The University of Leeds Libraries and Digirati are building new infrastructure for preservation and access to digitised and born digital content. We are following a principle that would not have been possible even a few years ago - that there is a standard at each end of the system: IIIF at the access end, and The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) at preservation end.

This presentation briefly describes the design and implementation of the system and the requirements of day-to-day operation in the near future, and then considers what comprehension of the preserved material might look like in the far future - if all you have left is the files, what can you make of it? OCFL addresses recoverability and comprehension of the material as a preserved object, but what, if anything, could IIIF do here? The runtime delivery of IIIF at scale is at the opposite end of the system, it’s an operational, presentation concern, it could be turned off and on again. But is there a place for some playable IIIF representation of an object to be part of preservation? What would that look like? And what would be playing it?

Wellcome Collection helped pioneer the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) since its inception. As an early adopter, we have championed its potential to transform access, engagement, and collaboration around digital collections. We helped shape the standard, fostered the early development of the Universal Viewer, and made over 50 million image and media files from our collections available through wellcomecollection.Org.

This paper reflects on our decade-long journey with IIIF, exploring the opportunities it has afforded and the challenges we have encountered. We examine critical areas such as ensuring the sustainability of IIIF infrastructure amidst evolving technological landscapes, addressing the persistent challenge of content discovery, and adapting to shifting user needs as audiences become more diverse and digitally literate. Drawing on examples and insights from Wellcome’s implementation of IIIF, we discuss the strategies we have developed to future-proof our work while maintaining alignment with IIIF’s principles. We will explore how we continue to pioneer, including through the presentation of born digital collections, and how AI tools and approaches may further unlock our collections.

By sharing our experiences, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse about the future of IIIF and its role in fostering innovative and equitable access to cultural heritage.

The Swedish National Archives presents an innovative implementation combining IIIF, Universal Viewer 4, and machine learning-based Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to improve access to historical documents. By integrating HTR-generated transcriptions through IIIF Content Search API, this solution enables full-text search within handwritten archival materials - a significant advance from traditional metadata-only searching. The presentation will demonstrate how this implementation fundamentally changes how users interact with archival content, making centuries of handwritten documents searchable and accessible to researchers, students, and the general public.

We will share our experience developing and deploying this system at scale, including technical challenges, infrastructure requirements, and lessons learned from integrating HTR pipelines into existing publication workflows.

The University Library of Bern provides a IIIF service with a server infrastructure supporting Image and Presentation API (v2.1 & v3), a self-upload service for images and metadata and an administration website to manage uploads. The service is multi-client capable and scalable. A task management system automates the parallel processing of upload tasks from multiple projects. Imported images are converted to JPEGs in different predefined sizes. A user-friendly feature allows researchers to use the original source file name when accessing an image via the Image API. So, the researchers can use their existing information for the presentation without the need of mapping their information to the generated GUIDs.

This service was developed in collaboration with and upon request of a pilot project and the Digital Humanities Chair in Bern. Data stewards who are closely networked with (digital) humanities researchers, manage the communication and support of the service for researchers.

Our presentation will show our experience in developing and maintaining an institutional, multi-client capable IIIF service that provides a sustainable infrastructure solution for research projects with limited funding. We would like to share this experience with the IIIF community, as researchers in Bern find this service very valuable.

IIIF was founded to advance interoperability, and the community has made remarkable advances at both technical and pragmatic levels. However, like the early evolution of the Web, IIIF has largely been silent on the legal aspects of interoperability, a critical facet of working across today's online environment. Are manifests copyrightable? Is there a legal right to read a third party’s manifest? To dereference a link? [Note that this is not about the openness (or not) of the IIIF resource (e.g., book) itself, but rather about the metadata and URIs used to represent and deliver its components online.] This talk will outline the legal issues relevant to technical IIIF’s underpinnings: copyright, contracts and their variations in international law. It will review legal analogs (both positive and less so) from the research and cultural heritage sectors, and make a call for open (meta)data to become an explicit IIIF community norm. We will further propose the use of CC0 (Creative Commons) public domain dedications for IIIF manifests, and specify potential approaches for applying these in a IIIF context and bringing the community inline with the burgeoning open science and open data movements.

IIIF was built upon the bedrock foundation of Medieval manuscripts, whose excised illuminations were required to be readable. As things happen in life and in libraries, the original use case of IIIF was outgrown by a global supply of content and unforeseeable applications, and it has since become a metonym for interoperability writ large. Looking forward to the next decade of IIIF, we (The IIIF Community Group for Education) offer a complementary trope based on ephemera, the curatorial category for short-lived transactional print content, often on card stock. A flimsy edifice, admittedly, the “house of cards” nevertheless stands up to withering scrutiny. It cautions against unreliable dependencies for re-use. Conversely, it clarifies occasions for long-term and term-limited user content. Ephemeral structures also bear weight as a design metaphor for next generation standards, tools, and products in immediate and transactional scenarios. Educational work products and user groups are built up and torn down every semester, and lightweight, disposable data management systems are well suited for these contexts. As examples, we showcase LMS-based learning objects and our own “Mixtape” aggregating multi-tool for IIIF teaching collections.

