Andrew Davis  0:10  
converted. So I'm, I'm, perhaps talking from the opposite end of the scale to Abira from a large institution, but actually there's probably more similarities to our approach to how we've gone about adopting IIIF than it would first appear I mean I'd love to be standing to be sat before you today, talking about how we've

been able to enact a carefully thought through long standing digital strategy that, that has led to mass adoption of triple is in the provision of 10s of 1000s hundreds of 1000s of thousands of

images via manifests, but actually that's, that's completely not the approach we've taken we've, we've been very piecemeal, and very step by step in our approach, and really is a way of trying to understand IIIF our selves were perhaps not the most digitally savvy organisation, around, but also in an in an attempt to try and embed knowledge about IIIF,  and the possibilities within the organisation to get that higher level buying. So like many organisations we had an existing online presentation of items from the Royal Collection kind of example on screen just screen grab from about 2017-2018 to just want me properly started to really think about how we might adopt IIIF, and it pulled, we built an interface into Drupal website that pulled text metadata from our collections management system, and images from our digital asset management system and combine

Unknown Speaker  1:51  
them online and present them allow people search them. And it's great, it's a means to an end, a way of getting

Andrew Davis  1:57  
at that point, about a quarter of a million records online, and we had pathways to allow us as we digitise to continue expanding that number we were presented with a number of challenges. We were aware those. We were limited, the image viewer particularly that we were using limited the number of images that we were able to present against an individual record. The example here is on screen is from a Mughal manuscript from the Pachamama, which contains 33 Beautiful miniature illustrations. But our view online was limited to 23 images, so we couldn't even show you all of the images from the, the object nevermind see the associated text alongside it. Combined with that it limited the size of images that we were able to present, primarily for performance reasons, similar reasons, the number of images was limited to allow us to sell a record in, in a reasonable time. Those things were limiting. So those were those are kind of long standing challenges that we knew internally that we had, and needed to be resolved. And then for a period of quite a few months, it felt that at every meeting I went to when I was asked I was, I was saying like IIIF could help us IIIF could help us. And then we were afforded an opportunity to investigate further. So our first challenge was the number of images that we presented, and we, the organisation and partner project to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Prince Albert Consort of Queen Victoria, which necessitated the presentation of large amounts of archival material, and volumes of photographs but particularly focusing on how Albert had collected and arranged and stored, it became important that we were able to present. Large numbers of images, against individual record, we needed to be able to just to show you the entirety of the photograph album of what had been pasted next to each other we needed to show you each page from the letter. But one of the things that we wanted to pull out as part of this project was Albert's adoption of new technology, particularly photography. He organised a project to photograph every known work of art by Raphael to to document and allow the wider study of Raphael, who was then considered to be the kind of premier artist in the world so that gave us a kind of an opening to build so up to this is a really good opportunity for us to look at IIIF, if all that had been alive today no doubt he would have undertaken Rafael project by using IIIF. So what we were able to introduce was kind of looking at the, the standard record page that we saw earlier we are getting to image carousel at the footer of the record, a link to a IIIF image viewer, which would then allow us to serve up as many images as we wish to serve up for an individual object we can present an entire album. If we had the photography to allow us to present it and what, what we rapidly noticed was that we tended only to photograph the things, and we haven't photographed blanks, but still it got us past that problem of a limited 23 images per record. So sorry, it was a success in those terms, the approach that we took was kind of kind of the bottom, the bottom point is really I think the most important thing here is that we we tweaked our existing methodology for present presentation information we use IIIF is kind of a bolt-on alongside the ways that we already presented information. We already pulled metadata and images out of our existing systems rather than seeking, at the start, to immediately replace the way that we presented images, meant that it was kind of limited to this one particular project area, if it didn't work. It didn't create problems for the entire of our kind of digital infrastructure. And we could manage and learn in this one small space. So we adopted another instance of our digital asset management system which is Resource Space. Critically, we have a network hosted version, which was incompatible with IIIF because of various security requirements within our internal networks, this is cloud based. We chose to use the same digital asset management system because it was system and familiar with a supplier who we had an existing relationship with, and potentially offered as the chance, at some point in the future, to kind of to combine services in the cloud, which was something we were also thinking about. But crucially Resource space had produced by a company called Monte Carlo had introduced the ability to create job live manifests from resources,

