The International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium is delighted to announce two new members. The University of Bern and the Vienna University Library have joined as Associate members.
“The IIIF-C is pleased to add The University of Bern and the Vienna University Library to our global consortium,” said Martin Kalfatovic, IIIF-C Managing Director, “both bring great content and technical expertise to the wider IIIF community.”
The University Library of Bern provides a centrally hosted, long-term maintained institutional IIIF service for researchers at the University of Bern. This service offers a sustainable technical infrastructure for IIIF-based research projects, such as Digital Scholarly Editions. It combines a IIIF server with a user-friendly frontend that allows researchers to upload images and metadata for their own projects. Once uploaded, all information required to use the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs is generated automatically, allowing seamless integration of images into project-specific presentation platforms. In collaboration with the Digital Humanities and the Data Science Lab, the University Library actively promotes the use of IIIF across disciplines.
With its institutional IIIF service, the University Library of Bern provides researchers at the University of Bern with a sustainable and interoperable infrastructure for working with digital images. This work is closely tied to, and depends on, the continued development of the IIIF standard. Through its Associate Membership, the University Library of Bern seeks to support this ongoing work in collaboration with the IIIF Community.
The Vienna University Library provides access to a growing range of digitised. Today, the Library already offers IIIF presentation of digitized collections via its Goobi Viewer. Building on this, the Library is planning the next step: a full IIIF and “Collections as Data” infrastructure designed specifically for research use—enabling programmatic access, sustainable reuse, and integration into scholarly tools and workflows across disciplines.
A key initial focus for this development is cartographic and geospatial material. The Library therefore particularly welcomes the cooperation between the IIIF Consortium and Allmaps, which opens up powerful new ways to work with historical maps. Through its Associate Membership in the IIIF Consortium (including the Allmaps Add-on), the Vienna University Library aims to actively support the continued development of the IIIF standards and to contribute research-driven use cases and expertise to the IIIF Community.
“Joining the IIIF Consortium is an important step in our strategy to make the University’s digitised collections more reusable, more interoperable, and more useful for research,” said Andreas Brandtner, Director of the Vienna University Library. “With IIIF—and with tools such as Allmaps—we can move beyond online presentation towards a sustainable infrastructure that enables data-driven scholarship and new forms of discovery and analysis.”
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.