Work with digital objects
Single images are very useful and interesting, but using the IIIF Presentation API allows you to do more: create sequences of images, add metadata and tables of contents, and work with annotations that will 'stick' to pages and images at any resolution and zoom level.
What is a manifest?¶
A manifest is a JSON object (JSON-LD, to be precise) that describes a digital object. It contains just enough information for viewers to display images in the right order and the object's descriptive and rights metadata. They can be more elaborate and include links to related resources, alternate representations and annotations. They can also include information about the object's structure, which viewers usually render as a table of contents.
Manifests follow the IIIF Presentation API, but although API is in the name, a manifest can be stored as a JSON file.
Find and use manifests¶
Create a manifest¶
As manifests are JSON-LD files following a certain schema, you can use various tools to create your own manifests. You could even use a text editor and write manifests by hand, but this becomes tedious very quickly. It is quite common that manifests are generated by applications that already know about the digital object's metadata and contents.
Create/reuse metadata¶
A manifest must have a label and may have other metadata. Metadata is only used for display purposes and is modeled as a list of label and value combinations. The Presentation API does not mandate any fields. Both the labels and values can be multilingual.
Create a sequence¶
A manifest must have at least one sequence of canvases, which defines the default display order of the contents.