explaining what a tractor is.

Two links down https://iiif.io/get-started/how-iiif-works/ :

> Learning about IIIF (generally pronounced “triple-eye-eff”) can be overwhelming at first,

I don’t think that’s our fault, that’s the authors’ fault.

I hate people who talk in circles and then imagine themselves misunderstood geniuses. Just fuckin… read some Feynman already and adjust your attitude.

Below the fold, two pages deep:

> Modern Web browsers understand how to display formats like .jpg and .mp4 at defined sizes, but cannot do much else. The IIIF specifications align with general Web standards that define how all browsers work to enable richer functionality beyond viewing an image or audio/visual files. For images, that means enabling deep zoom, comparison, structure (i.e., for an object such as a book, structure = page order) and annotation. For audio/visual materials, that means being able to deliver complex structures (such as several reels of film that make up a single movie) along with things like captions, transcriptions/translations, annotations, and more.

That’s all I wanted to know. Now I know if I care. Wait, what were we talking about? I’ve got four shelf-feet of unread books and a “read later” bookmark list and a “watch later” YouTube list that is so long you would cry. Do I want to get into this still or work on those?

Don’t bore the reader, or stuff like this ^ will go through their head. ESPECIALLY now that attention spans are getting shorter.

Thx!

Can we just call it "I3F"?

But why, "III" already means "three"!

Because I3F would at least ensure a consistent pronunciation ("eye-three-eff"), whereas IIIF leaves room for debate. "Eeeeeeef"? "Eye-eye-eye-eff"?

I will never not find weird that in English IIIF could be read "eeef" and not "iiif".

https://iiif.io/get-started/how-iiif-works/ says:

> generally pronounced "triple-eye-eff"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com