Ian Kerr
Hello Everyone! This is my first week ever leading a seminar so I am more than a little nervous. Luckily for me, I have someone as experienced as Veronica as a co leader who has been well organized and well prepared since the beginning of the week, so she has been helping me get prepared to lead as well, which has been most helpful. She is also being super awesome and posting this blog on her account (for now) because I am currently having difficulties with Hcomms and am unable to post blogs to my account for whatever reason (oh technology, haha.)
With my introduction and subsequent explanation out of the way, lets move on to this week’s topic IFF aka International image interoperability framework. As I am not a very tech savvy individual (which probably explains my issues with Hcomms!) I was initially fairly overwhelmed with the idea of leading seminar conversation on a topic so digitally focused, however after doing the readings assigned for this week, I can safely say it is not so complex and confusing as it might initially seem.
So in short IFF is (to my admittedly limited technical knowledge) a digitation programing interface that allows uniformity and ease of access between many different digitation programs. This is done in order to unite the field of image digitization as well as providing a universal digitation framework that helps academics intuitions better able to access, share, upload, and annotate primary and secondary digital images.
I found learning about IFF this week to be quite fascinating, as it seemingly a huge step forward in the field of image digitization and technological advancements in general. As by having many different digitization programs and tools available in one easy to use framework, it undoubtedly increases productivity in the digitizing academic field. What I mean by this, is instead of academics each using a different image digitization program, IFF instead provides a seemingly universal interface that allows academics form all over the world to communicate, upload and share images across academic institutions with less confusion and more uniformity.
That all being said, which readings assigned for this week are most helpful in learning what IFF and Mirador are? Although I found all of the readings assigned for this week useful in explaining what these two projects are, the three works I found the most useful were: firstly the training manual explaining what the difference was between an image Api and a presentation Api. Secondly: one by Sarah Ann Long “Review: International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF); Gallica; e-Codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland,”, and thirdly, was the video introduction to project matador available via YouTube. I found all of these sources did a tremendous job in expaing what these projects are in a simplistic and easy to understand manner that really helped explain what IFF and Mirdor actually are.
Finally onto the questions to consider before tomorrows class:
- How could/ or how do programs such as IFF and Miridor advance the field of digitation technology?
- What are some possible problems (technological/ digital that could arise while using IFF and Miridor? Are they both easy to use?
- How about older academics who are used to using certain programs, is it easy to transition to using IFF?
- Although IFF and Miridor are large steps forward in the field of digitization technology, what could be some possible drawbacks to using such a large interconnected framework? Technical limitations (needing to upgrade technology to be able to run IFF, bugs, limitations etc.
- What could be done to better clarify misconceptions about IFF? And how could they be clarified? As although the readings were very informative I found that they all presented IFF as this already complete framework or system instead of a work on progress as it clearly is right now.
- As IFF is already advancing the filed on digital imagery and connectivity, what could possibly be the benefits of having it universally adopted across all academic institutions? What could possibly be the future for IFF and Miridor?
Whew, this post is much longer than I intended, my apologies. I hope I have provided a simple explanation of IFF and Miridor and am looking forward to discussing these questions (and others tomorrow) with all of you in class.