What IIIFs or: How Dreams Come True at Harvard Art Museums
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Presentation given at the New England IIIF Conference on March 14, 2018
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What IIIFs or: How Dreams Come True at Harvard Art Museums
- 1. What IIIFs or: How Dreams Come True at Harvard Art Museums IIIF New England Meeting March 21, 2018 Jeff Steward (@jeffssteward) Director of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technology Harvard Art Museums (@harvartmuseums)
- 2. Dreams come true because of IIIF
- 4. A few questions for you
- 5. Preamble About the Museums
- 6. Harvard Art Museums is a teaching museum at a research university
- 7. Harvard Art Museums is a teaching museum at a research university
- 8. We have 250,000 objects
- 15. The Origin Story of IIIF at HAM
- 16. Untitled (three young women posed with person in horse costume during graduation party, 1961) Martin Schweig, American (20th century), 4.2002.9770, http://hvrd.art/o/132592
- 19. Time passes
- 23. What IIIFs
- 25. Untitled [with Anna May Wong], 1929 Marianne Brandt, German (Chemnitz, Germany 1893 - 1983 Kirchberg, Germany), 2006.25, http://hvrd.art/o/6772
- 50. Dreams come true because of IIIF
- 52. Thanks
Editor's Notes
- What IIIFs or: How Dreams Come True at Harvard Art Museums I’m not going to drag it out and save the answer to the end.
- Dreams come true at Harvard Art Museums because of IIIF. Or to put it another way.
- IIIF + HAM = ♥ Simple enough. Before I tell you about our dreams I have a few stops to make.
- First stop. A few questions for you. Who knows what IIIF is? Who has implemented it or parts of it? Who uses IIIF compatible content (images, manifests, etc)? Ok then. Second stop. Let’s take a look at HAM.
- I always like to give a bit of background on the museums.
- Harvard Art Museums is a teaching museum at a research university.
- I can’t overstate this. Keep this in mind anytime you hear about our work.
- We have 250,000 objects. They span a great distance and time. But we’re not encyclopedic. Here’s a sample.
- Paintings
- Coins We have 20,000+ ancient coins
- Prints
- Sculpture
- You can search the whole collection online. What you’ll find is ~250,000 objects. ~220,693 objects have at least one image. Plus we have exhibition, publication, and gallery records (with images for those things). In terms of IIIF, we have collections, ~200,000 manifests, annotation lists, and ~440,000 IIIF compatible images floating around out there. And to guide our existence, we have a mission and set of ideals. In our mission we talk about the transformative power of close looking at original works of art. Or to put it more simply. We want you to:
- Look closely. Think critically. Keep that in mind as we progress. That is our hook. It is our spirit guide when thinking about technology. How does technology help us look closely and think critically? And for the remainder of my time we’re going to explore more specifically how IIIF can help us look closely and think critically. So on to the third stop of our journey.
- Spoiler alert. It’s not that interesting of a story but I’m going to tell you anyway. IIIF came our way in January 2014. Just over four years ago. It arrived via colleagues at HarvardX (the Harvard specific version of EdX).
- I didn’t really see IIIF at first because it came to me in a disguise. The disguise was the Mirador viewer. What I saw then was another really neat book viewer. Being an art museum with a lot of things that aren’t books, IIIF didn’t really click then. I didn’t see beyond Mirador. [This is a recreation of my first time meeting IIIF.] Here’s what I saw.
- I was introduced to this stuff because the fine folks at HarvardX wanted to include museum objects in an upcoming course and wanted to know if we could make objects and high resolution images available for it. Sure, why not. We want our stuff to be used not just by us.
- And then some museum objects ended up alongside some library objects in the Mirador viewer in a HarvardX course (The Book). The implementation you see here isn’t true interoperability with our collection but it is a real world, tangible example of how museum objects and images could be used beyond our walls (and website). That it was built on IIIF still didn’t much matter to me or the museums.
