In September the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) will be the venue for an event that explores the interface between heritage and cutting edge technology. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is the emerging open standard for curating scientific and cultural heritage collections on the internet. Adopted by the World’s leading academic and heritage institutions including universities such as The University of Tokyo, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Stanford, IIIF enables the rich display and interoperable sharing of image and media files across the internet opening a whole new level of engagement with heritage resources and collaboration for research and academic endeavour. This will be the first time that a IIIF event has been hosted in Africa.
Click here to book for the Heritage Digital Campus
Glen Robson, far right, and other delegates at the 2018 IIIF Conference at the Library of Congress, Washington DC in May 2018. At the time Glen was working for the National Library of Wales and has since taken up the position of IIIF Technical Coordinator. Glen will be in South Africa in September 2019 leading Africa’s first IIIF event which will be part of Africa Media Online’s Heritage Digital Campus 2019.
Hosted by Africa Media Online and the Digitise Africa Trust, in Association with UKZN Special Collections, the IIIF introductory workshop forms part of the Heritage Digital Campus 2019. The Campus will be run during the week of Monday, September 23 to Friday, September 27 at the UKZN Pietermaritzburg campus before and after the UKZN Special Collections’ Preservation Conservation Conference 2019.
The Heritage Digital Campus provides specialist training for heritage professionals in digital archiving and digital curation. The training will run full day Monday, September 23, Tuesday, September 24 and Friday, September 27 with open sessions in the afternoons of Wednesday, September 25 and Thursday, September 26.
The Heritage Digital Campus is arranged around the University of KwaZulu-Natal Special Collections’ Preservation Conservation Conference 2019. To be held on the UKZN Pietermaritzburg Campus on Wednesday, September 25 and Thursday, September 26, the Conference will be run from 08h00 to 15h30. The Conference theme this year is “Disaster Prevention Preparedness, Response & Recovery of collective collections and e-collections (digitised & born digital images)”. Together, the Digital Campus and the Conference provide a full week of training and engagement on preservation and access for special collections in libraries, archives and museum collections.
Please Note: While normal registration for the Preservation Conservation Conference 2019 is now closed, delegates to the Heritage Digital Campus are still able to register for the Conference alongside their registration for the Campus.
Heritage Digital Campus
The Heritage Digital Campus is broken into two parts – you can do either one or both:
- Building a Digital Archive Masterclass
- IIIF Workshop
To book for either part of the Heritage Digital Campus and for the UKZN Special Collections’ Preservation Conservation Conference 2019 please click here.
Building a Digital Archive Masterclass:
12 Processes to Build a Digital Archive
Applicable for both the leadership of institutions looking to build a digital archive and for practitioners who will be involved day to day in various processes, the Building a Digital Archive Masterclass seeks to give you a comprehensive framework [1] for understanding the enterprise of building a digital archive from planning to digitisation or digital processing to sustaining a digital archive as well as the online curation of a digital archive. The Building a Digital Archive Masterclass will be led by Bandile Sizani and David Larsen of Africa Media Online and will include expert members of the Africa Media Online team.
Duration: 2 full days on Monday and Tuesday and one 1.5 hour session on Wednesday. The Wednesday session is open to participants at the UKZN Special Collections Conference
Cost: R4,500 ex VAT
Maximum Participants: 30
Requirements: None
Certificate: Available on request
Monday, September 23 – Tuesday, September 24, 2019
[Facilitators: David Larsen, Bandile Sizani, Nicki Kirby, Amanda Bucknall (Africa Media Online)]Planning a Digital Archive
On Monday we will look at the essential planning stage of building a digital archive – Scoping, Screening, Selecting and Preparing.
Populating a Digital Archive
Toward the end of the day on Monday and the start of the day on Tuesday we will look at the four processes relating to populating a digital archive – Inventorising, Capturing, Processing and Describing.
Sustaining a Digital Archive
The remainder of Tuesday will be spent on the four processes involved in sustaining a digital archive – Loading, Storing, Accessing and Using.
Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
[Facilitators: Bandile Sizani and David Larsen (Africa Media Online)]MEMAT Showcase
This open session will look at developments and plans around Africa Media Online’s MEMAT digital repository system that enables access, curation of digital collections and facilitates appropriate use of a digital archive.
IIIF Workshop
In 2019 the Heritage Digital Campus will also include the first International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) event in Africa. Glen Robson, Technical Coordinator for IIIF will be out from the UK presenting introductory sessions on the IIIF.
