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IIIF

You can access our images using standard International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs. This is how to get the images of digitised works that you've found using the Catalogue API.

Right now, only our open image collections are available and we support the IIIF Image API. We are working to add the IIIF Presentation, Search and Authentication APIs across all of our digitised collections.

How do I use it?​

You can just get started! There’s no sign up or authentication required, but you might want to browse the documentation, which shows how you make requests for images. You might also want to familiarise yourself with the IIIF standards.

Once we add support for the IIIF Presentation API, you'll also be able to use existing IIIF viewers like the Universal Viewer or Mirador. We license our images as openly as possible and ask you to please respect the licences on individual images.

What can I do with it?​

You can access our images at different sizes, regions, rotations and formats. Here are a couple of examples of what other people have done with our images:

  • The Digital Transgender Archive brings together sources on trans history and includes nearly 500 images from the James Gardiner Collection. These are early 20th century photographic postcards depicting cross-dressing in a variety of contexts.
  • Biblissima is an aggregator of digitised medieval manuscripts, primarily sourced from French repositories. Visitors to Biblissima can access around 300 manuscripts from our collections using Mirador, a IIIF-compliant viewer.