IIIF for Educators

IIIF for Teaching and Learning

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of open standards that makes it easy to share, view, and interact with high-quality digital images—particularly those from cultural heritage collections such as libraries, archives, and museums. IIIF allows educators and students to access images and other media from many institutions in a consistent way, and to use them in rich, interactive tools without downloading or reformatting files.

IIIF brings a world of cultural heritage objects into the classroom, allowing students to work with these objects for analysis, comparison, close inspection, and annotation. IIIF is an open-source standard used by libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions around the world to make images and audio/visual resources more accessible and useable. The shared IIIF guidelines ensure that materials made available by these institutions are interoperable. This means that students can work simultaneously with media from many different archives and that a vast array of resources from institutions around the world are available to form the basis of learning activities.

More and better engagement with digital media

IIIF encourages detailed and hands-on interaction with digital media. The ability to pan and zoom in on details of an object of study, to extract portions of interest, and to compare and juxtapose images changes media from something viewed to being a subject of inquiry. Image viewers, such as Mirador, allow students to explore these collections, comparing and juxtaposing images. The viewers can also be integrated into learning activities, allowing details of images to be used in discussion board posts, quizzes, blog posts and essays.

The world’s archives in your classroom

IIIF is by design interoperable. The shared standards developed by the IIIF consortium allows one to combine, remix and curate content from institutions around the world. While there is no doubt that visits to a library’s special collections or museum exhibit can be a rewarding educational experience, IIIF can augment and extend these experiences beyond the walls of the archive with high-resolution digital media that is replicable, manipulable, and portable.

Creative assignments for active learning

IIIF-enabled tools can form the basis of new assignment types. Storytelling tools such as Storiiies and Exhibit.so take advantage of deep zooming to allow the easy creation of interactive narratives and to share those stories with diverse audiences. Annotation tools encourage a critical, close viewing of media, and support manuscript transcription and translation assignments. But IIIF doesn’t end with manuscripts and art. The AllMaps tool is a free-to-use tools for georeferencing maps allowing students to align historic maps with modern coordinate systems.

What IIIF Does

At its core, IIIF:

  • Provides a standard way for institutions to deliver images, videos, audio, and structured metadata.
  • Uses manifests—small JSON documents—that describe a resource (e.g., a manuscript, painting, or map) and how it should be displayed, including sequence, annotations, and metadata.
  • Enables deep zooming, panning, and region selection of very high-resolution images.
  • Makes it possible to compare and combine items from multiple institutions in the same viewer.

This means that a teacher can, for example, pull together manuscripts from the British Library, paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, and maps from the Library of Congress, and view them side-by-side in one tool—even though they are hosted on different servers.

Why Use IIIF in Education

IIIF offers several benefits for teaching and learning:

  • Access to World-Class Collections – Many major cultural heritage institutions make their collections available via IIIF, so students can explore original artifacts in incredible detail.
  • Interactive Learning – Zoom into tiny details of artworks, annotate historical maps, or compare primary sources across time and geography.
  • Cross-Institutional Work – Combine resources from different libraries or museums without worrying about file compatibility.
  • Digital Literacy Skills – Using IIIF teaches students to work with linked data, online archives, and modern digital research tools.
  • Customization – Teachers can select only the parts of an object they need (e.g., specific manuscript pages) for focused lessons.

Where to Get IIIF Manifests

A IIIF manifest is the key to unlocking a resource in a viewer. Many institutions include a IIIF manifest link in their online catalog entries. Common places to find them include:

  • Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/iiif/
  • Harvard Library – https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/
  • British Library – via https://www.bl.uk/ item pages
  • Art Institute of Chicago – https://www.artic.edu/open-access/iiif
  • Europeana – https://www.europeana.eu/
  • e-codices (Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland) – https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/

Tip: If you see a small icon with the IIIF logo or the text “IIIF manifest,” you can copy that URL and paste it into a compatible viewer. Viewers and Tools for Educators

IIIF works with a growing number of free, web-based viewers and tools:

  • Mirador (https://projectmirador.org/) – A powerful, customizable viewer ideal for side-by-side comparisons and deep zooming.
  • Universal Viewer (https://universalviewer.io/) – Simple, clean interface for viewing single or multiple resources.
  • Cogapp’s Exhibit (https://exhibit.so/) – Lets you build and share curated exhibits using IIIF manifests.
  • Storiiies (https://storiiies.cogapp.com/) – Create interactive, story-based presentations around IIIF images.
  • Annotorious (https://recogito.pelagios.org/) – For annotating IIIF images with notes, metadata, and tags.
  • IIIF Curation Viewer – Allows you to create “playlists” of pages or items from multiple IIIF resources.

Getting Started in the Classroom

  • Find a IIIF manifest from an online collection.
  • Paste it into a viewer such as Mirador or Universal Viewer.
  • Explore and annotate the image with your students—zoom in, highlight key features, or compare with other resources.
  • Create a curated set of images for a lesson or project.
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