 So now I would like to introduce you to the basic elements of AAAF to set the base for the rest of today and the rest of the week if you're staying. So here's what I'm gonna cover. Really high level stuff. What is AAAF? Why do we need something like it? What does it do? And how does it work? And then I'm not covering this, but I consider this the rest of today to showcase the case study examples. So you'll be hearing about all of these things. So let's start at the very basics. What is AAAF? Well, you hear that acronym a bunch, but it actually stands for this set of words, the International Image Interoperability Framework. So because that's a lot of words and a lot of syllables, we say AAAF. I've really enjoyed in my seven months on the job hearing all the different ways that that becomes shortened in different languages. I think in Portuguese I learned a couple weeks ago they were saying EF. There are a number of interesting variations. Maybe more importantly though than the acronym, AAAF is really a model for presenting and annotating digital representations of objects and doing that in a uniform way and in an interoperable way. And because of that, there are many other benefits that accrue with the use of these technologies, especially across institutions. And importantly, as much as it's that model for representing those objects, it's also the community. When we say AAAF, we're talking about the body of institutions and people and curators and developers who make those APIs and then implement them in software at their various institutions, often in shared open source software tools and then expose content through those APIs, right? And that's really importantly, not just the technology, the body of folks who make this all work. So over the last nearly 10 years, it's grown to be a truly global community. So you can see here both the formal consortium members as well as just implementing institutions that we know about. And this is almost by definition out of date. So if you see a country or a city that has an implementation that you don't know about, please let me know and we'll add a dot to this map. You can see here kind of a high level list of some of the large scale institutions that are international leaders in AAAF. So museums and galleries, state and national libraries, research institutions like Godingen, and it's increasingly aggregators who are also helping smaller and other sets of institutions come on board and become AAAF compatible and enabled. So art store, content DM, Europeana and DPLA and places like that. So why do we need something like AAAF? I think a lot of us have this innate notion, right? Or this kind of already given understanding that the reason that we do a lot of the things that we do, the reason we digitize materials and present them online is because they're such valuable means of communicating the cultural context and giving people additional tools to inform their own experience and to understand the world around them and understand other connections to cultures. And so after the written word, these image materials, image-based resources are just such compelling ways of doing that and transmitting that knowledge. And it's great, we've done a great job over the last generation or so digitizing things and putting them online, but sort of by accident we've ended up with a slightly difficult situation for our end users, right? So we have all these rich worlds out there, but we kind of make everyone look through these telescope lens to see just a slice of those, right? Any given part of a collection without necessarily being able to see the entirety of it all the time. And so we get this ecosystem of digitized collections that's a little bit disjointed and hard to access and just a little bit difficult for the end users. Here's another view into it, right? This idea of similar silos, stacks of resources that all are essentially the same in terms of functionality, but there are just unnecessarily distinct, let's say, at a certain level. So that's why we need IIIF, to address this issue and to help us kind of come to a collective solution to that. But what does it do? What does it do in addressing that? So I think the easiest way to show this to you is a couple of video examples that I'll talk over, but you can see kind of the functionality happening as I'm describing these. So one of the main ways or means of using IIIF is just to deliver very large-scale, very high-resolution images over the internet, right? So gigabytes worth of image data but without transmitting all of that file at once, right? So just regions and tiles. So this example comes from Stanford. It's a Japanese tax map and you're meant to actually stand in the middle of the map and be able to read elements of it that are surrounding you. And for scale here, you can see, I'm told that photographer's name is Wayne, so this map is two wings tall by three wings wide, which is a very sizable map. I'm not sure I've ever seen a bigger map than that. But so one digital image can be delivered very straightforwardly through IIIF. Of course, the very large-scale images are an important piece of this, but so is siting and sharing a region of that, right? A very small section of detail. So this tool from the University College of Dublin allows you to address a specific region and cite that and work with it as a web link. Comparing images, right? This example comes from the Welcome Trust and so this is some skeletal and other imagery of a seal skull. And so one showing the outside portion of it and one the underlying skull structures of this tool and being able to work with those in the same viewer at the same time. But of course, if you can do that, it stands to reason you should be able to do that across institutions, right? Again, addressing that silo issue. So this example just shows how a scholar might wanna work with materials, say Shakespeare materials from Oxford, Stanford, and Yale in a single viewer, being able to pull those materials in and do that kind of deep dive analysis on these materials all at the same time in the same viewer. Triple life makes that pretty easy, as easy as drag and drop. So this use case, I think, really helps illustrate this as well. This really sings. So this comes to us from Biblicima, work with the National Bibliotech in France and so reunifying a disaggregated manuscript, right? So this is a 15th century manuscript that had the illuminations cut out of it. And so as the crow flies, the materials aren't that far apart, but as digital objects, these might as well be halfway around the world. And so this example shows digitized versions of all of these components digitized and presented in triple life, and then they're able to be reproduced, right? In the same context, exactly as they were meant to be seen originally. So kind of a beautiful illustration of bringing those assets together across institutional boundaries. And we have some other functionality baked into this as well, some other APIs. So there's one for searching within materials. So if you have transcriptions or translations, textual material that goes along with these assets, the search API makes it possible to search within those things. Doing some analysis, this is an example of geo rectification, right? So taking digitized maps, these come from the University of Edinburgh, taking older maps and then placing them using control points on sort of native mapping technologies that we're all familiar with, with Google Maps and other tools like that. Using it in educational context, right? So annotation, this example comes from a Harvard edX course, which has a really deep level of zoom and annotations at many different levels of this image to illustrate all the things that are happening inside that cell biology. I'm not a biologist, this is all, I