Introduction

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. A growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery. IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals: To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world, To define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories, and To develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images. (http://iiif.io).

This course will introduce students to the basic concepts and technologies that make IIIF possible, allowing for guided, hands-on experience in installing servers and clients that support IIIF, and utilizing the advanced functionality that IIIF provides for interactive image-based research, such as annotation.