Duration: A 1.5 hour session on Thursday and a full day on Friday. The Thursday session is open to participants at the UKZN Special Collections Conference
Cost: R550 ex VAT
Maximum Participants: Unlimited
Requirements: No previous IIIF experience is required and all technical skills are welcome. For “Introduction to IIIF” please bring a laptop if you have one, otherwise UKZN has made computers available to participants at a computer lab. The Software required will be shared before the workshop.
Thursday, September 26, 2019, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
[Facilitator: Glen Robson (IIIF)]IIIF Showcase
IIIF has emerged as the open standard for rich online display of primarily visual heritage and scientific resources. This session will look at examples of cutting edge developments in enabling online engagement with digital collections.
Friday, September 27, 2019
[Facilitator: Glen Robson (IIIF)]
An Introduction to IIIF
The first International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) event in Africa, this day will demonstrate the power and potential of interoperable image delivery on the Web. Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images and audio/visual resources are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of museum objects, books, newspapers, maps and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s content-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. A growing community of the world’s leading museums, research libraries and content repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery.
IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals:
• To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image and A/V based resources hosted around the world.
• To define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between content repositories.
• To develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.
In this workshop participants will explore the core IIIF APIs including setting up a IIIF Image server and writing a Presentation API manifest. Participants are encouraged to bring their own digital images and metadata to look at in the workshop.
The topics covered include:
• Introduction to IIIF and the IIIF Community
• In depth look at the IIIF Image API
• Installing IIIF Image API compatible software
• Looking at IIIF Image Viewers
• In depth look at the IIIF Presentation API
• Writing a IIIF Manifest
• Looking at the IIIF Presentation viewers including Mirador and the Universal Viewer
• Brief look at the other APIs Search, Auth
• Brief look at IIIF A/V
Bookings
To book for any part of the Heritage Digital Campus 2019 or the UKZN Special Collections’ Preservation Conservation Conference 2019 go to the online booking form
Gallery of Past Digital Campus’
Graeme Cookson teaches in the Digital Imaging Essentials Masterclass run by Africa Media Online at the Robyndale Conference Centre in Kloof in August 2007. This was the third year running that Africa Media Online brought Graeme Cookson out from the UK to teach imaging professionals in South Africa. The courses were run in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. In 2007 the Digital Imaging Essentials masterclass got the following average scores from participant evaluations out of a possible 10: Durban – 9.1; Cape Town – 8.9; Johannesburg 8.5. The new Practical Digital Workflow masterclasses got the following average scores from participant evaluations out of a possible 10: Durban – 9.6; Cape Town – 9.5; Johannesburg – 9.1.
Africa Media Online’s 2008 Digital Campus at the Ascot Conference Centre in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal. This is the fourth year that Africa Media Online is hosting digital masterclasses for African imaging professionals with UK based digital imaging consultant, Graeme Cookson. This year Graeme is joined by Peter Krogh, author of “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers”. A significant number of participants in the programme in 2008 are part of a longer programme run by Africa Media Online with partial funding from the European Union called the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme, aimed at empowering photographic entrepreneurs in Africa.
Peter Krogh teaching at Africa Media Online’s African Photo Entrepreneur Programme at the Cape Town School of Photography in Woodstock Cape Town. This week, run in August 2008 involved UK based imaging consultant, Graeme Cookson, US-based author of “The DAM Book”, Peter Krogh training in digital workflow as part of the Digital Campus.
Copyright lawyer, Tobias Schönwetter lectures at Africa Media Online’s Heritage Digital Campus held at Iziko Museums of Cape Town in August 2009.
Digital libraries specialist, Patricia Liebetrau, teaching at Africa Media Online’s Heritage Digital Campus at the University of Fort Hare in March 2012. The Heritage Digital Campus was held at UFH while the digitisation of the ANC Archive was ongoing and included many members of the NAHECS unit at the University of Fort Hare to ensure the transfer of skills.
UK-based digital archives consultant, Sarah Saunders teaching a masterclass during the 2013 Heritage Digital Campus at Michaelhouse school in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.
UK-based digital image consultant, Graeme Cookson teaching a class during Africa Media Online’s Heritage Digital Campus 2016 held at the Hilton Bush Lodge. The 2016 Campus was specifically focused on Science Museums.
[1] This model was originally conceptualized by Roger Layton of Roger Layton Associates for the writing of South Africa’s National Policy on the Digitisation of Heritage Resources. The model was adapted by David Larsen of Africa Media Online (who at the time was heading up the team that was writing the Best Practices companion to the Policy) to be applicable to the process of building a digital archive and for running a digitisation project. Based on actual use by Africa Media Online in digitisation projects over more than a decade, the model has since been expanded from 10 to 12 processes.