One area of major focus for art research in graduate study or professional work is provenance and object research. Beyond manuscripts, IIIF viewers offer non-technical researchers the ability to closely analyze art objects they may not have physical access to across global institutions. In this talk, art librarian Annalise Welte will show an example used from instruction for a class on object research to highlight the importance and ease of use of IIIF on the user side. Other objects will be presented as direct use cases from art research instruction to demonstrate examples where IIIF developments, like work supporting 3D objects, will become crucial in the future.

The need for on-demand image resizing and transcoding and the concept of dynamic web-based image visualization and interoperability has existed since the introduction of image support in web browsers in the 1990's. A number of competing technologies were created to address this. However, over the last 10 years, IIIF has emerged as the de-facto standard within the field of cultural heritage. The C2RMF was an early adopter of the concept of web-based image visualization for its image repository and has been a driver in the development of software for both image processing and visualization. In this presentation, therefore, we will take a look at how this has evolved not only at the C2RMF, but also more generally with an overview of the historical origins of IIIF-style image visualization and interoperability and how the technologies, image formats and APIs have evolved over the last 25 years. We will also look at examples of how advanced and complex scientific imaging types such as hyperspectral, macro-XRF and RTI have been integrated into the IIIF-based ecosystem.

Part of the Samvera community, Avalon Media System is an open source repository for managing and providing access to collections of digital audio and moving image content. Avalon 7.8 includes a basic implementation of Content Search 2.0 to provide a search service for querying transcripts associated with media files. This presentation will cover the Avalon team's work to create a tightly-scoped content search implementation hand in hand with new search functionality in the Transcript component of Ramp, the IIIF-based component library used in Avalon.

This talk will cover implementation of the back-end Content Search service using the existing Solr index, the addition of a canvas level search service to the IIIF manifests provided by Avalon, and the decisions made about how to provide annotation results associated with time fragments. In addition, the talk will demonstrate the front-end implementation of transcript search within the Ramp IIIF component library, which can accommodate searching transcripts locally in-browser or using an external Content Search service.

The IIIF consortium has established widespread access to visual data resources across a spectrum of scientific domains. While standards are available for representing annotations against this material (such as the W3C’s Web Annotation Data Model – WADM), the deployment of practical infrastructure for creating annotation data at scale has been constrained by challenges encountered when integrating annotation workflows with existing institutional ecosystems. However, making research investments using annotation into primary, discoverable and citable data resources in their own right, and realising the potential for long-term enrichment of FAIR data, has now become feasible.

During 2024 IIIF and WADM functionality was implemented for biodiversity applications by the European Commission's Zenodo research data repository. Zenodo now provides a IIIF previewer and supports an 'Annotation Collection' record type and 'Annotated By' contributor role. Launched in August 2024 at the Disentis Biodiversity Symposium, this functionality has been extended and will be employed on Oxford's Digital Scholarship MSc program in February and in April at Cambridge's Digital Heritage School. The presentation will introduce new Zenodo IIIF and WADM services for humanities applications to the IIIF community, and demonstrate creation of Zenodo records which display WADM annotation collections within the public repository user interface.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) is a pioneer in the field of digitization. Through an effort started in 1997, it created one of the world’s largest digital libraries, Gallica. Today, over 11 million documents are available online to a worldwide audience, most of them available as IIIF resources. The BnF’s DataLab initative provides a core space for the academic use and exploration of this data. It currently offers trainings and tools for experts, researchers, and librarians. However, global outreach and dissemination remain important challenges. We posit that the “interoperability” part of the IIIF protocol plays a major role in solving them.

We will present gallicarama and the anaver.se, two IIIF-integrated services, the strategies we used to train their users, and relevant examples of user curations. We will also show how these tools can be used for interoperability, enabling users to mix resources not only from the BnF, but also from other IIIF resource providers. Experiments involving the use of IIIF collections for the benefit of Gallica users will also be discussed.

A portal for western medieval and early modern manuscripts in German collections: the collaborative project’s current second phase sees the four developing partner libraries opening the Handschriftenportal data to scientific discourse.

Users can annotate IIIF-based digital images, scientific manuscript descriptions as well as the “manuscript object” itself – privately, shared with specific other users or published, citable by PURLs as micro publications. For use e.g. in teaching contexts, shared workspaces allow real-time collaboration.