should take this course, but from what I understand, it's like a really useful way of showing the students the scale of what's happening in these cells and all the annotations work in AAAF. And increasingly seeing some, especially coming from the museum side of the AAAF community, some really compelling ways of doing things that you would call guided viewing or storytelling. So this example comes from CogApp, their stories tool, being able to guide viewers through sections of different AAAF resources and still letting them kind of zoom in on their own but also using that annotation tool that you see overlaid to help people step through these image materials and be able to see the descriptions of the annotations they're looking at. And of course, it's not all just digital representations of objects. There's a way to make this companion piece to a very in-person physical experience as well. So this comes from Boston College but a very typical display of manuscript material that you'd see in display cases like that, a little bit of distance from the user in the plexiglass so that people don't cough on the materials or anything like that. But in addition to that, right next to it, there's a digitized representation of this object so that users can explore the manuscript and page through it as they would if they were able to actually touch the materials themselves. And an important piece of this is that many of these different functionalities work across different viewers and different implementations. So that's part of the rich open ecosystem of AAAF enables this sort of thing. So this example comes from the Cutter Digital Library that actually gives users options to open materials in a variety of different viewers and kind of let the researchers choose what to work with there. And I'm very excited, this is a new slide, brand new, to show you that we've actually moved beyond images with I think it was two nights ago, three nights ago, we released the beta version of the 3.0 version of our image API and our presentation API. And you'll hear a bit more about that I think later today. But just to give you kind of the quickest taste of some of the audio and moving image capabilities, here's an example from the distributed digital music archives and library's lab at McGill, which shows the prototype of what's possible. So this is a Chopin etude. So drawing in that video asset, but also annotating in real time the musical notation and allowing people to navigate up at that bar at the top. Okay. So hopefully that lodges in your minds some of the functionality. So how does it actually work? What's the underlying tools and techniques that make this work? So it all rests on APIs. You've probably heard this before, but very briefly application programming interfaces. It's essentially a contract between two systems and agreements about how data will work between two parts of a system. So say front end and back end. So as long as that agreement holds, you can swap out a front end portion of the system and have the back ends deliver the information just as it would previously. Or you can swap out the back ends. As long as that's coherent to the front end, the contract holds, then both of those things will work. And of course, we can go totally wild and swap both ends out and that middle portion still works. So at root, that's what APIs are doing in the AAAF ecosystem. And so what they're doing is enabling all these different sets of functionality. And so in the context of one institution, this is super important. This makes it very legible about what each element is happening. The images and the annotations and all of this. But in the context of many institutions, all of a sudden this becomes really powerful. This really enables the same sets of things to work across institutions. The delivery of images or the delivery of annotations or the cross functionality of these things. So that really leads us to this overall and grand vision of how AAAF works and what it can do, right? So creating this global interoperable framework that works with any number of participating institutions to deliver these things in a standard way to any of these compatible image viewers, right? That many folks have built display and manipulation in any application. So because we use web standards, the stuff all works basically in any browser. And then this is the most important piece, delivering that to our end users, right? To any set of populations that has access to the web, we can deliver these AAAF assets and make this work. So we have hundreds of millions of objects. I think we're up over a billion. It's a little hard to be 100% exact. And it's backed by a consortium of leading institutions. It's supported by growing suite of software tools and it's using the best of the latest standards that we have available to us. And I'm gonna touch on this very briefly just because I wanna make sure we have time for the rest of the day, but just to give you a sense, the main thing driving AAAF are these two core APIs, the image API, the presentation API, image API delivering pixels, presentation API delivering just enough structure to make the viewing experience work. So there are manipulations you can make using the image API. I won't explain all these. The presentation API delivers sequence, table of contents, metadata, basic metadata, things like that. I think the best way to do this though is to show you what's coming from where. So this is a AAAF viewer and you can see the section in blue is delivered by the image API. That's the body of the material and then the pieces in red are delivered by the presentation API, the sequence of the pages, both in terms of table of structure and the thumbnail strips, right? And the metadata up at the top all delivered by the presentation API. We do have two more APIs. We have a search API to search within transcriptions or translations and a lightweight authentication API for those contexts where maybe there are materials that can only be seen by staff or something like that. Okay, so how do you get started? So you're enticed, you're here, you're in this room. Well, good news. There is a very large and growing suite of software tools available to you. Vendor supported, open source, all sorts of means of doing this, rolling your own or using vendors tools that already have this baked into other systems. So you can see a few examples here but there's a lot listed on our website. So hopefully you're persuaded. I think you see there's hundreds of adopters, just countless applications that make this work. Billions of digital objects or more than a billion, let's say, right now objects out there in the world. And just more promise to come, right? It's conferences like this that really drive forward the work of the community. And so how do you participate? Well, the last one there is you're already doing it. Or sorry, that's on the next one. You're already at an event, so that's a good step. But using the tools to expose your collections, using any of these AAAF compatible software tools. An important one that we've had a lot of success with is asking your vendors how they can support the work you wanna do with AAAF. Participating in the community, so that's this bit here. There are many ways to do that. This is what I meant. You've already got a check mark on that last one. Participating in some AAAF events. But the website has a lot of useful information to you. Our email lists, Twitter, and our Slack groups are all fairly active. We're recording these sessions today so that we can have those online for those not able to join us today. So I hope that gives you a taste of the technology and the community. And with that, I'm gonna welcome Tom Kramer to give you a little bit of background on the standard in the community and pieces like that. Thanks.