Project Description Title: Improving access and research infrastructure for the internet’s images
Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital access offers the potential for scholars to employ heritage collections internationally via the internet. However, most of the internet’s image-based resources have been locked up in silos, and access at resolutions useful for research has been restricted to bespoke, locally-built applications. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) can solve this problem using Application Program Interfaces (APIs) which allow images and metadata held in different digital collections to be accessed in a standardised format.
In this EU-funded MUYA-IIIF project 694612 Proof of Concept project (the MUYA-IIIF PoC) the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) has addressed the problem of tools and infrastructure to realise the potential of IIIF in practical workflows for researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Heretofore the large number of organisations worldwide now providing access to their image-based resources via IIIF have only supported viewing, and not the routine use of research processes such as standards-based scientific annotation. The MUYA-IIIF PoC has worked with the British Library (BL) and the hasdai Partnership of CERN and Data Futures GmbH to build and employ a general-purpose IIIF annotation workflow, extending existing research conducted under earlier The Multimedia Yasna ERC Advanced Grant. Significantly, not only have problems of annotation workflows been addressed by the MUYA-IIIF PoC, but also the creation of new, reusable primary data resources from research employing annotation, which can be preserved using the W3C's Web Annotation Data Model (WADM) standards and state-of-the art InvenioRDM repository technology.
Specifically, MUYA-IIIF has annotated textual structure in key Avestan manuscripts from multiple collections, including from the British Library, to connect the digitised manuscript imagery with structured transcriptions of the text it bears, enabling analysis and searching.
While many institutions internationally now provide IIIF data resources based on their manuscript collections, very few of these are yet compatible with standards-based annotation. The Oxford MA in digital scholarship found, as recently as autumn 2022, that it needed to convert libraries' IIIF resources before being able to annotate them. In contrast, MUYA-IIIF has produced a new WADM-compliant IIIF service, which can now be freely annotated by scholars, and it has also created annotations of all of the stanzas of the Zoroastrian Yasna ceremony. In turn, this has permitted reuse of existing research investment using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) analysis of the Yasna. As a result a significant speed-up has been achieved in developing comprehensive interactive transcription of the Yasna manuscripts.
The second part of the MUYA-IIIF project has addressed sustainability and reuse of this new digital collection: in contrast, many data resources in the Humanities and in cultural heritage become vulnerable to technology obsolescence. In particular, WADM annotations are stand-off in nature—they are stored separately from the digitised manuscript imagery and demand new approaches for effective preservation and accessibility for the wider research community. MUYA-IIIF has therefore worked with the hasdai partnership to gain access to new repository technology developed in the InvenioRDM consortium, which supports annotation. InvenioRDM is the software platform on which the upgrade of the European Commission's OpenAIRE trusted Zenodo repository is based.
To support such long-term access and reuse, the project's outputs comprise four components, which together form a sustainable data resource on which not only SOAS but also the external research community can build.
1. the MUYA InvenioRDM corpus repository provides metadata linked to the British Library manuscript record, and a IIIF viewer for the BL Arundel54 Yasna manuscript imagery.
2. annotations produced in the MUYA-IIIF project are available for download as a WADM. dataset—these annotations are linked to the manuscript imagery via Persistent IDentifiers (PIDs).
3. the IIIF service for the manuscript is available for use by external IIIF applications and researchers' tools.
4. a Zenodo record, linked to the corpus repository, provides the Yasna annotation collection dataset, and this is discoverable by international libraries via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
The new MUYA InvenioRDM corpus repository is supported in the long-term through the hasdai Partnership, and the Zenodo record is supported by the EC's OpenAIRE programme. In this way MUYA-IIIF has created a new sustainability benchmark for digital research investments using scientific annotation, by assembling standards-based infrastructures and making very long-term costs of operation of complex data resources forecastable in concrete terms.
