IIIF for Educators

Maps & Manifests

Students are introduced to the practice of "Ekphrasis" to practice "reading" an image/photograph.

Maps & Manifests

💡 Concept

As you have come to learn, IIIF is a set of standards for making high-resolution media and associated metadata available in an interoperable way. This does not mean, however, that all institutions choose to standardize the way they make their resources available. Individual institutions are free to design their repositories however they choose. Some institutions display the IIIF logo prominently within their collection websites. Other institutions might not use the logo at all, but instead provide links that read 'IIIF Manifest' or 'View in Mirador' or 'Open in Viewer'. This all can be a little confusing. Take for example the two IIIF-enabled repositories below, Princeton University Library and Brown University Library.

Princeton University's Digital PUL

Brown University Digital Respository

Amherst College Digital Collections

The Princeton University Digital PUL platform makes use of a IIIF viewer (called the Universal Viewer) that displays the familiar IIIF logo in the bottom left.

The Brown University Library platform offers a variety of links including one labeled iiif_manifest

🔭 Explore

There are many institutions that offer IIIF-enabled resources. You have already seen the Princeton University and Brown University Libraries. Here are a few more:

Try visiting some or all of these collections and trying to find the IIIF logo or link to a IIIF manifest. Below is a map of many more institutions with IIIF-enabled collections. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all institutions that make use of IIIF, but you should be able to find links to IIIF in the collections of these institutions.

📍 A World of Content

🧱 Materials

Hopefully you found some IIIF icons or other links accompanying the digital objects in the repositories. If you clicked on of the links, you may have seen something like this:

Don't worry!

You don't need to understand all that code. This file is called a manifest. A manifest is a file that encapsulates information about a digital object, such as metadata (title, artist, holding institution, etc) and one or many depictions of the object. Depictions are most often images, but can also be videos, audio files, or even 3d renderings.

Again, it is not important to understand the contents of this file. It is important to be able to USE IT! To use it, all you need is the URL (universal resource locator), a fancy term for web address. It is this web address that you will paste into various tools to make use of the digital object represented by the manifest.

🛠️ Tools

IIIF is interoperable. This means, among other things, that IIIF manifests can be opened in a variety of IIIF-enabled tools. IIIF-enabled tools are built to understand the IIIF standards. There are many types of tools, including those for simply viewing IIIF materials, but also for cropping and annotating. Two of the most common tools for viewing IIIF resources are Universal Viewer and Mirador.

Open the link to the Universal Viewer. Scroll down the resulting page to the section labeled View a IIIF Manifest.

Paste your URL into the box and click VIEW.

You should now see a viewer with your object loaded into it. Most likely, you have seen this viewer before. It is very commonly used on Library and Museum websites.

Mirador

Another common IIIF Viewer is Mirador. While Universal Viewer focuses on displaying a single object/manifest, Mirador is suited to viewing multiple objects side-by-side.

Click the blue, Start Here button on the left-hand side of the viewer, Click Add Resource at the bottom of the screen and then paste your manifest URL into the box.

Click Add to add your manifest to the list of resources.

✉️ Share

Post a comment: What did you find? How do you feel about manifests or Mirador?

🤝 Collaborate

Take a look at other posts: how are others reacting, and are their responses similar to yours?