User:BParod

From Open Annotation Collaboration

Bill Parod

Library Technology Division - Enterprise Systems

Northwestern University Library

Use Case: OAC Applications in Northwestern's Digital Image Library

Northwestern University Library (NUL) would like to explore OAC for the stand-off aggregation, annotation, cropping, and potential cataloging of items from our Digital Image Library (DIL). The DIL includes approximately 70K professionally cataloged art historical images but we expect it to support image management and delivery, as well as represent genre and communities more broadly.

This interests stems from a development project currently underway. We're building a Ruby-on-Rails application using the Hydra stack (<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project>https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project) for use by faculty that supports their private or shared aggregation, annotation, cropping, and potential cataloging of items in the DIL collection. The DIL is professionally cataloged with descriptive records encoded in VRA-Core. Our application allows faculty to aggregate items they select from the collection into their own private/shared collections. They may then add notes to these items, draw crop boundary "areas of interest" on the images, and potentially extend their private "notes" to fully structured catalog records. These "stand-off" faculty assets are then visible and accessible to others, or not, depending on permission settings their owners control.

OAC use cases and elements that are of particular interest to us include citation of non-print media, shared annotations across interfaces, and media fragment URIs. Generalizing annotation capabilities for the DIL collection within Hydra will also lay important groundwork for anticipated development of an audiovisual module, for which a major collaborative grant proposal is currently in development. Implications for security and rights expression, and provenance are also of significant interest.

Our current early implementation uses the <modsCollection/> schema for encoding and archiving the aggregations. These aggregations then support <mods/> records for each item's annotation. Crop boundaries are encoded and archived using the SVG schema. We would like to explore the OAC model for expressing these data and consider adapting our implementation to support OAC.