The International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium is delighted to announce three new members. The New York Public Library will join the Consortium as a full member, and The National Library of Estonia and Vanderbilt University will join as Associate members. The memberships were unanimously approved by the IIIF Operating Committee.
NYPL currently serves a selection of its digital collections using IIIF-compliant servers, and will undertake the work of expanding the implementation across all collections in the coming months. NYPL’s exploration of IIIF began with a number of staff members taking a five-day online training course, and continued with participation in the IIIF Annual Conference in Cambridge, MA. Now, with their official membership underway, the Consortium is keen to support the NYPL’s ongoing work to make their collections open and accessible and is eager to learn from NYPL’s input into the Consortium and broader IIIF community.
Faculty from across Vanderbilt University have been using IIIF to advance their scholarship, including employing IIIF standards to make online archives more accessible and working with the Fine Arts Gallery to make public domain artworks in the collection available online via IIIF. One example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive, which makes use of IIIF to make the online archive more broadly accessible.
The National Library of Estonia is integrating IIIF into its digital archives, including uses of the Content Search and Authentication APIs, in order to achieve its stated goals of making “Estonia’s printed heritage available to use digitally for future generations.” This will make Estonian heritage—including rare books and manuscripts in German, Estonian and Russian, among many other materials—conveniently available for use by other memory institutions and researchers.
“We’re thrilled to see venerated research institutions like NYPL, Vanderbilt, and the National Library of Estonia support open standards like IIIF and lead by example when it comes to the best GLAM technologies for researchers around the world,” said Josh Hadro, Managing Director of the IIIF Consortium.
About the International Image Interoperability Framework
IIIF 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.In addition to supporting the IIIF community financially, these institutions contribute to the APIs, Community Groups, and more.
Join
Membership is open to universities, libraries, museums, archives, vendors, and others who have an interest in supporting the framework. Multiple levels of membership include a range of benefits.
To join the IIIF Consortium, take a look at the benefits of membership, and send an email to admin@iiif.io or fill out the form on that page expressing your interest.