- IIIF sort of went on the back burner at the museums. HarvardX, Harvard Libraries, and the Arts and Humanities Research Computing group kept going with it but It was difficult to see past Mirador (as a book viewer and interface for deep zoom) and really see IIIF for what it is. (Not to mention we were about 10 months out from opening this building. So there were a lot of other things on our minds.) Thankfully all of those Harvard groups kept us involved as they worked on the technology, new projects, grants, etc. So we go about our business. Jump to June 2015.
- We clone the code that Rashmi developed for Harvard Libraries (yeah open source, open access, open everything) and start working on the first of the implementation of parts of IIIF at the museum. In this case a presentation server. I’m not sure why we did it. It might have been the nagging feeling that if HarvardX and Harvard Libraries were investing time in IIIF and Mirador, there must be something more there. [Like I said. It’s not a great story. Perhaps this is a testament to how mundane some of the most exciting technology really is.] Anyway, part of what DIET does is constantly observe and evaluate technology. We share a constant desire to push the boundaries with what we do with our collections and this includes testing the elasticity and malleability of our collections data. We’re a teaching and research museum after all.
- Just to show you want I mean by pushing boundaries here are two data vis projects running directly on collections data API. The same API used for our website, IIIF stuff.
- So by June 2015 the time is right to push the boundaries of our images. Let’s really learn what this IIIF can do and why everyone from Stanford to the Getty to the Wellcome Trust to the University of Tokyo is making noise about it.
- I like to ask a lot of what if questions. Enter the what ifs. Here is the most basic one. What if every image I have is IIIF compatible? It’s a good starting point. How would this change how I work with my images? If you understand only one thing about the IIIF specifications, understand that the Image API is revolutionary in how concisely and simply it provides deep and sophisticated control of an image. It does this with three simple parameters for selecting a region of an image, the size of it, and the rotation. These parameters are part of the address/URL for every image served via IIIF. They are incredibly basic but I posit they are most powerful part of IIIF and the primary reason to adopt it.
- These parameters appear in my mind as a scissors. Snipping away at high resolution images any way I like. This is all happening right at the source. Always acting on the original file. Never copying anything, never destroying anything. Everything is in harmony as it should be. [Take a peek at the URL at the top of this video. With minor tweaks to the parameters I can slice and dice an image.] This simple concept blew my mind (and still does). Once I played with it, I saw the light of IIIF. The constraints on our images drifted away. My mind was set free to wander and wonder. The "what if" questions flooded in. What if I could do this with any image in our collection? What if this was native functionality? What would I do?
- What if I want to look at an object in various resolutions at once?
- What if I want to look deeply and closely?
- What if I want to focus on one area? What if I want to focus on one element or figure or motif?
- What if I want to peel back the layers and explore multispectral views? What if I want to see a tracing of an object alongside the object? Or better yet, on top of the object?
- What if I want to study photographs? [which we have in large quatity]
- But just the faces?
- Again?
- And again?
- And now in large quantities?
- What if I want to study works with text?
- Just the text?
- Now in large quantities?
- What if I want to compare objects from disparate collections within HAM?
- What if I want to compare objects from Colby, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton? What if I want to do this across collections (around the world)?
- What if I want to do all this in a collaborative way?
- What if I want to do all of these things without leaving my web browser?
- [This is the same web page from the video earlier in talk running in NCSU’s 360 visualization environment in the Chrome browser on a Windows desktop. Thanks to IIIF you can serve images that scale beautifully.]
- And what if I just want to have some fun? I can do these things and more. I can do them fast. The time from idea to reality got really short. Thank you IIIF.
- These are some of our dreams. And I know you have even bigger dreams. IIIF and the surrounding ecosystem sets collections free in ways I knew I wanted but couldn't quite imagine. It feels a bit like a miracle cure that actually works. I now long for the day that the framework is ubiquitous and all media on the web adheres to it.
- And with all of these tools in hand I return to: Look closely. Think critically. And I see a whole new universe of possibilities exploding into being.
- Once again thank you all for coming. Thank you to the organizing committee for these two days. Thank you to all of the speakers. I know you are are going to see some really fantastic uses of IIIF. Thanks to everyone at Harvard that works on IIIF. None of this would be possible without you. Thanks to the IIIF community for everything you’ve done thus far and everything you will do. And thanks for listening.