IIIF RBGE Example
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Herbarium
The RBGE Herbarium contains approximately three million specimens. An online herbarium catalogue presents metadata on around one million of these and zoomable, high resolution images of about half of those. The specimen images are the result of a complex internal process that has developed over the last decade. The final stage of the process is to build an image tile pyramid of the specimen and store it in a ZIP file. A bespoke web service then exposes this data as Zoomify end point.
The system works well and the online catalogue is used both within the organisation and by researchers from around the world. There was no need to make changes to the overall process however there were two areas that made adoption of IIIF desirable. Firstly the Zoomify endpoint restricts the choice of viewers in the catalogue. Secondly, because other herbaria do not use Zoomify in the same way, opportunities for interoperability were restricted.
Implementation
We therefore built our IIIF implementation as a wrapper around our existing infrastructure (Figure 11). A relatively simple set of bespoke PHP scripts (available in GitHub) implement the Image and Presentation APIs by calling the collections metadata in an Apache Solr index (the same one that feeds the catalogue) and the existing Zoomify API for images.
Once the IIIF service was in place and proved to be stable the existing Zoomify viewer in the catalogue was swapped out for an OpenSeadragon viewer that calls the IIIF Image API. This means the catalogue and backend are further decoupled and we could switch either out in the future if that became desirable.
Having implemented the IIIF service we were able to add the manifest URIs to our Darwin Core Archive feed to GBIF using the mechanism described in the section above. This means our specimens are displayed in the GBIF data portal with draggable IIIF icons along with those from other collections. The manifests are also available through the GBIF API for incorporation into other applications.
Future development
Looking to the future we may be able to include OCR and Citizen Science data gathered about specimens as IIIF annotations. We also hope our specimens will be exploited in IIIF based taxonomic work benches.
Padme
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