Jonathan Manton
Director, Digital Special Collections and Access
Yale University
Martin Kalfatovic
Managing Director
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Consortium
Thousands of institutions have adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to provide access to digitized collections, yet the content served through these APIs, including hundreds of thousands of maps, remains largely undiscoverable by location and difficult to use across institutional boundaries. Allmaps is an open source ecosystem that enables anyone to curate, georeference, and explore these resources without requiring GIS expertise or specialized infrastructure. In 2025, following the termination of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the IIIF Consortium formalized a tiered partnership with Allmaps to sustain its development. This is intended to be the first in a broader effort to help institutions realize the collective value of the content their shared infrastructure makes accessible via IIIF. This briefing will present the strategic rationale for this new consortial model from both the IIIF Consortium and Yale University Library, an early Allmaps Innovator. The session will explore how the partnership delivers tangible benefits to the community, from lowering barriers to georeferencing and cross-collection map discovery, to providing institutions with crowdsourcing tools, integration services, and governance participation without requiring specialized GIS infrastructure. Discussion will focus on how consortial organizations can move beyond standards-setting to actively steward and unlock the value of the content communities have collectively invested in digitizing.
