A Case Study on IIIF and Omeka S
Focused on Digital Humanities, in particular Digital Cultural Heritage, the M.A.S. thesis reports the works, experiments and results obtained during an internship at KBR – Royal Library of Belgium.
Through the case of Brugis Pictum project at DIGIT department, it shows the current stakes in the creation of digital repositories at research libraries: (1) the usefulness of STEM imaging for research in medieval history and material culture, (2) the emergence of IIIF – International Image Interoperability Framework as the new standard for image delivery in digital repositories, and (3) the benefits and limitations of web publishing platforms (Content Management Systems) dedicated to cultural heritage and digital curation.
The first part explores the processing of multispectral images on a set of folios from a late medieval manuscript with special attention to their illuminations. Multispectral imaging technology allows to distinguish the pigments specific to each illumination in view of a more accurate identification of the illuminators and, more broadly, a better understanding of the material culture of late medieval manuscripts.
The second part examines IIIF as the new standard for accessing digital image-based resources. It includes an overview of its core APIs, a metadata mapping of the current Presentation API (Manifest) related to multispectral images, and an overview of the solutions for integrating Linked Open Data within the Manifest.
The third part is centered on the implementation of a Content Management System, Omeka S, i.e., a web-publishing platform focused on digital curation for the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). The platform is designed for hosting the digital images created for the project following the IIIF standard as it integrates a IIIF server and diverse IIIF-compliant viewers among its plugins.