ARCHiOx (Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford) is a research and development partnership between the Factum Foundation, the Bodleian Libraries and the University of Oxford. Funded with generous support from The Helen Hamlyn Trust, ARCHiOx has been using an experimental photometric stereo scanning system developed by Factum (“the Selene”) to image artifacts with shallow relief or hidden surface details.

In phase 2 of the ARCHiOx project, which completed in December 2024, we have focussed on bringing the results of this research into production or “business as usual”. This has involved a wide range of activities, from scaling up our capture and preservation workflows in our imaging studio, to collaborating with and making changes to the OpenSeadragon project to help bring these incredible recordings to the IIIF community.

Here we will talk about our efforts to bring the software of ARCHiOx to the wider IIIF community, with a focus on our extended experimental IIIF presentation extension LightingMap and Python based iiif_static_choices tool. A tool which now allows people to deliver collections in 2.5D without the need for complex software architecture.

Global maritime projects depend on Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure to connect and use ocean information better across numerous systems. We face obstacles when making systems sustainable across three areas while keeping them accessible to everyone. The IIIF framework helps solve these problems to support marine data sharing and visualization. Our testing shows how 3D ocean mapping combined with AI-based data analysis helps protect marine life and ecosystems. Our research study looks at equal access practices for disabled people and underserved communities while establishing procedures to keep marine-based IIIF resources usable by future users. This presentation offers concrete solutions along with future predictions for adding MSDI to IIIF architecture to create more sustainable digital resources that everyone can access. Our presentation demonstrates IIIF's core objectives by presenting fresh implementation methods and accessibility options that benefit all users. Participants will learn how to use IIIF to build effective MSDI systems that help everyone while supporting worldwide marine spatial data goals.

This work explores the implementation of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in developing a large-scale image-native archival resources management system, addressing challenges in describing, analyzing and utilizing scanned archival images. Traditional archival workflows often involve inefficient manual descriptions, difficulties in processing unstructured data, and insufficient fine-grained content disclosure. This work proposes a solution based on IIIF, while leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools to enhance the handling of archival images and related texts. The proposed system decomposes the image development process into two workflows: the creation of an IIIF-conformed image server using the IIIF Image API, followed by the usage of the IIIF Presentation API for objectifying and encapsulating original images, in the form of Web Annotations and further converting to schema based archival text. Using a scientist’s archival resources management system as a case study, the system organizes IIIF objects of original images and OCR text as Digital Objects within a standardized resource structure. This approach significantly enhances the operability, retrievability, and accuracy of archival data.

Project K62.

K62 is a physical handwritten library catalogue containing metadata about 1.5 million books, journals, periodicals and dissertations from the 1790 through 1962. In an effort to preserve the physical catalogue and at the same time make it more accessible it was microfilmed and scanned in the 1980’s. An online representation of the catalogue exists but searching it is difficult since none of the images are transcribed and the meta data is limited. The primary objective of the project is to make records from K62 findable in the Swedish national library database Libris. Using AI to transcribe the text in the scanned images will unlock the data. When the data is no longer contained within the images it can be used, shared and linked to other data. A secondary goal of this project is to link every K62 record in the Swedish national library database back to the original image. A goal within that goal is to display the image together with the AI transcribed text as annotations using IIIF. This can be achieved by generating IIIF compatible annotation JSON using the AI transcription xml result.

As trust and authenticity increasingly becomes a concern for all kinds of digital media content, we have been working toward a solution for addressing the problem of authenticating cultural heritage images. The Digital Object Authenticity Working Group (DOAWG) goal is to establish a method for displaying descriptive and technical process metadata for digital surrogates representing archival objects in an easily accessible and understandable way, and we believe that IIIF will serve as the perfect platform for displaying this metadata in order to track provenance and establish trust. In particular, our field is missing established methods for easily displaying metadata that represents information about the creation of the digital object, as well as verification methods for ensuring that the digital object is true to the original. Our plan to address these gaps is to use the International Press Telecommunication Council (IPTC) Photo Metadata Standard in conjunction with the ISO 19264-1 standard and content authentication tools developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). By publishing this metadata and verification within the widely-used IIIF framework, we believe that institutions can more easily share their collections ethically and securely, and end users can reliably access complete and accurate information.

