Announcing the IIIF Consortium

Big news! On Tuesday [June 16], eleven world-leading institutions agreed to form the IIIF Consortium, a member organization dedicated to sustaining and advancing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The consortium will support the work of IIIF by pooling and allocating funding from members for exposing content via IIIF; doing outreach, training, and advocacy to grow the community; maintaining and elaborating on the IIIF technical specifications; providing catalytic support for IIIF-compatible software development; helping coordinate the IIIF community, and more.

The Consortium will reinforce and amplify the work currently done within IIIF community by providing ongoing support for the IIIF working group, editorial efforts, community calls and meetings. A core principle of the Consortium is that it derives its strengths from the active participation of a distributed community, and therefore values the diversity, inclusiveness and transparency that have characterized IIIF since its inception.

The consortium will extend invitations to additional Founding Members later this year. The first eleven institutions in the IIIF Consortium have each played prominent roles in helping develop IIIF to its current state, and have committed to helping grow it over the longterm. These institutions are:

  • Artstor
  • Bavarian State Library
  • British Library
  • Cornell University
  • National Library of France
  • National Library of Norway
  • Oxford University
  • Princeton University
  • Stanford University
  • Yale University
  • Wellcome Trust

For next steps, we will continue to work to expand the number of IIIF-compatible repositories and software packages in the world, and do ongoing development of the technical specifications on authentication, search within objects, and discovery of IIIF resources for use.

This is a watershed development as it signals major, international commitment at an institutional level for the Framework, and the beginning of organized support to help sustain the benefits of interoperability over the longterm.

To read more about IIIF visit: http://iiif.io/

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