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Introduction to IIIF

Right from the start of the web, cultural heritage organisations have been digitising things and putting them online. Manuscripts, books, maps, artworks, videotapes, audio recordings.

They built thousands of wonderful collection websites - but each of them in its own silo, with no way to reuse these digital objects in new environments or compare objects from different places. There was no standard around which everyone could develop applications.

IIIF - the International Image Interoperability Framework - was the result of a group of libraries, universities and museums coming together to develop a set of standards for digital objects on the web.

There are many metadata standards in the world of cultural heritage already. Could archives, museums and libraries, with their very different approaches to metadata, all adopt yet another standard?

Hundreds of organisations have made their collections available as IIIF, and there are now billions of digital objects on the web, and each of these objects is a IIIF Manifest.

How did everyone so rapidly agree to use the same standard? Fundamentally it’s because IIIF is not machine-readable metadata about the object - who painted this picture, where was this map published, what’s this book about. IIIF concerns itself with presenting the digital object, not describing it.

If you think of a web page, it’s written in HTML code. Your web browser turns that code into something you can read or see. A IIIF Manifest is also code, but for modelling digital objects. A viewer or annotation tool loads a IIIF Manifest and presents the object to you. Unlike other cultural heritage standards, IIIF is playable.

But IIIF Manifests don’t just provide a list of images or audio or video to play. The real power of IIIF lies in its foundations in web annotation standards - a Manifest is not just a list of content in the right order.

It’s a list of extents of space or time. Think of these extents as PowerPoint slides. Image or video or audio content can be placed on the slides. But so can transcript text, comments, notes, tags or any other annotations. And as well as the content provided by the manifest creator, anyone can make external annotations that target these extents - it’s like everyone’s PowerPoint slides are addressable spaces on the web.

This model has led to an explosion of software - viewers, IIIF editors, annotation tools, crowdsourcing platforms, and more.

It’s been a remarkable success, with a thriving community of developers, content creators, researchers, academics, librarians, archivists, and educators who make these specifications, and the hundreds of software projects that use them.

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