The Problem

IIIF emerged from a need to solve a common problem that was faced by cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, galleries, archives, and museums.

The need to present online high quality digital surrogates of:

• Books
• Manuscripts
• Maps
• Photographs
• Paintings
• Archives
• etc. etc.

in ways that provide compelling user experiences, but which are cost-effective to deliver.

Most institutions have a long history of projects that deliver digitised content, and attempt to solve this problem.

Sometimes a history of doing that multiple times, in multiple different ways, each of which is fundamentally incompatible with the other.

Each of which is costly to maintain, if they are maintained at all.

This Library of Congress image of grain silos in Idaho illustrates the standard metaphor for this type of problem.

The Beginning

In 2011, representatives of a number of institutions -- Stanford, British Library, National Library of Norway, Los Alamos, Cornell, Oxford, Bibliothèque nationale de France -- met at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Prompted in part by the need to consider what should happen with the next generation of the Parker on the Web project, and by a conversation between Tom Cramer (Stanford), Neil Jefferies (Oxford), and Sean Martin (BL) the idea was to see if a set of interoperable APIs could be developed.

Not only would one individual institution share some common standard across their projects, many institutions would share the same common standards across their projects.

These standards would be designed from the ground up to make interoperable content a possibility. So that a user could view content from Stanford, or the British Library, or the Bodleian, or the BnF, all at the same time, and in the same way.

With the idea that we move from a silo'd environment to one like:

The Solution

From these meetings, and many others over the next few years, the first and then second versions of two core APIs were produced:

• IIIF Image API: how do you get pixels to the screen?
• IIIF Presentation API: how do you organise content, and describe how it should be displayed so that the user has the right experience of that content?