This photo shows my family home! How to make annotations of cultural heritage objects more accessible through IIIF

This photo shows my family home! How to make annotations of cultural heritage objects more accessible through IIIF

The photo archive of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies (SSFS) contains images on topics of everyday life, tradition and identity, forms of work and living, ranging in date from the late 19th century through the later part of the 20th century. Since the digitised photographic collections became available online in 2018, people knowledgeable about the archives' resources have come forward. Identifying people in historical photographs is important for preserving material culture but it is also a challenging endeavour. Users may still be able to identify archival material but sound ecosystems to facilitate online annotation of digital surrogates are lacking and thus users have to fall back on more traditional means of communication, such as email.

Annotations with IIIF makes it easier to add context and commentary to cultural heritage objects in an interoperable manner. This ten-minute lightning session will cover how image annotations work with IIIF and how users can leverage it to identify people in historical image collections. Particular attention is paid to the artefactual nature of photography such as handwritten information, texture, colour as well as possible damages that can assist in the process of dating and identifying.

• How do we analyse or evaluate this kind of image information?
• What new interpretations emerge when users are able to annotate digital surrogates of photographs?

We suggest an interdisciplinary perspective in the context of the Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives (PIA) - https://about.participatory-archives.ch/ - that is useful for analysing the existing software and making annotations of historical photography accessible.

Titre en français: Cette photo montre ma maison familiale !  Comment rendre plus accessible les annotations d'objets du patrimoine culturel par le biais de IIIF