Digital Tools for Manuscript Study
John Stow’s Books is a publication of Digital Tools for Manuscript Study (DTMS), a project previously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based at the University of Toronto. Under the direction of Alexandra Gillespie (Centre for Medieval Studies) and Sian Meikle (Information Technology Services) the DTMS project seeks to address the needs of the increasing number of scholars and students who use digitized medieval manuscripts to carry out their work. We aim to create useful and long-lasting tools that improve researchers’ experience working with digitized books.
John Stow’s Books uses the IIIF Toolkit with Mirador plugin, which was developed as part of the DTMS project. Our plugin brings the capabilities of the Mirador image viewer and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a framework for sharing and viewing images reliably and uniformly across multiple collections, into the user-friendly Omeka environment. The Toolkit enables users to upload their own images into Omeka, curate their own metadata and create IIIF manifests from them. These manifests in turn can be viewed and annotated in the Mirador image viewer and used to create Omeka Exhibits and Neatline presentations. Since Omeka can now make use of IIIF, this means that scholars can also work with manuscript images from other archives, so long as those archives also use IIIF. For example, they can pull up images of manuscripts from the Bodleian Library, the Vatican and their own Omeka collection into the same viewer without juggling browser tabs or applications.
By putting Mirador and Omeka together, we make it easy for scholars to conduct extensive research using digital images and exhibit it in a free, open-source environment. The Mirador viewer allows scholars to easily browse through groups of images, annotate them, adjust the brightness and contrast of images, invert the colours, convert images to grayscale and back, rotate the image, and offers a deep zoom function for close-up examination.
To learn more about the IIIF Toolkit with Mirador plugin click here.