IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework, began, like many other good ideas, on the back of a napkin, or so the story is often told. Its first use case was restorative: to digitally reunite fragments of historic illuminated manuscripts that had been cut up over the ages by dealers and collectors. Through standardization, an illustration held in one institution would fit properly in the hole on a page of a manuscript owned by another institution. The aggregative logic of a single repaired item applied to many things, as it turned out, and IIIF outgrew its original narrow purpose to encompass a wide array of materials and practices: scholarly annotation, multi-institutional virtual collections, 3D, AI and machine learning, and so on. With its spread from Medieval European origins to global scope, it also helped diversify cultural heritage collections and reverse centuries of predatory collections practices. This history may be interesting or relevant to cultural heritage professionals, but what about educators?
Let us imagine the reverse scenario (the librarian’s fever dream): a professor from a small liberal arts college escorts a class of slouchy undergraduates into the rare book and manuscript library. The students hastily scan through everything in the collection, pick out a few of their favorites, and slip them into their backpacks for more comfortable inspection later that night in their dorm rooms. The professor asks each of them to snip sample illuminations and some text passages to share with their peers in class. In class, they pass them around, highlight the parts they don’t understand for discussion, collaboratively decipher messy handwriting, transcribe and annotate details with their best-guess descriptions and interpretations. Over the next several weeks, museums, libraries and archives from around the world overnight mail some of their own precious holdings for comparative study. All they ask is that the students handle everything and preferably write something of note in the margins. The professor leads a game of bingo using boards made from cut-out words and images from the manuscripts. Pages are eventually reduced to confetti in the study of individual letters. Ex ungue leonem: who can pick out an individual scribe in a handwriting lineup? Because learning is not all fun and games, the term concludes with a 10-12 page argumentative research essay, illustrated with annotated clippings from old books as evidence. Rest assured, no tomes are harmed to make all of this possible. And the professor is able to teach the same course year in and year out with the same materials, magically restored each time, to new students. Students jam the course rosters, thirsty for knowledge in the humanities and parents assured their academic training will help them on the job market.
How is this possible? IIIF (that’s “triple-eye-eff” for those of you new to the game) hinges on interoperability, which means the world’s best primary source content can move from place to place and mix and match right where you need it to be, in front of your students. Zooming viewers, such as Mirador or the Universal Viewer, and tools for cropping, annotating, narrating all embed in your LMS course site with material you choose, they find, or a curator selects. If your local institution has physical holdings, all the better! Archivists will marvel at your students’ prior knowledge and keenness to detail. The tangible materiality of objects adds a new dimension to their understanding and an excitement not usually afforded by young people to old stuff. You don’t need to be tech-savvy or code-literate to make it all work, just tolerant, perhaps, of those who are. Contact your IIIF professional today and they’ll help you get started.