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Viewer Upgrade & Embed Project Charter

Viewer Upgrade & Embed Project Charter

Sep 20, 2023

 

I. Problem/Value Statement

Problem Statement

Sharing high quality digital images and metadata is a fundamental part of research, teaching, and learning. Unfortunately, for Harvard students, faculty, and staff using the Viewer, the current process has a high technical barrier to entry and requires them to download their own copy of the image, precluding image and metadata interoperability within the university and across the global community. In addition, the present implementation of the Viewer—as well as various instances of the underlying Mirador application throughout the university—is highly fragmented; this hinders the ability to address accessibility, usability, sustainability, and security concerns in a timely manner at a community level.

Business Value

With this project, Library Technology Services (LTS) aims to empower the Harvard University community to more easily explore, compare, and share images for research, teaching and learning, and will enhance that capability by modernizing the underlying technology to be more sustainable, scalable, accessible, security-compliant, and performant. 

II. Vision and Approach

Our approach involves two main components: an upgraded Viewer application and a new embed service. 

The Viewer application upgrade will not only be an opportunity to modernize application features and enhance the user experience, but to streamline production and maintenance under the hood to facilitate future improvements. We’ll accomplish this by participating in plug-in development with the IIIF open-source community. This development approach will enable us to reduce our technical debt while positioning Harvard as a strong IIIF consortial partner, upholding our commitment to supporting the growth and adoption of IIIF. 

We’ll implement a user-friendly, format-agnostic embed service in both homegrown and vended systems and will make it readily available for the Harvard community to use in conventional websites. The embed solution will reduce maintenance overhead by replacing select services with a single service. And, it will enable us to seamlessly deliver future viewers/players. 

To provide a foundation for this work, we’ll develop an automated testing and deployment pipeline to improve support and responsiveness for information security, accessibility, performance tuning, scaling, sustainability, and quality assurance.  

 

Our vision aligns with the following Harvard Library multi-year goals and objectives (MYGOs) and HUIT objectives and key results (OKRs): 

    • Harvard Library: Modernize our digital infrastructure

      • Simplify and enhance our online discovery environment

      • Enhance online access to digital objects for research and teaching

    • HUIT: Achieve operational excellence across our services

      • Identify 20 candidate services that are “at risk” or “unsustainable” and produce action and/or remediation plans

III. In Scope/Out of Scope

In Scope

    • Develop an automated testing and deployment pipeline (aka continuous integration and continuous delivery aka CI/CD)

    • Viewer upgrade:

      • Upgrade Viewer application to the latest available version of Mirador

      • Incorporate the new v3 IIIF manifest while ensuring backwards compatibility with v2 IIIF manifests

      • Leverage standard Harvard authentication and authorization 

      • Achieve majority feature parity with the pre-existing Viewer application. Delivered functionality will:

        • Reduce customization by using plug-ins and out-of-the-box improvements

        • Meet Harvard University’s accessibility requirements

        • Comply with copyright/usage restriction requirements

        • Conform to end-user device expectations

        • Implement analytics to improve future value delivery

      • Support interim beta version of upgraded application on production until all MPS manifests have been generated in production and in-scope work on Mirador 3 is released. (This requirement was added June 2023. See Change order VUE-001.) 

    • Embed service

      • Develop an embed solution

      • Replace Viewer instances with the embed solution in the following Harvard Library discovery layers:

        • HOLLIS

        • HOLLIS Images

        • CURIOSity

      • (This requirement was revised September 2023. See Change order VUE-002.)

Out of Scope

    • New features that aren’t included in the latest out-of-the-box version of Mirador 

    • Viewer support beyond single image and page-turned objects (e.g., time-based media, geospatial data, three-dimensional objects) 

    • Replacing Viewer instances with the embed solution in discovery layers other than those enumerated above

    • Decommissioning/retiring supported services

IV. Deliverables and Work Products

    • An intuitive, easy-to-use embed service that’s implemented in several Harvard Library products

    • A modernized, enhanced Viewer experience

    • Reduced product maintenance overhead with streamlined embed service

    • Technical documentation for effective operations support

    • Updated documentation to support end users of the Viewer and embed service

    • Communication to scaffold education for the user community

Definition of Done

This project will be successful once we are able to 1) release and implement the embed service in enumerated products; 2) deploy an upgraded Viewer that meets in-scope requirements; 3) replace superseded services; and 4) support both rollouts with clear documentation.

V. Stakeholders

Stakeholder

Title

Participation

Stakeholder

Title

Participation

Stu Snydman

Associate University Librarian and Managing Director, Library Technology

Executive Sponsor, Business Owner

Vanessa Venti

Digital Collections Services Manager, Harvard Library

Stakeholder

Rashmi Singhal 

Director of Arts & Humanities, Research Computing, Academic Technology Services (AcTS)

Stakeholder

Jon Alper

Director, Technology, The Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning

Stakeholder

Jeff Steward

Director of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies, Harvard Art Museums

Stakeholder

Bill Comstock

Head of Imaging Services for Harvard Library

Stakeholder

VI. Project Team

Project Role

Team member(s)

Project Role

Team member(s)

Technical Product Owner / LTSLT Owner

Enrique Diaz

Software engineers

Phil Plencner, Jon White (Cogapp), Katie Amaral, Maura Ferrarini

QA

Julie Wetherill

Functional documentation

Julie Wetherill

UX, A11y

Janet Taylor

Scrum Master

Sara Rubinow

Project Manager

Sara Rubinow

Consulting HOLLIS developer

Corinna Baksik

VII. Estimated Schedule

Phase

Phase Start

Phase End

Completion Milestone

Development & Release

 

 

Embed service in homegrown systems

Development & Release

 

 

Embed service in vended systems

Development & Release

 

 

MVP Viewer upgrade live

Development & Release

 

 

Full Viewer upgrade live

VIII. Assumptions, Constraints, Dependencies, and Risks

Project Assumptions

    • The Viewer will be compatible with both the new v3 IIIF manifest design currently under development as part of the IIIF Media Presentation Service (MPS) project and with existing v2 IIIF manifests. The v3 IIIF manifest, a part of the IIIF Presentation API 3.0, is anticipated to include reconfigured and additional metadata fields.

    • There is no budget allocated to this effort for additional human resources.

    • Work on vended systems will not require communication with or time from the vendor. 

    • Stakeholders will be available to participate in project activities and to complete tasks as requested.

    • The Executive Sponsor and other stakeholders are empowered to make the decisions required for the project to be a success.

Project Constraints


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