“Discoverability” in the IIIF digital ecosystem

Abstract

The IIIF APIs have been used since 2012 by a community of research, national and state libraries, museums, companies and image repositories committed to providing access to image resources. The IIIF technical groups have developed compelling tools for the display of more than a billion IIIF-compatible images.

We can figure out that with hundreds of institutions participating worldwide, the possibilities, for instance, for IIIF-based scholarship are growing so one question could be about the discovery of those images relevant to one’s research interests in order to discover them for their consultation or, even more, for their reuse.

While IIIF specifications discussion has focused on the machine-to-machine mechanisms of making IIIF resources harvestable, we have yet to implement an end-to-end solution that demonstrates how discovery might be accomplished at scale and across a range of differing standards for metadata arising from libraries, archives, and museums.