IIIF Manifests

For the purposes of this workshop we need to introduce one of the core aspects of IIIF which is a Manifest. This is a JSON document which describes a digital resource. It contains:

• Descriptive metadata like labels, rights and other information
• Links to Images and AV resources
• Ordering of Images in sequences and table of contents

A IIIF Manifest is the thing you view in a viewer like Mirador or the Universal Viewer. A viewer reads the manifest to understand what images should be shown. Take this example from the Folger Shakespeare Library where the descriptive metadata and image information has been highlighted:

This digital object is available in the Folger here. The Manifest for this object is available here.

For this course it is not important to understand how the Manifest works but as demonstrated in the IIIF introduction it is possible to take a Manifest from one place and open it in another viewer. For example the Folger manifest can be opened in Mirador by following this link.

In the hands on annotation session discussed later we will be taking a Manifest from an institution and then adding annotations.