Metadata aggregation of IIIF Resources at
Europeana: status, plans and cooperation
opportunities
Nuno Freire
IIIF Conference, June 2017

Title here
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Outline
● Introduction to Europeana
• Re-thinking data aggregation in Europeana
● IIIF and aggregation in Europeana
● IIIF case studies
● Resulting IIIF based aggregations at present
● Ongoing and future R&D work
● Collaboration opportunities
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Metadata aggregation of IIIF Resources at Europeana

Title here
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Europeana
The Platform for Europe’s Digital Cultural Heritage
● We aggregate (and make available)
metadata:
• From all EU countries
• From ~3,500 galleries, libraries,
archives and museums
• Under a CC0 licence
• More than 54M objects
• In about 50 languages
“We transform the world with culture! We
want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and
make it easier for people to use, whether
for work, for learning or just for fun.”
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Metadata aggregation of IIIF Resources at Europeana

Czech Republic, PD
1887, Uměleckoprůmyslové museum v Praze
Preissig, Vojtech
Coloured etchings
Re-thinking data
aggregation in Europeana

Title here
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What kinds of technologies are we
considering?
● What are the successors of OAI-PMH?
● Technologies widely used by CH organizations for other purposes
• Search engine optimization
• Linked data
• Social web technologies
• IIIF
● Technologies that present low barriers for adoption by data providers
CC BY-SA

Cristallisation ou Mouvement du
temps, René Bord
1987, Bibliothèque Municipale De Lyon,
public domain
IIIF resources and
aggregation at Europeana

Brief introduction to the IIIF APIs
Europeana & IIIF
CC BY-SA
How can IIIF be used for metadata aggregation?

Object = Image + Presentation

Presentation API
•Descriptive:
label, description
•Rights: license,
attribution
(to be c’ed)
Image API
Image Data
Object = Image + Presentation

Presentation API (c’ed)
• Structure
• Collections of objects
• Manifests organizing Items, Sequences, Parts together with their
metadata
• Linking
• service: additional service endpoint
• related: resource to display to the user
• seeAlso: semantic metadata resource

Case studies
Netherlands, Public Domain
1910-1925, Rijksmuseum
Anonymous
Tak met vier mangolia’s

In the first case study:
Crawling services across the IIIF universe
• Questions addressed:
• Can Europeana find the available IIIF services through IIIF Service
Registries?
• Is the output of IIIF crawlable? Can robots follow links in IIIF output and
reach all resources?
• How mature and uniform are existing IIIF implementations ?
• Is metadata available?
• Are machine readable licenses available?
CC BY-SA

Registries are available and are machine readable, but coverage was only partial
IIIF provides all that is necessary, but some features are optional (e.g. IIIF Collections)
Minor compliance problems only due to immaturity of the implementations
IIIF provides a way to link to metadata, but it is optional (and often not used)
IIIF provides licensing information, but it is optional (and often not used)
• Questions addressed:
• Can Europeana find the available IIIF services through IIIF Service Registries?
• Is the output of IIIF crawlable? Can robots follow links in IIIF output and reach all resources?
• How mature and uniform are existing IIIF implementations?
• Is metadata available?
• Are machine readable licenses available?
CC BY-SA
In the first case study:
Crawling services across the IIIF universe

Case studies with partners
Europeana & IIIF
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● To study the feasibility of performing metadata aggregation via IIIF we have
undertaken several case studies, in cooperation with data providers of the
Europeana Network
• National Library of Wales
• Very active in the IIIF community
• Very advanced in IIIF implementation
• Expertise in full-text content (over IIIF)
• University College Dublin
• Very advanced in IIIF implementation
• Expertise in search engine optimization (Sitemaps and its media specific extensions)

Case studies with National Library of Wales
and University College Dublin
• Crawling IIIF services via IIIF Collections
• Crawling IIIF services via Sitemaps
• Standard Sitemaps
• Sitemaps extended with elements used in IIIF specifications
• Sitemaps extended with elements from the ResourceSync namespace
• Crawling IIIF services via IIIF Collections and HTTP cache
headers
CC BY-SA

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Main conclusions from the case studies
• Applying these technologies by providers was straightforward
• In-house knowledge is a great advantage
• None of the case studies presented serious technological obstacles
• Very simple technological solutions are available
• Only very large collections may require additional complexity
• ...the main challenge is to choose among the several possibilities and
establishing a standard (or best practice) within the community(ies):
• Europeana is working with the IIIF community in the context of the IIIF Discovery Technical
Specification group
• Europeana will prepare recommendations targeted at its own partner network.

