IIIF in Switzerland: A Report Series

In 2019, the Towards IIIF-Compliance Knowledge in Switzerland (TICKS) project at HEG Genève issued a white paper on the deployment of IIIF in Swiss cultural heritage institutions. At the time, the question was whether IIIF had a place in Switzerland, and how institutions could implement the APIs and software to make their resources compatible. Seven years on, the focus is rather on where it is already in use and how.

IIIF in Switzerland: A Landscape of Compatible Platforms and Engaged Institutions surveys Swiss platforms that publish IIIF resources meeting explicit criteria. It also lists the members of the IIIF Consortium based in Switzerland, such as the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) as well as the University of Bern.

A living report

The report is intended to be updated over time. Each new survey round will introduce a new major version, with minor versions adding platforms and corrections in between. This means that I don’t know if I will update the report every year, but I expect that each survey round will introduce a new major version. The all-versions DOI always points to the latest one: 10.5281/zenodo.23242983.

Version	Date	Platforms	DOI
1.1	5 November 2026	27	10.5281/zenodo.23318838
1.0	10 October 2026	23	10.5281/zenodo.23242984

What’s new in version 1.1

• New platforms: Archives de la Ville de Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève (Iconography), e-periodica, the online portal of the Museum of Communication and the PTT Archives, and RISM Online.
• One platform demoted: e-newspaperarchives.ch, whose bot protection has been blocking external IIIF clients.
• A clearer table, with each IIIF API on its own line next to its note.
• A change log (Appendix A).

Help me keep it up to date

The panorama is not exhaustive. If you know a Swiss platform that publishes IIIF resources, or spot something out of date, please get in touch. Before suggesting a platform, please check it against the three criteria set out in Section 3 of the report:

1. Compatibility: Manifests open in a IIIF client (viewer/player) that is not run by the institution itself, and validate against the version declared (warnings are acceptable). For platforms with images only, the Image API must work in an external deep zoom viewer.
2. Public reach: It is run by, or is closely associated with, a public service or research institution, such as a library, archive, university, research infrastructure, museum, or foundation, and makes its collections openly accessible.
3. Swiss anchoring: The service provider is based in Switzerland or the platform is primarily devoted to Swiss-related collections.