IIIF as an Enabling Tool in Data Curation

POSTER TEXT

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. It’s also an international community developing and implementing the IIIF APIs. IIIF is backed by a consortium of leading cultural institutions and a global and engaged community.

IIIF is a key tool in the curation and reuse of digital objects. Uses cases include Access and Reuse of digital objects, Preservation (by allowing the referencing and citability of portions of a digital object); Addition of Value (via annotations and object comparisons); and Active Management (assisting in storage and organization of digital objects). 

IIIF specifications align with general Web standards that define how all browsers work to enable richer functionality beyond viewing an image or audio/visual files. 

IIIF makes digital objects work in consistent ways. This enables portability across viewers, the ability to connect and unite materials across institutional boundaries, and more. 

This portability is one of the reasons IIIF is an important standard in digital humanities research allowing open access collections to be used as research data and for research software to be written once and used with many collections.