In today’s global digital environment, there are multiple barriers to accessing cultural heritage in the public domain, with serious implications for people’s enjoyment of and participation in cultural life and threaten our ability to connect with our past in order to understand our present and build our futures. In this session, we will explore how museums can harness open licenses, tools, policies and practices to enhance access to their cultural heritage collections. We will also share information about TAROCH, our collective effort towards an international standard-setting instrument enshrining “open heritage”.

The Digital Livonia project offers a new web platform for studying the history of medieval Livonia (c. 1200–1550) by integrating traditional historical research with digital humanities tools. This presentation explores lessons learned from a software architect’s perspective, focusing on collaboration, community building, and solutions for IIIF integration. Key takeaways include the critical role of open-source development, fostering inclusivity, and creating tools to give back to the community. During the project, it became clear that numerous valuable digital resources are significantly underutilized due to barriers like limited access and poor user interfaces. IIIF tools present an excellent opportunity to address these challenges. A key task to finalize the project is to raise greater awareness about the transformative possibilities IIIF offers for cultural heritage research.

Survey of India (SoI) maps produced from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries hold immense value for archaeological research. Predating significant landscape changes, they have been found to document the locations of thousands of elevated mound features of potential archaeological importance. Copies of these map sheets are available in UK Deposit Libraries, however in most cases are subject to challenges of discoverability, findability and accessibility. These challenges mainly arise from these map sheets being available as paper maps or text-catalogued objects as opposed to open-access digital images with a geospatial search capability. The Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project is using these map sheets to identify and document archaeological sites, and has developed a cross-platform interoperable geospatial search framework to address these challenges of discoverability, findability and accessibility. The implemented solution has arisen from collaborative work with Cambridge University Library and the British Library, who are extending the adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to SoI map collections. MAHSA has generated detailed metadata for these map sheets and made the records available using the Arches database platform. The MAHSA Arches database links to the IIIF map images hosted by libraries and serves as a geospatial search interface.

As IIIF celebrates its 10th anniversary, Amsterdam, once a global hub for map production, marks its 750th. A recent grant awarded to the University of Amsterdam’s library supports the enhancement of its collection of more than 135,000 loose maps and 4,500 atlases, housed in its special collections. This initiative focuses on metadata enrichment and the implementation of the IIIF Presentation 3.0 API, enhancing both accessibility and usability.

The project prioritizes curating and enriching metadata, with particular attention to colonial collections, addressing contested terms, and providing additional context. Metadata are embedded in IIIF Manifests and linked using schema.org, while workflows involving georeferencing annotations enhance the usability and discoverability of the maps.

Additional developments include extending Allmaps’ functionality to support georeferenced data and enhancing the Allmaps Here app, which allows users to explore maps based on their location or follow curated walking routes. Focused on Amsterdam’s historical maps, the project aligns with the city’s anniversary celebrations and the Amsterdam Time Machine initiative, highlighting IIIF’s potential for digital heritage and cultural storytelling.

This project offers valuable insights into implementing the IIIF framework, showcasing methodologies, overcoming challenges, and contributing to digital humanities and the wider IIIF community.

OldMapsOnline.org has served as a cornerstone for discovering and viewing historical map collections for over a decade. In this presentation, we unveil our newly expanded IIIF workflows, enabling effortless map upload, georeferencing, and online publication. This “bulletproof” system has been tested across hundreds of institutions, reinforcing our commitment to inclusive, sustainable approaches for sharing cultural heritage. We will also showcase a forthcoming browser extension that automatically detects IIIF links, streamlining users’ ability to add maps to OldMapsOnline for further annotation and exploration. Attendees will learn about our enhanced IIIF export feature for re-use and preservation of georeferencing data, as well as our newly launched global print service for producing and shipping high-quality IIIF-sourced images worldwide. We will briefly introduce TimeMap.org —our independent tool for visualizing historical timelines—highlighting how it leverages the community contributions and technical experience gained through OldMapsOnline. Join us to explore how these innovations bolster the IIIF ecosystem, encourage global engagement, and help safeguard our shared cartographic heritage.

