workshops

Georeferencing the Internet Archive with Allmaps

Thursday, December 07, 2023, 5:00 PM - 5:30 PM CET

Jules Schoonman & Bert Spaan

2023 Online Meeting, IIIF Consortium

Abstract

Following the exciting news about the collaboration between the IA and IIIF Consortium, this workshop explores the possibilities of annotating IA material using the Allmaps platform. We will locate relevant collections and resources in the IA, and open them in the Allmaps Editor using the available IIIF Manifest URIs. We’ll look at the format of a Georeference Annotation and demonstrate its usages in the Allmaps Viewer and other tools. When working with open data that is not yet available elsewhere with IIIF, the IA can thus serve as a repository to launch geospatial research projects. This workshop will give you everything you need to get started–and the approach can be replicated for other IIIF content as well. When we run into problems, we’ll create issues in the relevant repositories to help the development of both Allmaps and IA’s IIIF implementation.

Step 1: Finding Maps in the Internet Archive

As of September 2023 the IIIF API of the Internet Archive was upgraded in collaboration with the IIIF Consortium. The implementation is still under development and some items might throw an error when opening them in Allmaps. Please notify us when this happens and we’ll make sure to investigate and publish a fix when possible (or raise an issue in the IIIF repository of the IA).

Some collections of interest:

How to find the IIIF Manifest of an item in the Internet Archive?

💡You can use this bookmarklet to quickly open the IIIF Manifest of an item in the Internet Archive and this bookmarklet to open the current browser address in the Allmaps Editor. Use those two in sequence. Alternatively, you can use this form on the Allmaps documentation site (which is still in development).

❗Allmaps does not currently support IIIF Collection Manifests

Step 2: Georeferencing Maps in the Allmaps Editor

💡If you accidentally create a second mask, you can quickly change tabs (to Collection and back) to remove it again.

❗Removing points from the menu might confuse the numbering. Reload the page to reset the numbering. Note that the order of numbers change after reloading the page.

💡You can rotate the view by holding Option/Alt-Shift.

💡You can load a custom reference map by following the instructions in this Observable Notebook.

Step 3: What is a Georeference Annotation?

❗The Allmaps Editor currently stores the annotations for you. If you open the same map, the masks and control points are preserved. If someone else opens the same map, they can alter the annotation. It is therefore wise to save a copy of your data on your hard drive or elsewhere. The Editor does not yet support loading custom annotations, but the Allmaps Viewer does.

Step 4: Opening a Georeference Annotation in the Allmaps Viewer

💡 The copy/paste method serves to demonstrate how Allmaps works on the basis of Georeference Annotations. An easier way is to navigate to the Results tab and open one of the links. In this case, the annotation is loaded from Allmaps’ database directly. This means that new edits in the Editor will become visible in the Viewer after refreshing the page. You can leave both tabs open to improve your work.

💡 You can also use the following method to see if an annotation exists of a certain manifest:

(There’s also a bookmarklet for that.)

Or you can load a Manifest URL directly in the Allmaps Viewer.

❗Allmaps references Manifests by using a hash of the Manifest ID property. This can be different from the URL. In the case of the Internet Archive, the ID of https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/3/postofficemanual00unit/manifest.json is https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/postofficemanual00unit/manifest.json (without the 3/ in the URL). More about IDs in Allmaps

Step 5 (extra): Tracing maps with geojson.io

❗You can also load XYZ maps in Placemark. This app supports the TileJSON format which can be requested by using the following pattern: https://allmaps.xyz/tiles.json?url=.