Invited Talk: IIIF Interoperability in Practice

This talk will highlight key tools and features of International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) that enable, empower, and advance the content of digital libraries. The increasing importance of AI in the cultural heritage sector is also refactoring the use cases for IIIF. Examples of ongoing collaboration of the IIIF and AI4LAM (Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives, and Museums) community will be featured. Also covered will be the mature standard IIIF functions such as deep zoom, annotations, and multiple asset reference (e.g. image comparisons). These elements of the IIIF standard will be highlighted to show how new tools and platforms are being developed using IIIF. Chief among these will be Allmaps [1] (which allows users to geo-reference a IIIF-enabled historic map on a modern map facilitating overlaying of maps of different periods for comparison and also allowing access to maps of locations from institutions across the world. An update on the status of the IIIF Presentation API 4.0 which further facilitates use of 3D content will also be covered [2]. The growing IIIF community will also be featured. The IIIF Content Commons, a developing concept that will enhance the findability of IIIF resources will also be explored. IIIF [3] 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 [4]. IIIF 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 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. 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. [1] Allmaps a map geo-referencing tool https://allmaps.org/ [2] IIIF Specification roadmap. https://iiif.io/news/2025/08/11/roadmap/ [3] International Image Interoperability Framework IIIF https://iiif.io [4] IIIF Specification roadmap. https://iiif.io/news/2025/08/11/roadmap/