2024 IIIF in DDR Project Release Notes

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

Timeline: April-August 2024

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

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.

PDF strategy that doesn’t use IIIF

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

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.

Set viewing direction (LTR vs. RTL) in manifests

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

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

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, ‘viewing_direction’.

AV out of scope

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

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.

Hybrid static/dynamic manifest generation

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

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 ‘best of both worlds’.

Sharing manifests via the Public UI

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

Links to manifests will be provided in the public UI as an option under the ‘More Info & Options’ section of the webpage, as well as in the ‘Share’ drop-down menu.

Customizable display labels for pages in image viewer

While the default label for image pages in the image viewer is ‘Image 1’, ‘Image 2’, etc, it is now possible to supply a custom label for individual images by supplying a value in the new ‘Display Label’ 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 DDR’s use of structural metadata
Revisit DDR’s generation, recording, and use of technical metadata
Functionality to support batch download of IIIF manifests from the DDR administrative application
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