Teaching with IIIF: A Collections-Based Approach

An online talk with colleagues from the IIIF Community Group for Education sharing their hands-on experience of teaching with visual cultural heritage collections

As part of our series exploring the pedagogic applications of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), DCCH and Pedagogic Research in the Arts (PRiA) are delighted to host colleagues from the IIIF Community Group for Education for an online talk sharing their hands-on experience of teaching with visual cultural heritage collections.

Details are below; to attend please sign up by completing this short form. The session will be hosted on teams: speakers will be online, but we will also be streaming the talk in the Hub (Brotherton Ground 3.27).

About the event

The International Image Interoperability Framework (pronounced “Triple-Eye Eff”), as its founders occasionally remind us, is just a set of standards for web delivery of high-resolution cultural heritage content. But for acronym-averse educators IIIF is better represented as an eye-opening experience for students. The little blue and red IIIF icon serves as key to a secret garden of shared holdings among libraries, archives, and museums around the globe. The IIIF Community Group for Education has been mowing pathways through some remaining thorny patches, stocking a toolshed, and cultivating hybrid pedagogies for hands-on instruction. We will showcase a few examples of curriculum at the lesson, module, and course level, and describe the “collections-based inquiry” model that has informed instructional design for courses in the history of science and several other disciplines.

Speakers

Chien-Ling Liu Zeleny, Continuing Lecturer in the Department of History and Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA, is a historian of medicine. Her research has focused on cross-cultural medical encounters between Western Europe and East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her teaching emphasizes collection-based research, collective analysis, and embodied learning experiences that engage tangible and virtual objects of inquiry.

Christopher Gilman is Digital Curriculum Program Coordinator at the UCLA Library. He supports student and faculty engagement with Library Digital Collections for teaching, learning and research, and oversees instructional design efforts in the Digital Library Program.

Ben Johnston is Senior Educational Technologist at the McGraw Center for  Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. With over 25 years in the field of educational technology, Ben‘s work serves to promote the purposeful application of technology to creative teaching and active learning.

Further information - PRiA and IIIF

If you would like to know more about Pedagogic Research in the Arts (PRiA) at the University of Leeds, please join – if you haven’t already – our TEAM - PRIA | General | Microsoft Teams.

The IIIF format is central to the current Digital Libraries Infrastructure Project (DLIP) which aims to make Leeds’s rich cultural collections more widely accessible, reusable and interoperable. In June 2025, the University of Leeds will host the annual IIIF Conference, showcasing innovative applications across the education and cultural sectors.