Digital Systems: IIIF and Exhibit.so

For this exercise, I wanted to explore exhibit.so and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). My exhibit is here. In addition to detailing my experience with exhibit.so, I want to discuss the broader topic of IIIF and the benefits and challenges for GLAM institutions. 

Before starting to design an exhibit in exhibit.so, I spent some time on the IIIF website and mnemoscene.io to more familiarize myself with IIIF and exhibit.so. I found a link to this Medium article which talks about working with the Royal Pavilion Museum, and it was helpful to explore the Royal Pavilion website. I looked at some of the Pavilion’s online exhibits, such as the “Music Room”. exhibit.so also features several exhibit examples. The Royal Pavilion’s collections are mostly IIIF formatted, and when viewing an item a user can add it directly to an exhibit.so digital exhibit. 

Using exhibit.so was intuitive and straightforward, it did not take long for me to figure out how to annotate images and create “slides”. However, I used an existing image and IIIF manifest from the Victoria and Albert Museum. If I had wanted to build an exhibit with my own images, I would have first had to create a manifest. The only issue I ran into while working in exhibit.so was how to end and save a project. There is no “save” or “finish”, and no log-in or account creation. To save the exhibit you must copy a link for editing and a link for sharing. 

The free “hosted” version of Exhibit.so seems to be mostly intended for educational purposes, and “self-hosted” Exhibits for GLAM clients who need the added features and customizability. However, the final exhibit products on GLAM websites like the Royal Pavilion do not visually seem different from the basic exhibit.so hosted exhibits that anyone can create. Despite being free to use, exhibit.so does not appear to be open source. In order to self-host, a user needs to register and pay for other platforms like Google Cloud Platform. Exhibit.so is a great online tool that is very easy to use, and free for most users, but it is not a one stop shop for GLAM institutions looking to build online exhibits.  

While there are online tools and in-depth guides to create a manifest, it is another process that takes time and knowledge. Various institutions are developing tools to support IIIF. Smaller institutions may not have the resources to convert their existing digital collections to IIIF. While IIIF seeks to standardize image sharing and viewing, and writing a manifest may seem straightforward, many institutions still have different standards for metadata and image quality. However, sites like the Image Archive offer a free way to make an image IIIF compliant, allowing users to see if IIIF will be beneficial for their specific projects. 

The technology and staff expertise required are certainly one of the biggest restrictions to full IIIF implementation, there are other challenges GLAM institutions have to consider as well. End users, patrons of museums and libraries will require training as well. The back-end of how images are displayed or exhibits created can be confusing at worse and boring to most online end users. How should museums educate users on the benefits and usage of IIIF images, if at all? If the features of IIIF go largely unnoticed outside of academia, is it worth it? 

Discoverability is another IIIF challenge. IIIF protocols, according to the Framework, were designed to “break down silos”, but as Dr. Paola Manoni writes “we have yet to implement an end-to-end solution that demonstrates how discovery might be accomplished at scale”. Her article, “Discoverability in the IIIF digital ecosystem” discusses what discoverability of IIIF images should look like and how to achieve the next steps. It will be interesting to follow the work of IIIF community groups focusing on the end-user.   

So while there are challenges to IIIF protocols, the benefits are also substantial and many GLAM institutions around the world are working towards IIIF enabled collections. One exciting benefit for researchers is how easy it is to collaborate and annotate IIIF images. IIIF will increase resource sharing and collaboration between institutions, by standardizing how images are packaged and displayed. In 2022 researchers from different institutions in the United Kingdom compiled a report demonstrating the current usage of IIIF and future recommendations for wider adoption. The Victoria & Albert museum is using IIIF to reach their goal of only having one “master copy” of their images, the National Gallery is using IIIF for more educational purposes, creating new annotated educational packages, and the British Library is exploring how IIIF standards can be applied to non-2D items. The Smithsonian is also a pioneer of IIIF and working to standardize their collection.  

While the Image API retrieves and views the image, the IIIF Presentation API puts basic metadata with that image, which I believe is one of the major strengths of IIIF. This allows any user to be able to quickly see information like title, rights, material, and description as provided by the image’s source. So when images are reused by others outside, they are automatically correctly attributed. 

IIIF standards and IIIF image viewers like Mirador or Universal Image make it easier for institutions to build and reuse digital collections, by standardizing the digital images. IIIF is a piece of the digital exhibit and museum puzzle, and has the potential to improve digital repositories and databases and increase cross-institutional data sharing and image discovery. For students, exhibit.so and IIIF are useful learning tools. Teachers and museum educators can create interactive quizzes and slideshows. For GLAM institutions exhibit.so is a simple and stable way to create digital exhibits and engage audiences online.