Rethinking Photo Album Representation Through IIIF

Slides of the talk given at the 11th International Conference on Digital Heritage (EuroMed 2026). This contribution investigates how semantic web infrastructures for cultural heritage can represent objects whose meaning depends on material states that conventional metadata models flatten away. We take as our case Album 31, a 1920s vernacular photo album from the Kreis Family Collection (Cultural Anthropology Switzerland, Basel), whose pages exist in multiple simultaneous configurations — with and without protective interleaves, with and without loose photographs — that standard single-image digitisation cannot capture. We show how the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Presentation API, combined with the Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) design principles, provides a knowledge-representation layer capable of holding this ambiguity as a structural feature rather than resolving it. A custom IIIF Manifest uses the Choice construct to bind alternative material states to a single Canvas, enabling semantic annotation and metadata harmonisation across page-level variants without requiring separate records or lossy normalisation. We discuss how this approach extends to the W3C Web Annotation Data Model and Linked Art for distributed, provenance-aware enrichment (human and machine-generated), and how the resulting "boutique" Manifest raises concrete questions of long-term knowledge preservation: dependency on stable image-service infrastructure, the maintenance of dereferenceable URIs across system migrations, and the institutional labour required to keep interoperable resources trustworthy over time. By foregrounding IIIF/LOUD as an interoperable knowledge-management platform rather than a display technology, we argue that treating digitisation as interpretive modelling — rather than mass reproduction — offers a transferable pattern for other institutions managing materially complex, under-documented collections. We conclude with reflections on the trade-offs between the cost of purpose-built semantic modelling and its long-term reusability, provenance, and cross-collection interoperability. HTML version of the slides: https://julsraemy.ch/prezi/euromed2026-photo-album-iiif.html