If institutions holding artworks, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials provide IIIF endpoints for their content, any IIIF-compliant viewer or application can consume and display both the images and their structural and presentation metadata.
There are many digitisation programmes that have resulted in a particular collection’s content exposed on the web in a particular viewer application, but these various collections have not typically been interoperable with one another, and end users or institutions cannot substitute a viewer of their choice to consume the digitised material. The IIIF aims to cultivate shared technologies for both client and server to enable interoperability across repositories, and to foster a market in compatible servers and viewing applications.