 So with that, we'll dive into it, this general introduction here. And we'll start at the most basic level. So what is AAAF? At root, it is an acronym. It stands for this, the International Image Interoperability Framework. And because that is a real mouthful, you'll hear us generally refer to it as AAAF, or at least that's in English what most people use as a shorthand. But maybe more usefully, more interestingly, what AAAF is, it's a model for presenting and annotating content like digital images and audio visual files, for making a consistent presentation of all these different things. And when you do that, there are a lot of benefits that accrue to this end of using open standards. But it's also important to point out that whenever we talk about AAAF, we're also very much talking about the community of people who make this work. So that's a community of software developers, but also library staff and museum professionals and curators, as well as the photographers and other people who are involved with the entire process and pipeline of making digital materials available and putting them up online for people to work with. And to give you a sense of where this is all happening, we have this map. So there are hundreds of institutions that we know about around the world making use of AAAF, and there are certainly hundreds more that aren't represented here on this map. In particular, I'll point out that the dots that you see here in blue are members of the AAAF consortium. And so those are institutions that actually have taken the step of helping to financially support the work of doing outreach and presenting materials and things like this conference and doing work to help integrate AAAF at institutions around the world so that we get an even broader, more global base of support for this open set of technology. And this is a different view of that, gives you a sense of some of the institutions that are making use of AAAF, so very large and small museums and galleries around the world. Aggregators like Europeana, DPLA, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation, as well as state and national libraries and very large scale and small scale universities and research institutions as well. So that gives you a sense of who is making use of this. But maybe next, let's talk about why we need something like this. So why do we need AAAF? Well, if you're watching this, if you're attending the conference this week, you're probably on board with this notion that images and digitized materials are really fundamental carriers of information. They're so critical to the enterprise of of making cultural context more understandable, so presenting our own cultural context and those of other cultures around the world and understanding how those things all fit together and how they've evolved and interacted and intersected over time. So we've spent two generations in cultural heritage digitizing materials and putting them up online for exactly that reason because these are such important ways of communicating. But in doing that, we've also created a problem for ourselves. We've done this work, but we've done it individually and separately at all these different institutions around the world. So we've, as a result, created this world of silos. And if you look at this from the end user perspective, what you end up with is a situation where you present the user with this really rich set of materials, which you make them kind of dive deep into a single place and work with the materials and get familiar. And then they have to extricate themselves and kind of walk that tightrope across the top to maybe another institutionals web portal and then dive deep and work with the materials there. And even though a lot of these setups are very similar, we really give end users a very limited way of interacting with all these different things and the different silos that contain them. And this is a diagrammatic view of the same issue. So we all have very similar tech stacks. We're doing very similar things in terms of storing images and audio and video materials on the web and then presenting those to our end users. But we're doing it all the same way, but we're all doing it separately and independently. So AAAF provides a solution to that. It is a set of open APIs that make available a consistent way of sewing together things across different institutions, presenting them in unified viewers and other applications that help alleviate some of that burden on the end user. So probably the best way to go through this is to give a number of examples of how AAAF is used in production environments. These are real institutions, real use cases that are making extensive use of AAAF to solve real problems they have. So we'll go through a number of these and you can see the real interactions as we go through them. And the first one, kind of the most basic, the one that maybe the most people are familiar with, is this idea of really deep zoom on very large images. And so this particular example comes from Stanford University. It's a Japanese tax map. You're actually meant to stand in the middle of it and to be able to read the elements that are surrounding you. And you can see there very briefly, the photographer is in this particular image. And that guy's name is Wayne and he's about two meters tall. So you can see that this map is enormous. It's about four meters tall by three meters wide. And so digitizing something like that, you end up with gigabytes of information. So instead of making users download all of that information just to be able to work with it at a useful resolution, AAAF provides a mechanism for delivering just enough high resolution information to fill the display richly and then provides a mechanism for moving in and out of those different zoom levels just as you would with a digitized or Google maps or something like that. But the same set of technologies can be used