Comprehensive IIIF Management & Delivery
IIIF Cloud Services has an extensive set of capabilities, built in response to real use cases from the platform’s users. As open standards, these features can be re-used by any organisation in their own contexts without developing new infrastructure and tooling.
Image and Presentation services
Any image you register with the IIIF Cloud Services platform will be made available as a IIIF Image service. The platform offers full support for the Image API versions 2 and 3, including tiled (deep zoom) delivery, responsive HTML images, arbitrary cropping and sizing for editorial needs, automated production of pre-sized cached images (e.g. thumbnails) as well as multiple output image formats, now and in the future.
The platform also allows you to create, edit, store and manage IIIF Manifests and Collections for your content assets with full IIIF Presentation API support.
Other formats including born digital
As well as image delivery via the IIIF Image API, the platform supports transformations of other formats for web delivery. It will transcode audio and video to web-friendly formats. It can also convert PDFs to image-based Manifests, and Image-based IIIF Manifests to PDF. Even files that are not in the scope of the IIIF Preservation API, including many purely born digital files, can still be referenced from IIIF Manifests where appropriate, and can still be the targets of annotation and other IIIF-adjacent technologies.
Easy to use portal
The Portal provides an easy to use interface to inspect, manage or enhance IIIF content, automatically created in the system via integration workflows using the IIIF Cloud Services APIs. It also offers the ability to create IIIF content without requiring any API integration using batch uploading and drag-and drop so users can quickly and easily get started making their collections available within the platform.
The portal includes a seamless integration with the Digirati Manifest Editor which enables detailed editing of individual IIIF Manifests covering the full IIIF Specification. These Manifests are stored in the platform.
Content Integration
IIIF Cloud Services can host any file for you, and link to it from your IIIF Manifests. For example, annotations, transcripts, datasets and other supplementary material can be managed. These files might be generated by external processes (OCR, machine learning pipelines) or might be generated by users (annotations, including classroom use cases). These files can be linked from any IIIF Resource - Canvases, Collections, Ranges as well as individual content resources - allowing the IIIF Manifest to act as an integration hub for digital content.
See adjuncts in the documentation for more detail.
Text Services
Where a Manifest has one or more text-bearing linked resources (such as OCR or HTR files, or WebVTT transcripts), IIIF Cloud Services can provide IIIF Search API and Autocomplete endpoints, allowing users to search within the text. The same text services suite can generate plain text representations of the text in a digital object, as well as a searchable PDF with text overlaying your images, allowing selection and copy/paste even from handwritten materials.
IIIF Cloud Services can generate these text resources for you, by performing its own OCR/HTR processes, or you can add your own data for the platform to read.
Engaging discovery experiences
Functions to edit IIIF in the portal could be used for anything from a simple metadata correction to enhancing and remixing IIIF content to drive enriched viewing experiences. This includes rich state-of-the art interactive online exhibitions, when combined with the Exhibition Viewer.
Also available is an out -of-the box Collections Website that presents your collections utilising your IIIF metadata to provide a basic website structure. This can be used as a way of previewing your collections or for a public website, customising if required either by working with our client services team or utilising your own resources.
Preservation options
Integrated preservation
As featured in the diagram above, Digirati have developed an open source standards based preservation solution which uses Fedora as a repository for Oxford Common File Format (OCFL) storage and has an established flexible and simple integration approach with IIIF Cloud Services. See Preservation section for more details.
Preservica plugin
The platform provides an existing easy to implement integration with Preservica. Items added to your Preservica repository can be synchronised with the IIIF Cloud Services Platform for IIIF Delivery. Preservica folder structure is replicated using IIIF Collections and the metadata is made available for populating your IIIF manifests. Find out more in our University of the Arts London case study
Other integrations can be offered via our Client Services division.
Connecting collection items from different sources for the University of the Arts London.
Read the case studyPowerful integration capabilities
HTTP REST API
We designed IIIF Cloud Services platform to cater for known system integration use cases, such as digitisation and preservation workflows, and be a flexible platform for new application development. All features are available via the Platform API, when you register assets with the platform, you can also register arbitrary metadata that you can then use to query the platform for those assets, selecting and projecting assets such as TIFFs into new forms such as IIIF Manifests with image services and access control. These configurable named queries allow the platform to project sequences of assets into results in Manifest form, in PDF form, and more.
Granular access control
The platform can enforce access control on any asset, including images derived from assets via the Image API. It does this by implementing the IIIF Authorization Flow API. When you register assets, you can supply one or more roles associated with that asset. The platform has an API for integrating with your own identity provider, mapping roles associated with users with the roles configured on assets, allowing you to delegate authorisation.
URL mapping
We can map all your IIIF URIs to work with your existing domains and create user friendly URL structures as required, and if migrating your IIIF to IIIF Cloud Services then your existing URIs can be persisted.