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Category: Communication

Description: Presented at JTS2019 by Adam Tovell and Andy Irving at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum (NL) on Saturday, October 5, 2019. Collaborative notes available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3835666 ABSTRACT: IIIF (International Image Interoperability Format) has emerged in recent years as a powerful framework to enable the viewing, comparing, manipulation and annotation of images online. As a community driven, standardised set of technologies, IIIF is attractive to memory institutions in providing access to digital materials and their supporting metadata (e.g. descriptive and structural) without the limits imposed by bespoke, locally-developed applications and solutions. By describing content in a standardised way, digital collections can be rendered by a single ‘viewer’, reducing technical overheads, creating a unified, ‘content agnostic’ experience for the end-user, providing more opportunities for collaboration and opening up collections between institutions, globally. Access to digital collections is fundamental to research and scholarship, and to the promotion of collections to non-academic audiences. But providing access to digitised sound collections in a way that supports the needs of researchers and the curious public presents several challenges. Archival materials and ‘field recordings’ held on legacy physical formats can be very complex, often composed of several distinct recordings on multiple items, by several sequences of audio files, each of which are frequently non-sequential. To deliver these materials online with the metadata required to navigate the resource and to understand its contents requires rich but easily understandable metadata. Over the past two years and supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the IIIF Presentation API has been further developed by a consortium of international partners including the British Library to support the delivery of audiovisual materials. IIIF v3 aims to support the various needs of audio creators and custodians. Use cases for IIIF for audiovisual materials have been collected from the across the IIIF community, including requirements such as the ability to: • Deliver complex archival resources to a research audience with rich metadata • Deliver complex audio resources in a simple way to the public • Create and display annotations as they apply to an audio or audiovisual recording • Compare multiple resources alongside one another • Play sound recordings of a piece of music or speech while following a musical score or transcript • Highlight or specify a region or point of interest in an audio or audiovisual file This work has also involved the development of the ‘Universal Viewer’ – an open-source viewer for IIIF image sequences – to support audio and to deliver all audio materials created through the British Library’s eight-year Save our Sounds programme. This paper will explore the challenges that delivering audio resources online presents; how IIIF metadata can be used to describe complex audio collections; how harnessing this metadata can open up possibilities for research and dissemination and how the Universal Viewer will provide access to audio collections online for the Library’s Save our Sounds programme.