2024 IIIF in DDR Project Release Notes

Team: @Sean Aery @Molly Bragg, @Hugh Cayless, @Maggie Dickson, @Farrell, @David Chandek-Stark

Timeline: April-August 2024

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Documentation

Goals

  • Render IIIF Presentation API JSON-LD manifests for DDR objects

  • Implement a new image viewer that uses IIIF manifests

Highlights

Mirador image viewer chosen over Universal Viewer

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-200 Ā 

One of the goals of this project was to replace our OpenSeaDragon image viewer with a IIIF-compliant solution. Two viewers, Mirador and Universal Viewer, quickly rose to the top of the list of options, and we evaluated both against a number of criteria. We ultimately decided to go with Mirador, as it is more actively maintained, includes out-of-the-box functionality that is important to us, and is more easily extensible via local or community-built plugins, among other reasons.Ā 

PDF strategy that doesnā€™t use IIIF

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-203 Ā 

In-page PDF viewability is a long-standing stakeholder request. Neither Mirador nor Universal Viewer include out-of-the-box functionality to support PDFs sufficient to our needs, so we have adopted a native browser PDF viewer. This solution does not use IIIF, but does meet stakeholder needs. We will reevaluate this solution in the future if/when PDFs are robustly supported by an IIIF viewer.Ā 

Set viewing direction (LTR vs. RTL) in manifests

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-185 Ā 

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-217 Ā 

It was important to us that the viewer we implemented be able to display texts using the viewing direction accurate to individual resources. Viewing direction is set in IIIF manifests with a default of Left-to-Right (LTR). The default may be overridden by changing the value in a new metadata field, ā€˜viewing_directionā€™.

AV out of scope

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-201 Ā 

Neither of the viewers we evaluated include support for audiovisual materials. While we will generate manifests for audiovisual materials, we will not replace the viewer/player for these objects at this time. We anticipate Mirador and/or Universal Viewer will build out this functionality in future releases.Ā 

Hybrid static/dynamic manifest generation

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-227 Ā 

For performance reasons, we wished to pregenerate IIIF manifests, which involves using information about the resources from the DDR administrative application, but we also wanted to use the more human-readable iteration of the metadata as presented in the DDR public administration. Hugh Cayless was able to develop a hybrid approach, wherein the structural parts of the manifest are statically generated but the metadata parts are dynamic, giving us the ā€˜best of both worldsā€™.

Sharing manifests via the Public UIĀ 

https://duldev.atlassian.net/browse/DDK-216

Links to manifests will be provided in the public UI as an option under the ā€˜More Info & Optionsā€™ section of the webpage, as well as in the ā€˜Shareā€™ drop-down menu.Ā 

Customizable display labels for pages in image viewer

While the default label for image pages in the image viewer is ā€˜Image 1ā€™, ā€˜Image 2ā€™, etc, it is now possible to supply a custom label for individual images by supplying a value in the new ā€˜Display Labelā€™ field on the component level. This action may be done in batch via csv upload.

Future work

  • Leveraging OCR with full-text search at DUL (as opposed to relying on CONTENTdm), and integrating search and term highlighting features into the DDR stack

  • Expanding our IIIF implementation to present video, audio, and/or PDF objects (currently available tools do not meet our needs)

  • Revisit DDRā€™s use of structural metadataĀ 

  • Revisit DDRā€™s generation, recording, and use of technical metadata

  • Functionality to support batch download of IIIF manifests from the DDR administrative applicationĀ 

  • Upgrade IIP image server to use IIIF Image API v3.0 (pending resolution of this issue)

  • Interrogate how we can contribute work back to the Mirador community