Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

Some notes on the IIIF Annual Conference 2025

This year’s festive edition of the IIIF Annual Conference, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the IIIF Consortium, took place in Leeds (UK). Hosted by the University of Leeds, the IIIF Community gathered for a three-part event: a showcase for (potential) new users, two days of presentations and one day filled with birds of a feather sessions.

All of the conference presentations were recorded and are published on the YouTube channel of the IIIF Consortium.

Cloth Hall Court (Leeds)

IIIF Tech Update

The conference opened with an important announcement: by the end of the year, the Presentation API version 4.0 will be published. This new version will create a framework to present 3D resources. The presenters ensured that this will mainly be an addition to the existing framework, limiting the hard breaks to a minimum. The publication of a new version also does not mean every implementation of the Presentation API should be immediately updated. Common viewers and tools will need time to implement the new version.

The IIIF Consortium finished the tech update stating that the IIIF Community started maintaining the Cantaloupe Image Server and began securing the code of the Internet Archive following the cyber-attack of last year.

Community cases

With the Presentation API version 4.0 on the way, 3D was destined to become an important conversation theme. But, the community presentations mainly focused on other hot topics:

(Legal) reuse

  • Tom Cramer, Simeon Warner and Rochelle Lundy talked about the lack of legal information on the reuse of IIIF manifests and the included metadata. They advocated for a IIIF-specific assessment of legal issues.
  • Mat Jordan presented some userfriendly ways to open, share and reuse IIIF resources directly from the digital collections page of the Northwestern University Library.
  • Daphne Van Wijngaarden and Paul Mollahan showed how to use the Digirati Manifest Editor as a visual creation tool, supporting the creation of digital exhibitions.

Sustainability

  • Tom Crane and Claire Knowles focused on new infrastructure for preservation and access to digitized and born digital content, using IIIF and The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL).
  • Leander Seige advocated for truly persistent identifiers, proposing potential solutions.
  • Glen Robson presented a python application (iiifarchive) to create a IIIF backup, avoiding lost research data due to disappearing IIIF Manifests.

Annotations

  • Daniel Granville introduced the repository software platform InvenioRDM and the repository annotation service Annostor, linked to Zenodo, to create, save and publish annotations following the Web Annotation Data Model.
  • Fredrik Bjarman presented a workflow to make the written library catalogue digitally searchable. They used Kraken, Loghi and eScriptorium, and converted PageXML and ALTO XML to IIIF annotations.
  • Hennie Brugman argued to handle web annotations as fullfledged datasets, presenting the AnnoRepo annotation service.
  • Claudio Cortese talked about the integration of IIIF annotation management in DSpace.

Maps

  • Junaid Abdul Jabbar presented the Database Mahsa, a search environment for Indian map collections, using the Arches database platform. The data are linked based on CIDOC-CRM.
  • Leon Van Wissen, Ingeborg Verheul and Margriet Hoogvliet talked about ways to improve the accessibility and sharing of digitized maps using Linked Open Data and Allmaps.
  • Bert Spaan and Jules Schoonman elaborated on the development of Allmaps, introducing Allmaps Cursors and Allmaps Here.

Discovery & analysis

  • Michael Appleby introduced an experimental tool for the discovery and analysis of digital collections based on large language models. These LLMs are both used for text recognition and analysis.
  • James Misson published a IIIF Timeline tool to visualize collections chronologically.
  • Yaming Fu and Jie Song presented a IIIF integrated Word environment with OCR plugin and a free Excel plugin to support archival transcription, comparison and description.

The whole schedule can be found on https://iiif.io/event/2025/leeds/.

 

Annual Conference 2026

Next year, the IIIF conference stays on the European continent. The Netherlands will be the hosting country. The specific location(s) is/are yet to be determined.

 

Any questions? Please contact Rein.Debrulle@UGent.be