because it's kind of removed from our usual data flow structure. It's an entirely manual process of creation and data entry, there's absolutely no automated process of data transfer so we had to manually manually build each, each manifest. But that meant that we had an element of security in the only things that we consciously chose to make available by IIIF were being made available by IIIF, which addressed one of the concerns around suddenly making absolutely everything available with, with, with no controls over it. And then images were delivered into our website by adding the manifest URL to a dummy resource in our main network dam instance, which would present the IIIF images in a branded version of Universal Viewer, integrating the site and this was a slight tweak to the way that we already present. For example, Vimeo videos when we have film footage of an object. So that worked, that worked really well. Just, just about the time that we finished that or launched that album project, we moved on to the next, the next challenge, which was the size of images. We were working we've been working the organization's been working on a project to publish to catalogue and publish the collection of George III's military maps for a number of years. It originally been a project that was intended to be published, physically,

Unknown Speaker  8:26  
as the kind of digital revolution happened. And then as as our organisation became aware of the digital revolution, it

Andrew Davis  8:33  
was realised that actually because the the nature of these objects, the size of them the level of detail that you need to see digital is much better means of publishing and allowing people to study than than a print publication would be. And indeed, now that we had the means of of presenting within the Universal Viewer, we already had an infrastructure that would allow us to present in a much higher resolution than we than we had been planning to prior to 2019 the launch of that project. So because we were able to reuse that same, that same process we were able to do exactly the same kind of thing so on, on the object record as it was published on the website. We pull through a link to a IIIF viewer, you launch the viewer and you are then able to zoom, this is the highest resolution image that we have. Zoom in see details of individual gun positions or where where troops might be able to actually read the labels, and the annotations that are added to each of the maps. So again, that, that met our need, perfectly. So two kind of long standing internal problems had been addressed. But because we we use IIIF, and because it offers so many possibilities almost sometimes attend these things thinking there's almost an overwhelming level of possibilities for where you can go next and what you might be able to do. We now have all of those options open to us we have the infrastructure in place that means that we can do more. So one of the next projects that we're involved in is taking advantage of this is the Shakespeare in the Royal Collection project with King College London, and this will be the first project that presents Royal Collection objects via IIIF manifests in a non Royal Collection website, increasingly we're keen on being able to share our collections more broadly than our own estate. And this is kind of our trial to find out what are the limitations of our implementation and IIIF when it comes to sharing those resources more wisely and allowing other people to work with them. So, so the individual object records within the Shakespeare in the Royal Collection website, the images are presented via IIIF manifests hosted within our cloud version of our digital asset management system. And this project is going to be also using Cogapp storiiies tool I think I've got one too few eyes in there, too, to allow a deeper interpretation and exploration and some of the topics within, within that collection, when that product launches on the 15th of July. So, so we've gone from kind of solving our immediate problems internally to hopefully beginning to understand the mechanism for how we might share our, our assets and resources more widely. And then where do we go beyond there. As I said we don't currently have a clear roadmap for what we will do next, almost certainly, we will not do all of these things or we will not do all of them together. But areas that we, that I want us to be looking at in the immediate future are whether we should move towards having IIIF by default, rather than opt-in, should it be the main means that we are using to make our images, particularly available to the public. And should we therefore be adopting something that's much more akin to Tom's more industrial model of manifest creation, alternating the ingestion of metadata from our cataloguing systems, for example, to slightly clunky, user experience on our own website can we integrate the IIIF viewrer more into the digital experience and improve more seamless visitor's exploration of our resources. And can you know the King's model is successful and, and that works. Can we open our resources and metadata more widely for for greater, greater sharing and greater reuse. Beyond the Royal Collection sites. And finally, is that model of stories, or the exhibit tool of using IIIF resources for enhanced storytelling an interpretation is not something that we can do more. So as I say, we haven't got any answers for where we might go next, but what we have learned is kind of tackling things in bite size chunks at the level that we can manage them is the best way forward for us. So keep watching and we will keep developing.