Tom Cramer
Chief Technology Strategist, Libraries
Stanford University
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.
The British Library and Stanford University, with a half dozen of the world’s leading research libraries and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have embarked on a one-year effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable framework for image delivery. With shared technology, common application programming interfaces (APIs), and rich user interfaces, this framework has the promise to surpass the current crop of image viewers, page-turners, and navigation systems, and to give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources. The IIIF charter institutions are: Stanford University, the British Library, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Library, and Cornell University.
This presentation will lay out the need and opportunity for an interoperable framework for image access, expose the work done on APIs and tools to date, and explore opportunities for extending the institutions, resources and tools covered by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).