to do something really useful like this comparison example. So this comes from the Leiden collection. And this example shows different kinds of imaging all interleaved together or woven together in this interviewer. So this has a visual representation of the image as well as X-ray representation and infrared representation. So all these different spectra of information. And this is called a curtain viewer. And it allows the user to look at how these different light spectra intersects in this viewer. And it still allows for that deep zoom capability. So you can get all the way in on a detail and see what it looks like in say X-ray versus infrared and examples like that. And of course the AAAF APIs are also useful across different sites and applications. So this is an example of an illuminated manuscript from the 15th century that actually had the illuminations cut out of it. And over the years ended up at a different institution. So you can see here just in terms of raw distance, they're not all that far apart, both located in Paris. But in terms of digital objects, you might as well be asking the end users to travel through different dimensions in terms of reunifying materials. But using AAAF APIs, Bibli Sima was able to create this demonstration viewer that actually reconnects the illustrations with the pages from which they were cut. It allows you to interact with the images as they were originally meant to be seen and worked with. So drawing those materials from across institutional boundaries into this reunified interface. There's also elements built into AAAF that allow you to do things like searching within text. So if you have translation or transcriptions or other text associated with an image, you can search inside that text just as you would doing search inside of a PDF, for example. And annotation is how this is all accomplished. So this example shows one really useful mechanism of using annotation in an educational context. This comes from Harvard's edX course on cell biology and cell chemistry. And it provides these annotations that describe what's happening in these different components of a cell. And it shows them in their sort of natural scale relationship to each other. So the end users, students can explore what's happening in the cell and really see what's happening at the original resolution for all these different elements and see the text of the annotations describing what's happening. And that same set of capabilities is also very usefully deployed in crowdsourcing. So this is one example that comes from the National Library of Wales. And their crowdsourcing platform asks users from the local communities to identify people in the photographs to help determine what year the photograph was taken to help identify where a photograph might have been taken nearby. And all of that is done and stored in the AAAF annotation technology. And a new capability that we've seen coming very much out of some of the University and Museum communities is this idea of guided viewing and guided tours of AAAF materials. So this is a tool called Exhibit that came from St. Andrews and the Nemesene Digital Folks. And so this allows you to take multiple AAAF assets, put them into this edited interface, and then turn that into a guided viewing experience for the end users. And there are a couple of different ways to make that work. This example in this screenshot here is an example of what's called scrolly telling. So the user just scrolls through the different parts of the page, and it then connects the annotations, the text elements over there on the left with different segments of these AAAF assets in the viewer over there on the right. And of course, this does wonders and has provided so many different capabilities on the digital side of the world, but we're also seeing it enhancing in-person experiences as well. So this example comes from Boston College where there are these two manuscripts presented in the display case, but there's also a digital representation of the objects available for users to explore and work with and zoom in and out of presented there in a tablet on the right. And because these things are all premised on the open standards in the AAAF universe, they come with a lot of ability to port things and to really make use of the interoperability element of the AAAF acronym. So this is an example that comes from the Indigenous Digital Archive, which itself is a wonderful viewer and connection point into a lot of digitized materials from the National Archives and other places. But in each case, when they present these AAAF materials, they're also presenting the option for users to open them in different AAAF viewers. So this example you can see at the bottom allows users to open the same asset in the universal viewer or in the mirror door viewer, which allows for comparative viewing of multiple objects, for example. And one of the things we're most excited about is just in the last year or so, the AAAF universe has expanded to encompass more than just digitized images. So you can now connect digitized audio or digitized moving image materials to different AAAF annotations and other capabilities. So there are examples that run a whole gamut of examples from something simple like transcriptions or automated captioning, all the way to more interactive tools that let you work with and annotate musical compositions, for example. But this screenshot that I'll play in just a second here, I think does a really nice job of elegantly integrating the ability to have a recorded guided viewing experience that moves the user through different sections of a high-resolution image while still allowing the end user to explore on their own, for example, and to move and zoom on their own. You'll see how that works here in just a second. I want to take a look at one of my favorite maps that's been recently digitized at the 11th Hall Center. This map isn't