IIIF

Implementation of IIIF for Natural History Collections

The CETAF Identifier specification provides a uniform way for people and machines to access textual data about specimens over the internet but one of the primary use cases is to access images of specimens. These pages document best practice for exposing specimen images using IIIF and why this approach is recommended. The initial development of these recommendations was carried out as part of an EU funded Synthesys+ (2019-2021) which was part of the larger DISSCo initiative.

IIIF ([International Image Interoperability Framework]) is an exchange standard for sharing multimedia representations of objects on-line. It has been adopted by many institutions and commercial partners in the digital humanities community but, before the EU Commission funded project Synthesys+ (2019-2021), was not used in the Natural History community.