While the digitization of physical collections is a cornerstone of cultural heritage preservation, translating tactile, three-dimensional, and historically rich materials into engaging and equitable digital experiences remains a challenge. This presentation explores how interdisciplinary approaches in metadata, digitization, and user engagement can extend IIIFs capacity to meet these challenges. Rooted in the work of the Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this case study highlights three distinct collections: the Historical Board Games Collection, the Ricker Materials Collection, and the Gwendolyn Brooks Collection. We applied innovative approaches that align with IIIF’s mission of accessibility and interoperability. Additionally, we prioritized multi-modal digital access by leveraging IIIF viewers to provide layered metadata, contextual narratives, and detailed imagery that simulate the experience of tactile exploration. Finally, we developed metadata strategies that support both academic research and public use cases, ensuring the preservation of cultural and historical context. We demonstrate how these methodologies meet critical themes of accessibility, institutional sustainability, and the broader cultural impact of IIIF implementations. Attendees will gain insights into curatorial and technical decision-making, including imaging choices for translucent and textured objects, the ethical use of facsimiles, and the inclusion of voices historically excluded from digital representation.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in LA has existed for over 100 years, and has amassed a huge amount of textual and image data to describe its collections. Furthermore, these holdings are extremely varied: living specimens in the case of its botanical collections; paintings and sculpture from its museum; rare books and digitized archives from its vast library.

This presented considerable challenges when surfacing a unified view of all of the collections, which launched to the public earlier this year. The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate how using IIIF standards, particularly the Image API, has enabled a flexible and evolving way to deal with variety of collections data, all while providing a consistent (and interoperable!) interface for users.

I particular, I will talk about some of the backend challenges in storing and serving image data from multiple internal systems during the prototype phase, and how these were simplified by switching to a consolidated image store, thanks to the use of a IIIF-capable DAMS. I will also demonstrate how settling on one standard for image delivery allowed us to provide a consistent interface for users, as well as easily reusable components for web developers.

Glycerine Workbench provides a suite of annotation tools and end-to-end workflows for researchers, curators and students to collaborate on projects across repositories. Glycerine provides a comprehensive implementation framework for integration with institutional digital asset management and content management systems. Through integration with institutional API’s and import of TEI files, Glycerine supports scalable development of collections.

The development and adoption of IIIF complaint Image AI annotation pipelines presents an opportunity for radical scalability in the annotation of images. A missing component has been the workflows for scholarly and professional emendation of annotations. Glycerine Workbench has integrated an open-source Image AI IIIF annotation pipeline to support productive, iterative and scalable workflows for the training of AI models and the assisted automation of image segmentation, segment captioning, and semantic tagging of images segments with domain specific scholarly vocabularies. The architecture adopted encompasses collaboration with the IIIF community on open-source API’s and methods for the iterative training of Image AI models and deployment of those API’s from within Glycerine Workbench collaboration workflows.

When the Mapping Chicagoland project began to digitize over 4,000 maps and atlases from institutions in the Chicago area, the size of the challenge for cataloguing and georeferencing this volume of content was immense. However, selecting the AllMaps platform has transformed our large-scale project in several ways, enabling us to prioritize longevity and preservation over the need to hire and manage a large number of technical staff. This has created what we have called the “AllMaps advantage.” We will highlight the three key benefits we have seen with the platform and how we were able to reform our workflow to support our research community, as well as our own institution’s longevity.

Africa Media Online (AMO) was the first organisation in Africa to adopt IIIF, building the Universal Viewer into the public web interface of its DAMS. The high speed of technological innovation around the world, particularly with the rapid adoption of AI technologies, meant that AMO abandoned the strategy of developing its own systems from scratch and in 2023 began to represent best of breed systems from elsewhere in the world into African markets. A number of the new systems do not incorporate IIIF. Seeing IIIF as a key component of what AMO wants to bring to the African market, with it's new technology partner, Code Pilot leading the development, AMO set out to integrate IIIF technologies with Wordpress and the Elementor visual builder to create a highly versatile web interface for any DAMS that has mature APIs. Since Wordpress is the most widely used website builder in the world, this integration between Wordpress and IIIF technologies in the new Memat 5 web interface promises not just to bring IIIF to the GLAM sector in Africa but also make it available to just about any economic sector anywhere in the World.