particularly rare or particularly ancient, but I love it because it captures a view of the Boston metropolitan region at a really interesting moment when trolley lines were fusing together what had previously been independent cities and towns and reshaping how people experienced the regional landscape. This map is called a trolley wayfinder, and it shows a bird's-eye view of trolley routes in New England. And so that example, I should say, is an example of a technology called Movie Maps, and it comes from the 11th Hall Map Center, and it's just been released in the first set of example movie maps that they've presented like this one that you just saw about the trolley wayfinding. I think that just works very nicely in terms of presenting users a nice guided access point to AAAF materials. I want to take a look at so now that we've given kind of a good high-level overview of some of the use cases at AAAF and the ways that institutions are making use of this in production instances all over the world. Maybe let's take a different look at how it actually works and some of the underpinning concepts. So at root AAAF really makes use of this concept of application programming interfaces or APIs. You've probably heard of that before. And what an API is, is a structured way of connecting systems. It is a contract about how data will work when presented between two parts of a system. And as long as that contract holds, as long as both ends of the agreement are maintained and that connection is still viable, then you can do things like swap out the front end of the system while keeping the back end. And as long as the API presents the information in that same structured way, this will all work pretty fluidly. Or you can do the reverse and swap out the back ends while keeping the front end the same. And over time, as you may guess, because the APIs provide that consistent and structured way of communicating data, you can end up swapping out all the components of a system and still have that agreement hold. And as long as the APIs are understood, you can add on other components or work with different systems in different ways. And the APIs provide a normalized way of working with those elements. So this is a view into how that notion of an API works in the context of an individual institution. In this case, the layer of AAAF APIs makes it possible to work with images into a customized application to work with annotations that are stored in a particular environment. But where the magic really happens is in the context of multiple institutions. So you see here all these institutions making the use of all the same set of open APIs really starts to make possible a variety of interactions and capabilities that weren't there before. So institutions being able to work with digitized assets from their own collections and also being able to draw in related works from other AAAF compliance institutions. Being able to add and store annotations about those materials, regardless of where they're stored, whether it's a local digitized material or pulled in from another institution. So you get the sense here that that layer really provides that consistency across not just one institution, but across all these different capabilities ecosystem-wide. And in the AAAF context, this really rests on this notion of the two core AAAF APIs. So we have the image API, which as it sounds literally delivers the pixels by a simple restful web service and allows you to manipulate images using URL parameters. And then that works in conjunction with the presentation API, which provides just enough metadata and structure to drive a really compelling viewing experience. So you can see here, this diagram of the image API shows you some of the transformation. So you can do things like regioning of an image, rescaling that region, rotation, reflection, also possibly changing the quality. So delivering grayscale or black and white versions of an image. And all of that is done here with segments of this URL. So you can see this example, URL for an image, and all those different sections between the slashes are showing you how you would manipulate the aspects of the AAAF image API. And this works consistently across any image delivered through a AAAF image API server. And that then works with the presentation API. So the presentation API delivers things that like structure, which would mean the order of pages in a book or the order of songs on a mix tape, things like that. And then combining that with really basic properties, things like description, labels, licensing, attribution, and links to other metadata elements. So AAAF really works with just about any metadata standard. It is not itself a metadata standard. It doesn't dictate how any of these things work other than being able to pull data from a lot of different places. So it can really cross different software components and institutional image management systems or repositories, things like that. And this is probably a useful way to see how they get put together. So over there on the right, you can see in that blue box is the actual deep zoomable asset itself. And that set of pixels is what's being delivered by the image API. And then on the left, and at the bottom there, you can see the elements that are delivered by the presentation API. So the things like what's labeled there, the title label, the structure, in this case, the table of contents for a sketchbook, the sequence of the images that should appear. So that order of the thumbnails down there at the bottom, those are all specified in the presentation API. And then one other thing I guess I'll say about this image as an added element on top of all of that is that the thumbnails themselves, while the order is specified by the presentation API, the thumbnails themselves are being drawn by the image API. So again, another integration of these two API elements. There are two other elements, two