Andrew Prescott  0:10  
Thanks, and I'm a professor at the University of Glasgow, and I've been involved in different ways in imaging of manuscripts and archives, since the early 1990s, the focus of what I want to talk about introducing myself, is very much around manuscripts and archives so the emphasis is maybe slightly different than some of the things we've already talked about. I cut my digital teeth on the electronic Beowulf project in the 90s which compiled an image archive illustrating the transmission of a celebrated Old English poem. And the idea was in presenting a multifaceted view, which comprised on the one hand a straightforward imaging of the manuscript, on the other, a variety of shots, under a number of different specialists lighting conditions, also digitization of early transcripts and collations, we wanted to get across through images the idea that this is actually a very complex text, and our understanding of it is very complex and to some extent, the way in which it's almost impossible to come up with a final set of text. And we felt that that idea of an image edition, had a lot of power. So I was really excited when I first learned about IIIF because it seems to me, offers the opportunity, easily to create this kind of image edition, offering a multifaceted view the history of reception of a text or document, which previously needed an enormous amount of time and resource. Certainly an enormous amount of resources gone into the Beowulf project over the years, but IIIF at a first point offers enormous savings in terms of time and money in hopes of sustainability, but that would be enough, but the excitement of IIIF seems to me goes beyond that. Because ever since I first got involved in dealing with digital images. I've been interested in seeing how far we can create new forms of scholarly dialogue, which directly incorporate and address the artefact, and are not dependent on textual descriptions of the object. If you look at any scholarly discussion that involves palaeography, you will immediately be confronted with masses of a highly technical, textual description, which actually convey very very little, even to those who are quite expert about the nature of the object being described. And you, as soon as you confront that, you immediately think, how much easier it would be, if somehow that was simply rooted in images and IIIF offers that possibility. The annotation potential IIIF offers the prospect of creating a new form of scholarly communication, one which for the first time, can place the object firmly in the centre of discourse. and but it seems to me and we've touched on this a bit already in the first half of today's event, but we've only taken quite limited steps to consider what a collaborative scholarly dialogue would look like and how it will fit in with the other things we're interested in. What I'm interested in, is very interested in different to what Davy's interested in, in terms of addressing the Congolese comics. And so that requires a different sort of dialogue and a different sort of structure, and I'm not sure that we've tended to think too much of crowdsourcing as a single object in relations IIIF not thought about different types of audience, and different types of use sufficiently. And here I'm very specifically interested in the possibility of creating through the use of IIIF collaborative descriptions, which might involve five or six mediaeval palaeographers working on a single, single manuscript and then giving you a variety of different views on the evidence for that management I think IIIF can offer those sorts of richer perspectives. Now I've undertaken some limited experiments myself on this, and particularly fascinating, on my favourite sites is the Polonsky Foundation's website of early Anglo-French manuscripts from the British Library and Bibliotech nationale de France offers a lot of possibilities, and I've found in looking at one particular group of 10th century liturgical managed groups that actually using annotation comparison and IIIF. I've been able to work towards a different view

of their relationship with manuscripts, and I'd love to be able to publish that as a IIIF piece, but it hasn't been possible to do that, because it seems to me there are still some severe limitations, using IIIF as a platform for publishing a piece of research like this. So I want to conclude in pointing to seems to be the three main problems I worry about, and then use the last one of those as my my piece of advice. First is the problem that, as soon as you start wanting to take any scholarly research, you find that the availability of the manuscripts that you want to use the IIIF format is incredibly patchy, you immediately almost come up against the key manuscript that you want, isn't in IIIF form. So while two vital manuscripts from the British Library that we visit Nationale de France are available on the Polonsky site in IIIF form, there's a third that's very key to this discussion that isn't available in a IIIF form, even though it's on the British Library's digitised manuscripts site. So I find that kind of patchy implementation of IIIF, is a real problem in terms of the user perspective, it gets particularly frustrating with, happens with smaller archives I've tended to notice, where the manifests have sometimes been deliberately crippled in order to limit what you can do with it, and it seems to be about very much almost against the spirit of IIIF. My second concern is that it is the we tend to have only single views of material and then hi-res that it will be helpful if we have more multiple views and particularly views on the for example multispectral lighting conditions available for some material, because then we could even more effectively exploit the possibilities of IIIF for comparison, in all sorts of interesting ways. But my third, and I think my biggest issue so it's the one that I would have as my, my piece of advice I've already alluded to, this is how we shape and make available, for download discussion around particular artefacts, it's not a single conversation. There's not a single function. And the way in which annotations are made available and controlled across different implementations of IIIF, makes a lot of different assumptions about the type of audience and purpose, that the annotations are being used for. And it seems to me would be helpful to actually certainly want you to think carefully about how the annotation is going to be used before you do that, but it would also be helpful to have a wider discussion about a more consistent approach to dealing with the availability of annotations. thank you very much.