Leiden University Libraries elected to the Executive Committee of the IIIF Consortium
Leiden University Libraries has been elected to the Executive Committee of the IIIF Consortium. The term of office is two years starting from January 2022.
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is an open standard for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. It’s also an international community developing and implementing the IIIF APIs, backed by a consortium of leading academic and cultural institutions.
Leiden University Libraries (UBL) is a founding member of the IIIF Consortium. Through our Digital Collections portal we make more than 200.000 objects from our special collections available via IIIF. This allows more specialized subject portals, such as Biblissima, The Buddhist Digital Archives and more universal portals such as Europeana, to incorporate our digital objects via IIIF.
UBL also collaborates with faculty at Leiden University to develop digital courses that use IIIF, such as Mouse & Manuscript: Lessons in codicology and palaeography based on manuscripts from the Middle East, Islamic Africa and beyond, and Digital Manuscripts in the Classroom. UBL works on pilots that test the research possibilities of IIIF e.g. to annotate the digital versions of papyri from the Louvre in The Abnormal Hieratic Global Portal: Manuscripts in Abnormal Hieratic Script.
UBL is also a partner in international projects that use IIIF as core technology such as the EU-funded ARMA -The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages project and the Digital Historical Maps of Southeast Asia project, funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education.