I am learning IIIF by exploring existing manifests

[tomcrane]

I am learning IIIF and exploring existing manifests to understand what’s in them and how they work.

I've read a few articles about IIIF, and I think I get the basic idea. I had a look at the spec but it's a bit dense and not really easy to follow as an introduction, I learn better from examples and figuring it out.

I go to the Manifest Editor site. I have a few IIIF Manifests in mind I want to take a look at. I can find them because most sites with viewers have a link to the IIIF Manifest. The first is a 50 page book with a table of contents, so I go to File->Open.

On some sites I can just drag the little iiif icon from the page into the Manifest Editor, but this doesn't always work.

There are a few options on the File->Open menu. If I can't drag it on I'll just paste the URL into the textbox, which is always near the top of the options. There are other options on there that allow me to browse IIIF collections; I tried that for a bit but it wasn't very useful for what I needed - easier to find what you need on someone else's site and then bring it in.

I opened my book manifest and it appears in the familiar, PowerPoint style view. This is good for a quick scroll through the pages, but it's not telling me very much about IIIF.

So I switch to the Outline View. This feels a bit more technical, but it really shows all the different parts of the Manifest. It looks like files and folders, although there's clearly more going on than that - the "folders" have different icons, their contents look different from each other. I can see that some of the things I click are just properties of the manifest, but others are more complicated - either new types of thing, or lists. The manifest's items property is very prominent, and shows me a list view of all the canvases. If I open a canvas I can see further structure - this makes it clear what the relationship is between the canvases and the page images.

I also spot things I hadn't noticed - each page of the book - each canvas, rather (now that I see them like that) also includes some other objects - links to other objects, outside the manifest. The text of each page, for example, as plain text, as annotations, or even as XML data of some kind.

Every time I click around in the outline, the content of the main panel changes - it gives me something I can use to edit the thing I clicked on. I'm not interested in editing this thing, just looking at it - but seeing how I could edit it - what I can and can't do - is helpful.

There's even a checkbox "show Empty properties" - when I check that, a whole load of possible but empty folder are revealed, and by clicking on them I see what kinds of data they are expecting - what I would need to fill in to set that property or content.

One of the the properties is structures and I can see that this gives me a tree view in the main panel - it renders the same table of contents I can see in the viewer, but in a way that shows thumbnails of the pages in each chapter. There's also a link that slides down in a bar that suggests trying the Range Editor to look at ranges.