About IIIF
This section will provide an introduction to some foundational concepts behind how the gallery builder works.
What is IIIF?
IIIF stands for the International Image Interoperability Framework.
It is pronounced “Triple-eye eff”
It is both:
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A set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online; these specifications dictate how digital cultural objects are to be provided and received
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A community that develops and implements these specifications
IIIF aims to standardize how digital images are delivered and viewed.
The specifications support interoperability yet allow for flexibility and variety in the description of the object via metadata.
Each participating institution has control over how they describe things in their own collections, but they make the images available in a consistent way.
Learn more about IIIF on the consortium’s website
What is a manifest?
A IIIF manifest is the package that contains all the information related to a particular digital object, including where the image is stored and associated metadata.
It is written in a string of text in a format called JSON (pronounced jay-SOHN).
JSON is a file format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects.
Today we will be working with IIIF Manifest endpoints, the links to the manifests.
A quick peek at some code
As advertised, you don’t need to understand the code to build or use galleries.
But it may help you to have a rough idea of what’s happening, so we’re going to take a quick look at the contents of a manifest.
Copy one of the links in the boxes below, and paste it into the address bar in your web browser.
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/iiif/m/RUMSEY~8~1~296148~90067635/manifest
https://purl.stanford.edu/ht369zy9186/iiif/manifest
https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/map198204401/manifest.json
Look through the code and see if you can find some pairs or combinations of labels and their values.
The code is described as “human-readable” because we can decypher some of it as natural language.