IIIF and Mirador viewer for digital collections and research

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Shafeek Fazal

On March 3rd, 2021 the SBU Center for Digital Humanities in collaboration with the SBU Libraries Digital Projects team hosted an hour-long “Digital Humanities Show & Tell” presentation entitled “Mirador 3.0 IIIF Image Viewer for Digital Collections and Research.” Chris Sauerwald, SBU Libraries Multimedia Specialist presented the event via Zoom videoconference.

The event gave a tour of the SBU Library Digital Projects and Exhibits website focused specifically on the uses of the new open source Mirador 3.0 image viewer now integrated into all of SBU Libraries’ digital collections presented in Omeka S 3.0.

This web browser based viewer introduces exciting possibilities for teaching and research, leveraging not only items from our own digital collections but also resources from other cultural institutions across the globe. Digitizing cultural heritage items for preservation and public access allows new opportunities for online exhibition, research, and pedagogy. IIIF enabled technology like the Mirador Viewer provides the ability for scholars not only to access and view digitized items but also to contextualize and interpret them within a larger body of available digital multimedia materials.

SBU Libraries was spurred to adopt IIIF by our work on the Otto F. Ege collection of medieval manuscript leaves held by SBU Special Collections and Archives. In 2017 the Libraries Digital Projects team led by Victoria Pilato and university archivist Kristen Nyitray digitized the collection and launched the online exhibit in order to facilitate scholarly study of the leaves. IIIF and Mirador enables one of the main goals of that project which was to allow scholars to “reunite” the manuscript fragments with digitized leaves from other institutions.

At the end of the presentation several advanced implementations of IIIF web based tech were demonstrated, highlighting possible future uses for complex online exhibits of our digital collections.

Link to slides from this talk:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f8_KJ0kwIhSYy0HkDDWlNZc6qCiblmhT1jpEzYuwZ44/edit?usp=sharing