GLAM Guide part II

In Part I I used Tensorflow as a painting/object recognition tool and displayed some information about the painting. The idea was that a visitor on a museum or poi could use their own phone to get more information about a specific piece of art.

In this article I will use IIIF as a storytelling tool. And of course neatly packed into a Progressive Web App

We have all been there, sitting together with grandmother, with an old photo in her hand, pointing to the persons and telling you about your ancestors. Those of us that has been to a gallery or museum looking at a piece of art may also have wondered what the artist meant with it. Usually we depends on informationsigns or searching for information our self.

But what if it is a better way? A way you could use your always present phone as the storyteller…

IIIF has been a buzzword in the GLAM community for some time now. And a lot of institutions have implemented it. For good reasons, IIIF is:

• Free
• Open Source and Open-Access Friendly
• Has a ton of reliable, high-quality tools already developed

IIIF and storytelling has also been done, but often in a linear (singlepage) or dynamic click- through(user-driven) way. I wanted to explore if I could do it in a better way:

But before we begin, remember the first part of GLAM Guide: A visitor opens a webpage (actually a PWA), point the phone at some artpiece, an AI recognize the object and the phone shows some information. In this case, a IIIF ‘image’.

First I had to install a imageserver. I choose IIPImage server.

IIPImage is an advanced high-performance feature-rich image server system for web-based streamed viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be fast and bandwidth-efficient with low processor and memory requirements

Source images can be in either TIFF or JPEG2000 format. In order to maximize the speed and efficiency of the system, the source images must be in a multi-resolution format. This allows for rapid access to individual image tiles at any resolution with minimal server overhead. I used TIFF and found a image of a painting I downloaded.

Before I could use the image I had to convert it to a Tiled Multi-Resolution image. This is easily done with VIPS.:

$vips im_vips2tiff c:\supper.jpg tt.tif:jpeg,tile:512x512,pyramid

IIPImage server up and running at localhost

Then it was time to chose a viewer. Since I wanted a IIIF viewer and somehow common in GLAM community I used OpenSeadragon

OpenSeadragon is an open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images, implemented in pure JavaScript, for desktop and mobile.

OpenSeadragon supports several image serving protocols out of the box and then of course IIIF.

Using OpenSeadragon with IIIF and IIPImage server is pretty strait forward:

<script type="text/javascript">
 var count=0;
    var viewer = new OpenSeadragon.Viewer({
        id: "openseadragon1",
        prefixUrl: "/openseadragon/images/",
        preserveViewport:   true,
        visibilityRatio:    1,
        minZoomLevel:       1,
        defaultZoomLevel:   1,
        sequenceMode:       true,
 tileSources:   [{
      "@context": "http://iiif.io/api/image/2/context.json",
       "@id": "http://192.168.0.110/fcgi-bin/iipsrv.fcgi?IIIF=tt.tif",
      "height": 4800,
      "width": 9600,
      "profile": [ "http://iiif.io/api/image/2/level2.json" ],
      "protocol": "http://iiif.io/api/image",
      "tiles": [{
        "scaleFactors": [ 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 ],
        "width": 512
      }]
    }
      
    ]
});

So now I had a functional IIIF server and viewer:

(background music is Tangerine Dream, my favorite band :) )

The rest of the project was ‘no big deal’: I created a firebase database, downloaded a .mp3 file where the painting was discussed, selected viewports and timecode correlating to the discussion and fired panTo and zoomTo events.

This is the result (remember volume, action starts at approx 15 sec):

Conclusion

Using IIIF as a storytelling platform works very well. And I wish I could see more of it in the GLAM community. It gives added value to the visitor and the institution gains from satisfied customers. But… There will always be a discussion if it is ‘good practices’ to be online in a museum. Maybe a museum or gallery should be that place where you go offline and just use your own senses…