other APIs in the AAAF universe right now. There is the search API that allows you to search within texts that is associated with an image or a newspaper, whatever it might be. And then there is something called the authentication API, which supports a couple of different mechanisms for login or other authentication in cases where say only on site or only authorized users should be able to see the complete resolution of an image, whereas otherwise maybe a smaller version of an image is delivered. Or if there's sensitive materials that require as a click through agreement, the authentication API can work with those kind of interaction patterns. And I'll also just mention that there are some other API elements in the works that are not yet fully baked, but should be on their way in the coming months. So there is work being done in the discovery domain to do things like presenting how AAAF assets and materials have changed over time, as well as other discovery elements being able to deliver links and search results that link to specific portions of images and AAAF annotations. So there's also work being done to update the search API and the authentication API to work with the latest iterations of the 3.0 image and presentation APIs. And there are presentations on all of the things I just mentioned happening at the conference here this week. So if you're interested, please take a look at the agenda for that. And so that basically brings us to the end of this kind of high level introduction to the world of AAAF. What I'll conclude with here is just a few comments on how to get involved, how to get started working with and interacting with the AAAF community. And the great news is that you are already doing the first and most important step. Everyone we talk to who has kind of gotten more familiar with the AAAF community has said that attending events really was the best on-ramp for them. And so you're attending the conference this week, that's great. We encourage you to attend the community call. There are lots of different groups within the AAAF community working on different aspects, things like manuscripts or newspapers or maps or different search technologies. There's definitely a spot for you, maybe in the museum community group. We encourage you to look at the variety of content that's happening this week and find the right segment to the community that might be a good fit for you and your work. So we also have an email discussion list that allows people to talk through issues and solve technical complications. And then we have a newsletter, that's a great way of understanding how the AAAF community is working on new collections and new software components for displaying materials and presenting them in new and interesting ways. We have a really robust and friendly Slack channel that we would love to have you join, where it's a great way to kind of stay apprised of the latest things happening in the community. The cookbook is a really useful way. We have what's called the AAAF cookbook of best practice recipes. So this is a relatively new effort of trying to document the best practices around really common AAAF use patterns. So the best way to present just a single book in AAAF or the best way to present annotations on moving image and audio materials, the best way to present AAAF captions for video materials, things like that. So it's developing every month. We're adding new recipes. So that's a great place to look if you have a particular use case that you're looking to solve. And then beyond that, obviously working with AAAF exposing your collections is the best way to enhance the community and help it grow even larger than it has been in years. Using AAAF compatible software is a great way to do that or writing your own. A lot of this for a lot of folks is connected to working with their software vendors, their software suppliers to become AAAF compatible and to add to the ecosystem of things that work with a AAAF compliant universe. And finally, I'll say too that really the best possible way to ensure the continued evolution and the longevity of this open set of technologies is to join the AAAF consortium. So that really helps us do the work of reaching out to new parts of the world, reaching out to new domains, making sure that when we update a set of tools that the largest set of people will find out about it, that the people who need help building an ecosystem around a certain domain can get support that they need. So joining the AAAF consortium is a really critical way that your institution can help us make sure that AAAF is a viable and useful thing for your institution for years and years to come. And so this last piece here is just a quick snapshot view into some of the open and vendor-supported technologies that make the AAAF ecosystem work. This is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but just to give you a small sense of all the different ways that the AAAF has made its way into different elements of the cultural heritage sector. And so yeah, we'll leave you with that element, that exciting a bit of promise just to have given you a great sense of hundreds of adopters around the world. Hope to urge you to add your collections to the more than a billion digital objects that we know about already, and that's growing every day and every week, and really helping us to build on this promise of the really bright AAAF future. So we'll leave it there. As I mentioned at the top, there is a Q&A section on the HUVA application where we're happy to answer your questions about getting started with AAAF or more in-depth specific questions. We'll find a way to get you the right information. But most of all, I just want to say thank you for joining us here today. Thanks for joining us at the conference this week, and please keep in touch and let us know how AAAF is useful to you and your use cases and your institution. Thanks so much.