Move Linked Art standards work under IIIF?

[Robert Sanderson]

Dear all,

On the call on Wednesday we discussed whether or not to move Linked Art under the IIIF umbrella.

The points in favor:

* IIIF is a sustainable, active community supported and managed by a membership funded organization with three excellect full time staff. If I (Rob) were to be run over a bus, then there is a framework within which Linked Art would continue.

* IIIF organizes conferences, meetings, events and has funds and staff to make things happen, not just on a completely volunteer basis, unlike Linked Art today which relies on the good will of Getty to pay for the domain and a free tier of Netlify and AWS usage for the site and validator.

* We've seen a decrease in attendance in calls over the past year since 1.0 was released. Completely understandable and even expected. IIIF on the other hand continues to grow and mature, and participation in our work would receive a valuable boost of cross-domain attention.

* We're currently a working group in ICOM Documentation (previously called CIDOC) which has some cache in the museum space, but even there it carries the perception of CIDOC-CRM's complexity. We do not get anything from being part of ICOM in terms of either community, adoption, advertising, support or infrastructure.

* Linked Art is aligned with IIIF in terms of design principles, community principles and process. Much more so than with ICOM.

* Linked Art has moved beyond just its original art museum collection origins into archives, bibliographic material, and even natural history museum collections to some degree. This makes it ideal for IIIF implementers as a cross-domain standard

* IIIF also has community groups for adoption and discussion but not technical work, which will alleviate some of the pressure of having only one call for all things linked art.

* IIIF also stands to benefit, making this a win/win:

    * Increased awareness in the museum sector, which has been a target of the community compared to ever more libraries

    * IIIF is often asked about semantic descriptive metadata, which it does not address. Linked Art would provide a solution to that question, in a way that is compatible with the existing specifications, and indeed uses many of them directly

  

Points against:

* Museums might think of IIIF as "images in a box" (which it isn't) and have a negative reaction. (Not sure this is the case ... IIIF is pretty well known these days, and it's easy to disprove)

* ICOM might be cross about it. (We'll discuss with the co-chairs of ICOM Documentation before anything final happens to ensure communication remains open, and potentially to broker a joint specification process in which ICOM blesses the specification as well as IIIF)

* The spec is likely to be renamed, losing some brand name recognition. (Yes, and I'm sure we'll all continue to refer to it as Linked Art, but the brand of IIIF is much more well known still)

Non-Issues:

* Linked Art is an open community -- anyone can participate. So is IIIF. The consortium is funded by members who believe in the work, but the consortium is not a gating mechanism to participation.

* IIIF specifications require at least one editor to sponsor a new specification and shepherd the technical work. Not a problem because I'm an editor in IIIF.

* IIIF TSGs need deliverables and whatnot. They also need approval by various committees. While true, I think this is a non-issue as if IIIF doesn't want to work on this, then the answer to "do we join up with IIIF" is very clear :)

I welcome any and all thoughts in favor or against this move. We are currently on the docket for the IIIF Executive to discuss in July, after the conference in the Netherlands in a couple of weeks time.

Julien and I will draft a charter for Linked Art within the IIIF constructs and share when it's fleshed out for further comment.

Many thanks!

Rob

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Rob Sanderson

Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage

Yale University