(apologies for the repost; original not received by many)

The International Image Interoperability Framework 
(http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif) is an initiative driven by several major 
research and national libraries to enable the rich and robust delivery 
of digital images through common interfaces, and to spur the development 
of open source and commercial software solutions in this space.

The IIIF Working Group invites comment and feedback on a proposed API 
for the the delivery of images via a standard http request. The full 
specification can be found at:

http://library.stanford.edu/iiif/image-api

The IIIF Image API specifies a web service that returns an image in 
response to a standard http or https request. The URL can specify the 
region, size, rotation, quality characteristics and format of the 
requested image. A URL can also be constructed to request basic 
technical information about the image to support client applications.

The IIIF Image API was conceived of to facilitate systematic reuse of 
image resources, and enable their delivery through a diversity of 
software applications and environments, regardless of underlying 
technology platforms. The API is designed to be adoptable by any image 
repository or service provider, and can be used to retrieve static 
images in response to a properly constructed URL. We invite you to read 
this specification and provide us critical feedback.

Please send feedback to [log in to unmask] by June 22, 2012.

Once all feedback is reviewed and incorporated, we will release the 
specification for adoption.

If you would like to follow future IIIF-related developments, you may be 
interested in joining the initiative's announcements email list 
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/iiif-announce.

If you would like to participate in IIIF's development, and/or implement 
or consume the API for your image repository or image delivery software, 
we encourage you to join the IIIF discussion email list 
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/iiif-discuss.

With many thanks for your feedback,

The IIIF Working Group