Published annotations go full circle: Consisting of text and structured metadata, they are indexed into the discovery system to drive search and filter functionalities. Thus, user-generated content becomes a source of information equal to data imported by editorial staff. As published annotations themselves are annotatable again, a scientific discourse is possible directly at data level.

150,000 manuscripts, 250 institutions, 25,000 IIIF manifests – and still growing. Those ambitious numbers are at once the portal’s biggest advantage and biggest challenge. In addition to discussing annotation use cases, features and workflows, the talk will give insights into the lessons learned within a project trying to integrate data from over 50 IIIF repositories – and raise the question of persistency of annotated objects not held within the own domain.

A question that often comes up in the IIIF training, particularly from Digital Humanities scholars is what happens to my research if the IIIF manifest I am using becomes inaccessible?

The IIIF standards recommend Manifests are made available and “Once published, they should be as persistent and unchanging as possible.” Recent cyber attacks with the British Library and the Internet Archive and the issue of links to Manifests changing during system upgrades, can cause users real issues. It leaves end users at risk of losing the time and effort they have put into annotating and gathering manifests. It would be useful if a researcher could download a copy of the manifest and related images they are working with as a backup and if the original becomes inaccessible, they could publish this copy of the manifest along with their own research.

This session will describe a new tool called iiif-archive which aims to fill this role by allowing users to download a copy of a Manifest and its images into a zip file. This zip file can then be processed to create a copy of the Manifest and images which can be published on a Web server or Github pages

Yale University Library has developed an experimental AI tool that can provide users with insights into the content of textual materials housed in its digital collections system, and potentially content in any IIIF repository. This standalone application uses the IIIF APIs to load a digital object, performs on-demand text extraction from its constituent images, and makes that text available for analysis by a selection of large language models (LLMs). Rather than provide a chat interface, the software presents a curated menu of prompts, making it easy for the user to request summaries, names, locations, and other information from all or part of the selected object.

Yale Library is using this software to explore the effectiveness of LLMs in working with a variety of collection materials, as well as the potential of the tool to assist with discovery and use of the Library’s special collections. We are also considering classroom use cases, which may involve the use of digitized materials from beyond Yale.

IIIF Timeline is a tool for viewing IIIF Collections chronologically. Users can display IIIF items on a zoomable, dynamic timeline and view them in Universal Viewer. The tool addresses a conspicuous gap in IIIF technology for chronological interfaces and makes use of the underutilized navDate property. Experimental features include grouping items and plotting additional historical data. This lightning talk will also explore the challenges of displaying temporal data and the broader utility of timeline interfaces, with the goal of encouraging other developers to leverage the IIIF navDate property.

This lightning will discuss an implementation of image area selection in Stanford’s version of Spotlight. The talk will discuss how we created a feature to allow users to zoom into an area of an image for display when the Mirador viewer loads and why we did not use the Content State API. The talk will discuss why this is a step towards what Content State API wants to do and the pain points we found in using the API for Mirador. Additionally, it will discuss what changes had to be made to Mirador in order to make this work.

Since 2018, the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) has been improving user accessibility and experience by using IIIF across multiple platforms. A key initiative is the implementation of the "companion window" feature on the Minutes of the Federal Council platform, which allows text transcriptions to be viewed side-by-side using a customised Mirador 3 plug-in. Building on this, we integrated the core IIIF APIs and the Content Search API into our main portal in 2023.

In October 2024, we further enhanced our IIIF infrastructure by enabling search capabilities across our IIIF Collections. This enhancement significantly improves navigation and discovery of archival materials. With the release of Mirador 4, we are exploring how our IIIF infrastructure should be adapted and are designing consolidation efforts to improve sustainability.

This presentation will explore the challenges and successes of enhancing IIIF viewers. We will share our experiences, discuss our considerations for future developments, and lessons learned that can benefit the IIIF community. Our aim is to contribute to the dialogue on balancing continuous improvement with sustainability to ensure that GLAM institutions can effectively preserve and provide access to digital resources.
- Minutes of the Federal Council: https://www.chgov.bar.admin.ch/
- mirador-ocr-helper: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@4eyes/mirador-ocr-helper
- Online Access to the Federal Archives: https://www.recherche.bar.admin.ch/

Building on our infrastructure of Manifests and Collections at Northwestern Digital Collections, we are now exploring fun and interesting ways to enhance the front-end experience and advance research through deeper applications of our IIIF APIs. This presentation will highlight how Northwestern generates on-the-fly IIIF Collections alongside search results in its digital collections, demonstrate an implementation of the Content State API that enables researchers to share point-in-time annotations, and explores how users from all backgrounds and levels of experience can collect and share these works through intuitively integrated features.