Stanford, CA-- Sheila Rabun has been appointed the new Community and Communications Officer of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community, and will assume her responsibilities at the end of August. 

The IIIF community is a growing membership of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories that have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery. Rabun, is the first dedicated staff position for the global community, and will focus on coordinating the expanding suite of IIIF features and functionality, facilitate communication within and beyond partners and help institutions, software developers and individual users engage with the platform more deeply.

“I am excited to join the IIIF community and build upon the excellent accomplishments of the initiative thus far,” Rabun said in a written statement.  Formerly the Digital Project Manager and Interim Director of the University of Oregon Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center, Rabun managed the development of the Oregon Digital Hydra repository, the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) and Historic Oregon Newspapers online, the collaborative Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI) software development project, and a variety of digital scholarship projects.

“I am passionate about digital literacy and encouraging the use of digital applications to conduct research, analysis, and dissemination as an extension of traditional academia, and I look forward to strengthening internal and external communication within the IIIF Consortium and broader community, organizing documentation and training efforts, and building new partnerships through increased outreach and advocacy,” said Rabun.

Rabun will serve as an employee of the Council on Library Information Resources (CLIR) under terms of an agreement with the IIIF Consortium.  Rabun will work at the direction of Michael Keller, university librarian at Stanford and Tom Cramer, assistant university librarian and chief technology strategist at Stanford.  

Stanford Libraries, together with the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University and the British Library conceived the IIIF initiative on the back of a napkin over a dinner conversation, and in June 2015 eight additional institutions came together to establish the IIIF-Consortium.

“Sheila’s impressive accomplishments in various digital library and scholarly programs coupled with her strong critical thinking, analysis and communication skills will add great capacity for the entire IIIF community,” said Keller, who also serves as the chair of the IIIF-Consortium.  “We look forward to partnering with her to shape this very new, and exciting role in support of improved access to all our digital collections.”

About IIIF

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. The IIIF is driven by a community of research, national and state libraries, museums, companies and image repositories committed to providing access to high quality image resources.

Press contact: Gabrielle Karampelas | 650-497-4414 | gkaram@stanford.edu