Tagged: libraryitnews

Announcing the IIIF Consortium

Big news! On Tuesday [June 16], eleven world-leading institutions agreed to form the IIIF Consortium, a member organization dedicated to sustaining and advancing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The consortium will support the work of IIIF by pooling and allocating funding from members for exposing content via IIIF; doing outreach, training, and advocacy to grow the community; maintaining and elaborating on the IIIF technical specifications; providing catalytic support for IIIF-compatible software development; helping coordinate the IIIF community, and more.

The Consortium will reinforce and amplify the work currently done within IIIF community by providing ongoing support for the IIIF working group, editorial efforts, community calls and meetings. A core principle of the Consortium is that it derives its strengths from the active participation of a distributed community, and therefore values the diversity, inclusiveness and transparency that have characterized IIIF since its inception.

The consortium will extend invitations to additional Founding Members later this year. The first eleven institutions in the IIIF Consortium have each played prominent roles in helping develop IIIF to its current state, and have committed to helping grow it over the longterm. These institutions are:

  • Artstor
  • Bavarian State Library
  • British Library
  • Cornell University
  • National Library of France
  • National Library of Norway
  • Oxford University
  • Princeton University
  • Stanford University
  • Yale University
  • Wellcome Trust

For next steps, we will continue to work to expand the number of IIIF-compatible repositories and software packages in the world, and do ongoing development of the technical specifications on authentication, search within objects, and discovery of IIIF resources for use.

This is a watershed development as it signals major, international commitment at an institutional level for the Framework, and the beginning of organized support to help sustain the benefits of interoperability over the longterm.

To read more about IIIF visit: http://iiif.io/

HydraDAM 2 update

Indiana University and WGBH recently presented their plans for the grant funded HydraDAM 2 project. Some interesting bullets from their presentation:

  • HydraDAM 1 came from a need for WGBH to migrate off the vendor product Artesia which was heading in a new direction
  • Indian University’s use case is to ingest 10 Terabytes per day for 4 years for a total of 6.6 Petabytes of master and use copy video files along with associated files for preservation into HydraDAM 2
  • HydraDam 1 is too slow for ingest so ingest is handled externally
  • HydraDam2 will use two different storage system models with Fedora 4 managing both online/nearline and offline tape copies
  • Out of region copies are out of scope for the size of the collection going in, however, IU is a DPN member and plans to use that for high risk items. Currently they are in the process of setting policies and preservation levels associated with the content.
  • Preservation services to be offered in HydraDam2 include:
    • Storage and retrieval of files
    • Scheduled fixity checks and file characterization on demand
    • Auditing based on Fedora 4
    • Reporting
    • Media migration (from one storage solution to another storage solution)
    • Format migration for risk of obsolescence
  • There is a working version of Avalon using Fedora 4

This was a preliminary presentation. IU and WGBH will be giving a detailed presentation at the upcoming Open Repositories conference in June.

Mellon funds University of Michigan Press collaboration to create new ecosystem for digital scholarship

Excerpt:

The University of Michigan Press, which is part of the University of Michigan Library, will collaborate with the university presses at Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern and Penn State universities (each institution will receive funds from Mellon) to build workflows and infrastructure using Hydra/Fedora, a robust and flexible technical framework and repository system.

Read more about this 3 year, $899,000 grant:
http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/22771-mellon-funds-u-m-press-collaboration-to-create-new-ecosystem-for-digital-scholarship