What is IIIF?
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a standardized approach to presenting digital media online. It enables institutions like libraries, museums, and archives to share and display high-resolution images while allowing users to interact with them in various ways, such as zooming, comparing, and annotating. By following IIIF protocols, different platforms can seamlessly access and display the same content without compatibility issues.
What is an IIIF Manifest?
An IIIF manifest is essentially a structured digital document, typically in JSON format, that provides information about a collection of images. This file contains metadata, sequencing details, and links to images, ensuring they can be displayed in an organized manner. Manifests follow IIIF standards, making it easier for viewers and applications to retrieve and render content correctly.
To read more about IIIF : Visit the IIIF consortium homepage
Using IIIF Manifests from Discover
Discover York Digital Library uses IIIF Manifests as the foundation of our Digital delivery and discovery process. Our newly migrated collections and IIIF compliant and enables a user to navigate away from the platform and still be able to use content data easily for research and reference. Our primary content viewer is Universal viewer. But our uses have the flexibility to view the manifests in a viewer of their choice.
How to use a manifest with another viewer :
For example, considering this collection : University of York Photographs
Each collection page has the section that mentions ‘How to cite collection data set’ ; on clicking this URL, the IIIF manifest URL can be obtained for this collection : https://discover.york.ac.uk/ark:/36941/ahc13192/presentation/3/collection
To view this manifest on Mirador viewer we copy this Manifest URL to the viewer demo page : https://projectmirador.org/demo/
We navigate to the the 'New Resource' icon (top left icon
) and click the 'Add Resource' option on the bottom right and paste the link, the manifest should now appear in the list. Any number of manifests from our list of collections can be added to this resource list for personal reference and collection.