IIIF Annotations for Student Work and Scholarship

The presentation shows how the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship organized and ran student annotation projects in response to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. In the spring of 2020 with students, faculty, and staff told to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many students found themselves suddenly unable to go to work. Using standard IIIF tools we put together an annotation workflow the students could use from home to get work-hours. Additionally, the annotations were useful for enriching the library's digital collections and for scholars looking at these thousands of pages of scanned images. This talk will present what we did, how we managed the students, and pulled off this cross-institutional effort. We will show the key piece of technical infrastructure—the work assigner—which was not off-the-shelf. We will also talk about problems we had with annotations, and offer suggestions for future work. This is joint work between Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship and Data Futures.