What you'll need during the workshop
Aim of the workshop
In this brief hands-on workshop we will help you start to get familiar with IIIF, providing you with the initial insights required when considering it for your work - be that research, education or simply exploration of digitised materials. We will focus on a few use case examples relevant to our setting at the Medieval Congress here in Leeds.
The use cases will illustrate how elements of IIIF are enabling many research or scholarly activities including discovery of content, capture, enriching, analysing, sharing and collaboration through to presentation.
We will then guide you through some activities where you can try out some of the tools demonstrated, before then creating, editing and publishing your own IIIF digital object (known as a Manifest) using the easy-to-use tools provided by Digirati for today's workshop.
We will keep the activities bite-sized, so that you can get through some of each aspect and you can always return to the material later if you want to continue further.
By the end of the workshop we will have covered some basics of the IIIF Image API and the IIIF Presentation API, providing you with a foundation to explore further. You can continue to use the tools and this guide to experiment and try out further activities in your own time.
Note there are a number of great online resources to enable you to learn more about IIIF in your own time or as part of an expert-led training course. The IIIF Consortium’s online training is a great place to start - and if you want to try going further today with any area you can refer to their course syllabus here: https://training.iiif.io/iiif-online-workshop/index.html.
Modern browser, Internet access
A modern browser, with access to the Internet to allow you to use the online tools and content that we'll leverage during the workshop.
Tools
IIIF Editor
The Digirati Manifest Editor is an open-source, IIIF editing tool, designed to provide a visually intuitive tool for creating, editing and updating of IIIF content. You can use it to create new manifests, adding metadata, creating and managing canvases for simple and complex IIIF manifest requirements. You can preview your work in progress in a range of configured IIIF viewers, whilst you can share your work in progress or completed manifest with other users.
You can edit existing manifests to update and test changes ranging from simple metadata additions, to adding annotations, changing manifest behaviours and adding navPlace data to support enriching your presentation with map-based interfaces.
It is also possible to simply provide the option to allow users to view manifests, supporting learning and exploration of IIIF Manifests and how these are assembled by institutes and organisations to deliver rich, engaging only viewing experiences.
We will use this tool today to enable inspection and exploration of existing IIIF content and to support you in the creation of your own IIIF content.
Open-source viewers
There are multiple IIIF-compliant viewers. Most allow users to pan, zoom, rotate, and resize images. Others have added features, such as search, annotations, etc, and may be more tailored for certain types of content and practical uses, such as comparing multiple images side by side or viewing 3D objects or video.
During today's workshop, we will use a number of these tools including:
Mirador
Mirador is a configurable, extensible, and easy-to-integrate image viewer, which enables image annotation and comparison of images from repositories dispersed around the world. Mirador has been optimized to display resources from repositories that support the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) API's. Mirador provides several workspaces for comparing image-based resources, suitable for use in both cultural heritage and research settings.
Theseus
Theseus Viewer is a IIIF-compliant, reference viewer that allows users to view, navigate, and interact with digital collections of images, audio, and video, especially in the context of cultural heritage and research applications.
Theseus is very user friendly, will allow you to share your content with others, and also has wide support for the almost all aspects of the features the IIIF specification provides.
Universal Viewer
Originally created by Digirati for the Wellcome Library and then extended to cover the British Library’s broad set of use cases as a single ‘Universal Viewer’. Universal Viewer has established itself as a popular community-driven IIIF viewer used by leading cultural institutions across the world supporting image, audio, video, and pdf as IIIF viewing experiences.
The British Library is now leading further developments of this open source project with their own dedicated team. Recent community sprints involving team members from the British Library, National Libray of Wales, Villanova University and other participants have been running over the past 12 months to help enhance and further develop the tool.