As a project entitled the ‘Practical Applications of IIIF’ it’s only right that one of our project partners is the IIIF Consortium (IIIF-C), a collective of 60 organisations world-wide who have committed themselves to the growth and adoption of IIIF, represented by IIIF Technical Coordinator, Glen Robson.
In short, IIIF itself is a way to standardize the delivery of images and audio/visual files from servers to different environments on the Web where they can then be viewed and interacted with in many ways.
Modern Web browsers understand how to display formats like .jpg and .mp4 at defined sizes, but cannot do much else. The 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. For images, that means enabling deep zoom, comparison, structure (i.e., for an object such as a book, structure = page order) and annotation. For audio/visual materials, that means being able to deliver complex structures (such as several reels of film that make up a single movie) along with things like captions, transcriptions/translations, annotations, and more.
IIIF makes these objects work in a consistent way. That enables portability across viewers, the ability to connect and unite materials across institutional boundaries, and more.[1]
But more than a technical framework or a simple alliance of GLAM organisations, IIIF is really a community of developers, digital humanists, scholars, researchers, curators, and all those interested in shared open content across the web. Before the global pandemic, each year there was a summer conference, a chance for the community to gather as a whole, talk, build, and help one another through the inevitable technical snags and larger implementation questions. While the conferences have continued virtually, the images below speak to the community, and put faces to those who are directly engaged with IIIF from the Vatican Conference in 2017, the Washington DC Conference in 2018, and the Göttingen Conference in 2019, illustrating just how much the community has grown in the last three years.
Below, I’ve embedded the recently redesigned IIIF website, available to browse as well at https://iiif.io.