IIIF
Implementation of IIIF for Natural History Collections
The CETAF Identifier specification provides a uniform way for people and machines to access textual data about specimens over the internet but one of the primary use cases is to access images of specimens. These pages document best practice for exposing specimen images using IIIF and why this approach is recommended. The initial development of these recommendations was carried out as part of an EU funded Synthesys+ Task 4.3 (2019-2021) which was part of the larger DISSCo initiative.
IIIF ([International Image Interoperability Framework]) is an exchange standard for sharing multimedia representations of objects on-line. It has been adopted by many institutions and commercial partners in the digital humanities community but, before Synthesys+ Task 4.3, was not used in the Natural History community.
Background
Researchers have become accustomed to online access to data about the specimens held in natural history collections. Over several decades metadata standards have been developed to facilitate the sharing and aggregation of these data, notably Darwin Core and ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) developed under the auspices of the Biodiversity Information Standards organization (TDWG) but other standards developed in other communities, have also proved useful, notably EML (Ecological Metadata Language) from the Ecological Society of America and Long Term Ecological Research Network, and GML (Geography Markup Language) from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
Data aggregators have arisen who both drive standards development and take advantage of the vast number of records made available through this community effort. Examples include Atlas of Living Australia, EoL (Encyclopedia of Life), iDigBio, GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and WFO (World Flora Online). Aggregators with a wider cultural scope have also shown an interest in representing natural history material, notably JSTOR and Europeana.
In addition to these successes there are still many “dark specimens” that are not visible to the web and efforts continue to digitise data on these objects and expose it online.
The vast majority of the data that have been liberated so far have therefore been text based data about specimens and the exchange standards reflect this. But many institutions and projects have simultaneously been imaging their specimens, producing large numbers of images and other media associated with their specimens that they want researchers to be able to access.
Some existing standards have created media extensions to accommodate the sharing of images and other multimedia formats. However, these are restricted to metadata about media objects rather than the exchange of the media objects themselves. For example, two extensions to Darwin Core are Audubon Core, (Multimedia Resources Task Group 2013) which is designed to “determine whether a particular resource or collection will be fit for some particular biodiversity science application before acquiring the media.” and the Simple Multimedia extension, which is a “simple extension for exchanging metadata about multimedia resources”. Therefore image exchange, in particular, has not used open standards. Projects have relied on transferring high resolution versions of images (e.g. submission of type specimen images to JSTOR) or cut down compressed versions (e.g. many herbarium specimens submitted to The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or to Europeana).
The _ad hoc_ network of institutions, organisations and projects that has emerged has not allowed access to high resolution versions of images as curated by the host institutions themselves beyond basic links to web pages. If high resolution images have been published in online catalogues, they have been made available using a hotchpotch of different technologies including the now defunct Java Applets and Adobe Flash player. The network has not supported different views of the same specimen or annotations of those views, or integration of audio and moving images.