One of Edinburgh’s Heritage Collections biggest stories in recent years was the acquisition of

Charles Lyell’s Scientific Notebooks. These notebooks are an internationally-recognised

research resource, as they give direct insight into the working mind of Charles Lyell, a

prominent Scottish geologist whose work was key to our understanding of the earth’s

history. His writings were vitally important: he’s seen as one of the fathers of geology and a

direct influence on the thinking of, among others, Darwin.

Upon their reception, priority was given to digitising the notebooks. An enormous effort was

undertaken to get all of these online, in the LUNA image management system; this

coincided with our implementation of the Goobi workflow management system. Both of

these tools have a strong basis in IIIF.

This presentation highlights two innovative projects that combine technology and accessibility. The first project involves transforming images into sound using Chladni patterns and machine learning. By applying machine learning techniques, we developed a method to convert visual images into sound, offering a multisensory experience that could benefit educational, artistic, and accessibility initiatives. The second project focuses on creating a 3D scanner for digital archiving of the University of Leeds' coin collection. The high-resolution scanner captures detailed features of coins, allowing for their preservation and global sharing.

Central to both projects is the use of the IIIF, which allows for high-quality image sharing and viewing across platforms. IIIF enables the democratization of university archives, which were previously inaccessible outside the institution. By integrating IIIF into these projects, we can share valuable content globally, expanding access to research, education, and collaboration.

These projects aim to revolutionize how digital content is shared, preserved, and interacted with. The ability to digitally document cultural artifacts like coins and convert visual art into sound not only preserves them but also creates new, accessible ways for people to engage with knowledge and history on a global scale.

Universities face challenges with presenting 3D content because of the fact that presenting 3D models is more difficult than 2D images since these models need specialized software and hardware to render and show them. Furthermore, hosting and presenting 3D content can be expensive, making it impractical for universities with little funding. However, when universities team up with the IIIF Community Group, together they can develop standards and best practices for 3D interoperability with the goal of making 3D content as easily shareable and accessible as 2D images. This is not only beneficial for educational experiences but also contributes to the overall objectives of digital preservation and access.

3D data is more and more a common part of archaeological datasets. Hence, 3D technologies should be integrated into the curricula to make archaeology students fit for an engagement with cultural heritage data. This presentation focuses on a class taught for archaeology students at the University of Basel which aimed at introducing them to the principles and practices of 3D modelling of buildings using open-source tools and standards. A complete workflow will be presented, starting from the creation of 3D models using Blender, the creation of rich accompanying metadata, paradata and state-of-the-art IIIF manifests, to the publication of the 3D models.

In addition to developing basic technical skills, the class aimed at addressing a critical need for the next generation of professionals in local museums, cantonal archaeologies, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to embrace open and accessible data practices. By equipping students with the knowledge of 3D modelling and interoperable data standards such as IIIF, they are empowered to advocate for and implement more open approaches to managing cultural heritage data in the future. This is essential for fostering collaboration with researchers and greater accessibility of these data.

In 2016, staff at the University of Victoria decided to implement and migrate to an open source, Samvera (Hyrax)-based application (called “Vault”, available at https://vault.library.uvic.ca) to store and showcase our rarest and unique digital materials. Samvera products offered several IIIF features “out of the box”: a IIIF viewer, automated manifest generation, and a lightweight image server with basic caching capabilities.

This end-to-end support was a better fit and more sustainable for us both financially and in terms of staff time: it allowed us to hit the ground running and build custom features for our applications and local communities, without worrying about the basics. This presentation will discuss our experience with Samvera, some sustainability challenges associated with maintaining open source software over the long run, and how we can respond.

Thanks to the generosity of the National Endowment of the Humanities and a host of partnerships over the past decade, the TPEN team responsible for the introduction of line-by-line transcription to manuscript studies is leveraging the major advances in presentation, annotation, and automation standards to modernize the TPEN platform for a new wave of paleographers and scholars. This talk outlines the pain points that have made it necessary to upgrade and the new opportunities this provides. The project began in January 2024 and the early public beta release is scheduled for July of 2025, completing in 2026.

