IT and culture: The Yale Center for British Art has now made available through its online collection in the framework of the International project

The Yale Center for British Art has now made available through its online collection nearly seventy thousand images of works of art in the public domain that are compliant with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF is a technology framework that supports enriched image use, including comparing, manipulating, and annotating multiple images within and across collections. The IIIF Consortium consists of the world’s leading libraries, museums, universities, research institutions, and image repositories, working in a collaborative system for sharing uniform and rich access to image-based resources on the web. IIIF supports a uniform display of images of books, maps, scrolls, manuscripts, musical scores, and archival material from participating institutions for display, manipulation, measurement, and annotation by scholars and students working individually or in groups around the world.

Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections at the Yale Center for British Art, explained what is particularly unique and noteworthy about what the project has accomplished: “The Yale Center for British Art was a core founding member of the IIIF Consortium and one of the first museums in the world to commit to delivering IIIF-compliant images. The Center is dedicated to providing ever-greater access to our extraordinary collection of images to support research and all fields of creative endeavor. By adopting the IIIF, our images can now travel beyond the confines of our own website and become fully interoperable with images from other collections, greatly enhancing the ability to pursue research in the digital environment.”

The Getty, another member of the consortium, also made more than thirty thousand images in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection available. The Center and the Getty have helped lead a growing international progression towards cooperatively adopting IIIF.

“The founder of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon, emphasized free and open access to collections as a fundamental value of our institution,” said the Center’s director, Amy Meyers. “When the Center opened its doors to the public in 1977, no one could have anticipated the exciting technological advances that have made this remarkable and unprecedented level of international exchange possible. However, this is just one example of how research and education at Yale University are at the forefront of innovation. Collaborating with extraordinary colleagues at leading institutions across the university and across the globe to help establish new global standards for scholarship is a hallmark of our work at Yale.”