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Operational IIIF harvests so far
• National Library of Wales
• Sitemap + IIIF
• University College Dublin
• Sitemap + IIIF +Sitemap Video Extention
• Wellcome library
• IIIF Collection + IIIF

R&D ongoing work
France, Public Domain
Agence Rol. Agence photographique,
Bibliothëque national de France
Chat "regardant" à travers une longue-vue et
autre chat perché dessus

CC BY-SA
R&D ongoing work
Crawling websites/LOD/IIIF in search for
resources represented with Schema.org
• Research Question:
• Can metadata still comply with the requirements of Europeana/EDM,
by being represented with Schema.Org? If so, with what level of
quality?
• One IIIF case study is in progress at this time
• IIIF provider: North Carolina State University Libraries

CC BY-SA
"@context": "http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2/context.json",
"@id": "https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00066-001-bx0001-001-001/manifest",
"@type": "sc:Manifest",
"label": "Robert Barnhardt oral history interview",
...
"seeAlso": [
{
"@id": “https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00066-001-bx0001-001-001/schemaorg.json",
"format": "application/ld+json",
"label": "Schema.org metadata as JSON-LD"
}
]
Extract of a IIIF from NCSU Libraries
R&D ongoing work
Crawling websites/LOD/IIIF in search for
resources represented in Schema.org

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R&D ongoing work
Crawling websites/LOD/IIIF in search for
resources represented in Schema.org
• The IIIF/Schema.Org case study on NC State University Libraries
• Crawling is done with a Sitemap pointing to IIIF Manifests
• Schema.Org metadata is referenced in the IIIF Manifest
• Approximately 100 thousand examples collected
• Analysis is in progress...

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R&D ongoing work
Notification Frameworks and Aggregation
• Early exploration of the application of Webmention for metadata aggregation
• In combination with linked data and IIIF sources
• Some of Webmention’s drawbacks were covered in another W3C draft
recommendation from the Social Web group: Linked Data Notifications (LDN)
• Europeana contributed to the LDN specification
• Work on a prototype was started:
• A component that can be deployed on the side of a IIIF service, using the
Presentation API, to monitor a IIIF collection and issue notifications on
changes
• Currently just complies with the LDN Consumer role
• IIIF component still in the design phase

R&D ongoing work
Linked Data Notifications
Data provider Europeana
LDN / LOD platform / IIIF
LDN sender /
consumer
Linked
Open Data
Provided CHOs
(create, update, delete)
LDN
Ingestion status
Validation reports
Data quality reports
CHO@Europeana
Annotations
Enrichments
IIIF
resources
Linked
Open Data
LDN sender /
consumer

Future work
France, Public Domain
Agence Rol. Agence photographique,
Bibliothëque national de France
Chat "regardant" à travers une longue-vue et
autre chat perché dessus

CC BY-SA
Future work
• More case studies in preparation:
• ResourceSync: One case study in preparation with a collection
containing over 600 thousand resources
• Continue monitoring and investigating technology
trends in our domain:
• Follow the outcomes from the IIIF Discovery group
• The Linked Data Platform

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Collaboration within the Europeana Network
• A cultural heritage organization with IIIF?
• Migrate an existing collection
• Share a new one
• Would you like to put into practice the future outcomes of the IIIF
Discovery group?
• Which technologies do you have in place that Europeana could re-use
for aggregation purposes?
• … or which one would you like to experiment with?

Thank you for your attention
nuno.freire@europeana.eu
Netherlands, Public Domain
1660 - 1625, Rijksmuseum
Anonymous
Arrival of a Portuguese ship
Acknowledgments
Antoine Isaac, Glen Robson, Hugo Manguinhas, Jason Ronalo, John
Howard, Valentine Charles