The presentation highlights the results of a three-year collaboration between Allmaps and the postmaster’s program of the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology, in combination with other updates from the Allmaps ecosystem.

Researching historical maps, building plans, and other archival documentation is a key component of architectural research and design. Over the course of three years, the use of Allmaps within the context of design education has been implemented in collaboration with the Berlage postmaster program, resulting in the publication of three atlases: River Atlas, City Atlas and Coast Atlas.

While navigating the results–a conglomerate of historical maps and contemporary student work–the presentation discusses the process of working with students and their particular needs and interests. It also reflects on the challenges and potentials of using Allmaps and IIIF within design education at scale.

Since 2017, TU Delft Library have collaborated with Digirati, using IIIF to create engaging digital exhibitions that reflect their physical counterparts. By developing a shared design language and compositional system, the results have pushed the possibilities of IIIF modelling for the delivery of complex and expressive exhibitions.

TU Delft Library will address the initial design considerations, and highlight distinct features such as mixed-media canvases and the benefits of IIIF as the encoding format. They will offer a walk-through of the exhibition-making process, using the IIIF Manifest Editor and a recently completed exhibition site. The open source software and methods discussed aim to inspire similar workflows for other organizations and the collective development of shared tools.

This collaboration has helped inform the development of a number of tools and other supporting infrastructure to help enhance IIIF’s role as a facilitator for research, teaching and public engagement. Digirati will discuss new tooling developments to support these aims including a standalone exhibition viewer for presenting IIIF Manifest(s) in an engaging and extensible way, a "presenter mode" to showcase exhibitions on (touch)screens and support for ranges to add chapters to exhibitions.

To show and illustrate the relevance and importance of the use of Web Annotations in combination with IIIF, we present and demonstrate a number of project deliverables from our practice as developers of tools and services for humanities scholars. We zoom in on the W3C compliant web annotation services that we implemented. We present and discuss a number of guiding principles that allowed us to build a generic software stack that can be applied to a wide range of digital collections, while staying close to standards such as IIIF and Linked Data.

The PerVisum project aims to contribute to scientific publishing by making it possible to make images central to published research articles. Leveraging IIIF, it redefines the interplay between images and text, exploring IIIF manifests as a publishing format.

Applications span disciplines such as art history, archaeology, and material culture studies, addressing challenges like publishing large image collections alongside critical analysis.

The project includes the development of an accessible tool to compile, structure, and present IIIF-hosted images, offering practical pathways to overcome current obstacles to IIIF adoption.

Are you wondering how to partner between cultural heritage collections at your organization? BUT- do your worlds feel so wildly different that a single solution seems unattainable? Dartmouth has been there, and we’d like to share.

Sustaining open source software can be challenging. As the IIIF Consortium celebrates its 10 year anniversary, the Universal Viewer (UV) is also celebrating its longevity as an open source software product, entering its thirteenth year in production. We will discuss what steps have been taken to ensure the UV remains a well maintained, community driven project with an active network of trusted committers. These include the creation of the Universal Viewer Steering Group (UVSG) and removing barriers to contribution through the development of a clear governance structure, well defined roles and responsibilities and improved documentation. We will highlight methods for community engagement including innovative, inclusive and multi-institution sprints. We showcase UV’s evolution, including accessibility and user experience enhancements, future plans and ways for others to contribute.

Since 2017, 4Science has been working on implementing support for IIIF in DSpace, the most used open source Digital Asset Management System in the world, to provide a better user experience in enjoying images, especially in the cultural heritage domain. A dedicated add-on has been implemented to achieve this goal, and it is easily integrated with a set of external Image Servers, such as Cantaloupe or Digilib. To enrich the content related to the digital cultural heritage managed within DSpace, we are now implementing workflows aimed at saving IIIF annotations created with Mirador and at relating them with all the information provided by metadata, fulltexts and entities. The proposed paper illustrates such workflows and how to relate annotations to each other and to other entities structured at data model level, to integrate them in a Digital Library knowledge base.  

A whistlestop tour of all the FUN things you can do with your friendly international operability framework for images, time-based media and whathaveyou.