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Digital Collection Toolkit: IIIF

Intro.

IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework)

From https://iiif.io/about/

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications.

A growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery.

IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals:

  • To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world.
  • To define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories.
  • To develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.

The UWM Libraries Digital Collections are hosted by OCLC CONTENTdm platform which supports the IIIF Image API and the IIIF Presentation API.  

Using the IIIF API calls, people can easily access all published images and their metadata in our digital collections.

For more details, please check the following sub-pages:

For more information on what IIIF is all about, visit the IIIF home: https://iiif.io/