Meet Tristan Roddis, co-chair of the IIIF SIG.
Hello! My name is Tristan, and I’m a huge fan of both MCN and IIIF, an acronym for International Image Interoperability Framework. I’ve both attended, and presented at, the MCN conference six times since my first one in 2011 and always love the interchange of ideas that goes on.
Talking of that, I first came across the idea of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in 2013, thanks to some contacts at the British Library. At the time I dismissed it as boring, irrelevant, and abstruse, but as I’ve found out more over the years I have had a complete conversion, and now consider myself a IIIF evangelist.
The main reason for this is that I’ve seen first-hand the way in which taking the time to implement its standards is paid back several fold when it comes to providing useful features for your website. In my role as Director of Web Development at Cogapp, I’ve been responsible for around half a dozen large-scale implementations of several of the IIIF APIs (Image, Presentation and Content Search, since you ask). These can then form the building-blocks for interesting experiences for your site visitors, and that is the area that really excites me!
Because of this I have been presenting a talk that I call “Fun With IIIF” where I try to highlight the extremely varied ways in which people have been using IIIF to create such experiences. This has been through several incarnations, but the latest and greatest version is from IIIF Week last year, which features ten different presenters, and showcases twenty projects. If you don’t want to watch the full hour presentation in that link, you can pick-and-choose the projects to look at from the slides instead.
Alternatively, if you’re new to IIIF and just want answers to the most common questions, have a look at the notes from my session Everything You Always Wanted to Know About IIIF* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) from MCN 2017.
Interested in joining a SIG?
Through Special Interest Groups, all MCN members have the opportunity to connect with colleagues doing similar work, explore opportunities to collaborate among them, share resources and effective practices, or discuss ways to advance their area of digital practice.