IIIF and User Annotations

Mirador_VTL_03199_01_0084.jpg

Vat. lat. 3199: Dante's Divina Commedia, with portraits of the poets Dante and Petrarch.

At the METAscripta website users will be able to search for Vatican manuscripts by BAV Shelfmark as well as by 1) Century, 2) Country, and 3) Language to discover new manuscripts in their areas of interest. Built with IIIF technology, the website will enable users to view JPEGS of manuscript in the Mirador viewer, an interface with interactive display tools. Other functions will allow users to contribute new metadata about the manuscript, and exchange information with other collaborators.

META_data_07.jpg

DigiVatLib, the website of the Vatican Library's manuscript digitization project.

The DigiVatLib website of the Vatican Library also creates access to Vatican manuscripts using a IIIF digital environment. Retrieval is primarily by BAV shelfmark, however, with little opportunity for discovery of new works. METAscripta will provide a crowd-sourcing metadata template to help support descriptive cataloging at the BAV. The complementary projects reflect the long history of cooperation between the Vatican Film Library and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

IIIF_Mirador_01.jpg

Three Exultet manuscripts displayed in the Mirador viewer: Vat. lat. 9820, Barb. lat. 592, and Vat. lat. 3784.

The versatile Mirador viewer will not only enable viewers to study individual manuscripts digitized from microfilms at SLU, but also to compare these with different manuscripts from other locations, including DigiVatLib. This is a screen shot of the IIIF Mirador viewer with a comparison of three Exultet manuscripts, one digitized from microfilm at Saint Louis University and two digitized from original manuscripts at the Vatican Library.

IIIF_Mirador_02.jpg

Three Exultet Manuscripts in IIIF/Mirador, with Annotations added.

The IIIF Annotation tool allows users to add annotations to any image displayed in the Mirador viewer. You can try out this tool at the Mirador Demo website by clicking on the Bubble icons. The screen shot displayed here shows the above three Exultet manuscripts, this time with various annotations added by the user. Annotations can include texts, other images, and embedded hyperlinks to other online resources.

IIIF_Mirador_03.jpg

Three Exultet Manuscripts in IIIF/Mirador, with annotated links to other resources.

A screen shot of the IIIF Annotation tool in action. The web browser is displaying embedded links opened to other websites with the Mirador viewer still running in the background. Users can thus search the internet for other resources and link these to specified selections of any manuscript. They will also be able to save their annotations to registered accounts for continued research.

IIIF and User Annotations