Digital Tools for Manuscript Study

Facilitating knowledge creation

Rachel Di Cresce, Project Librarian, University of Toronto Library

Our Project

Four Parts to Project• Users

• Centre for Medieval Studies • Broader community

• Content • Digital images

• Scholarly Output • Codicology • Palaeography • Pedagogy

• Technical Stack • Data formats • Tools

Our Users• Who

• Medievalists (obviously) • Rely heavily on digital images for research and

teaching • Have varying specialities • Varying levels of technical competency

• Needs assessment • Interviews • User stories • Contextual design

Results What do our scholars want?

• Robust image viewing • Annotation capabilities • Collation tools • Data portability • Cross-institutional resource sharing and

accessibility • Standardized, easy to use tools • Pedagogical tools and materials

Four Part SolutionData portability / institutional resource sharing

• International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

Robust image viewing and annotations

• Mirador (Web Annotation specification)

Easy to use tools / pedagogical • Omeka

Collation tool • Viscoll

25%

25% 25%

25%

– iiif.io

“IIIF is an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery”

MiradorIIIF, multi-up viewer projectmirador.org

OmekaOpen source, content management system, web

publishing platform, teaching tool

Current Stage

• Create a Mirador plugin within Omeka

• Ensure non IIIF-compliant content can make use of Mirador

• IIIF import function - manifest, nested collections, reference URL

• Allow annotation creation in Mirador to create Omeka item

Mirador + OmekaMock-up for handling image viewing and annotation

Data model mock up for item-based plugin

Data model for integrating IIIF items with Omeka

IIIF manifest and Mirador viewer generated in Omeka

IIIF manifest import page

Manifest import status page

IIIF collection item page with metadata and manifest URL

IIIF items combined in collection and presented in Mirador viewer in Omeka

Next phase: Viscollhttps://github.com/leoba/VisColl

• Collation tool

• Two part system at moment

• Collation building

• Visualization

• Make a standalone, robust, web application

• Integration with IIIF?

Next phase: UTL integrationUTL collections

• Provide IIIF endpoints for digital collections

• Fisher Rare Book Library

Persistence layer

• Image and annotation store

• API which pushes and pulls data into repository and IIIF ecosystem

IIIF-to-go

• suite of tools and resources to facilitate entry into IIIF environment

• aimed at non-adopters and smaller institutions

Resources• Dot Porter. Viscoll https://github.com/leoba/VisColl

• International Image Interoperability Framework. http://iiif.io

• Project Mirador 2.1 (2016). http://projectmirador.org

• Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media,George Mason University (2016). Omeka https://omeka.org

• University of Toronto Libraries (2016). Digital Tools for Manuscript Study https://digitaltoolsmss.library.utoronto.ca

Questions?