PIDs in IIIF Webinar

Designed as a seminar to discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with embedding Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in IIIF resources, this seminar brought together experts in both fields to discuss the potentials for wider implementation of PIDs within the IIIF Framework.

The emergence of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) has presented researchers with an opportunity to annotate and cite digitised or digital resources. However, many of the creative and scholarly uses of IIIF are stymied by an inability to reliably and persistently link to objects or collections of objects. Persistent identifiers are long lasting, digital references to resources, whether physical or digital, including objects published in IIIF. 

The second webinar hosted by the Practical Applications of IIIF Project, highlighted the need for the ability to be able to consistently identify objects or collections of objects in IIIF. 

Both the Practical IIIF and Heritage PIDs projects are actively gathering use cases on this topic to understand community needs in this area. Some initial use cases and issues the projects identified include:

• The ability to assign a PID for collection level manifests to showcase and present areas of a collection
• The ability to identify IIIF manifests with a PID, both static and dynamic
• The ability to create PIDs for user generated manifests, collections and annotations
• The ability to update existing IIIF manifests with PIDs to reflect new imaging or updated metadata.

This seminar provided an occasion for a panel of international experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges these use cases present and suggest a way forward for individual implementations and the framework as a whole. 

Panellists : Ben and Sara Brumfield ( FromThePage), Andy Irving (Bodleian Libraries), Rachael Kotarski (British Library), Joseph Padfield (National Gallery) and Julien Raemy (University of Basel and DaSCH).

Agenda

• Introduction to topic and panelists
• Description of use cases followed by comments from panelists
• Q&A and Discussion

This seminar is co-organised by Practical Applications of IIIF and Persistent Identifiers as IRO infrastructure (Heritage PIDs) both foundation projects in the Towards a National Collection programme.