The increasing availability of digitized archives presents new opportunities for scholarly research, yet effective reuse of these resources requires infrastructure that is interoperable with open data. This paper presents a novel annotation platform for the scholarly research on visual material, based on a customization of the ResearchSpace platform. By directly integrating images served via the IIIF Image API (v2/v3), the system ensures a high level of digital provenance and source reliability, crucial for research in history-oriented humanities. The paper outlines the platform’s technological framework, highlighting how its architecture fosters deep scholarly engagement with digitized materials and exploring the potential applications of annotation outcomes. Additionally, it discusses the challenge of streamlining the connection between researchers and digitized archives. Future improvements will focus on automating metadata integration and tackling interoperability challenges across diverse data models.