Cultural heritage institutions have been digitizing their collections for many years, and while publishing digital assets and metadata online has had a positive impact to make them relevant in our connected world, digital collaboration between scholars has remained a difficult proposition. A main obstacle to efficient and scalable image-based research has been the lack of interoperability between image silos, and it is not a stretch to think that this might have hindered the progress of scholarship.
Recognizing this obstacle, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) provides uniform access to a network of distributed image repositories. The development of the technology and the various image viewing and serving software is community based, and the Yale Center for British Art is leading the way in terms of evolving both to support the requirements of scholarly research for museums.
The presentation will look at the benefits of the IIIF standard and how it supports the institutional mission of generating the highest-quality research data, especially conservation data.