Our digital archives is considering switching to Mirador Viewer to replace our current IIIF viewer for a better UI and improved multipart item support. I’ve heard that Mirador is allegedly built-in to the latest version of Omeka S now, but I can’t find any documentation to confirm this. If this is true, would that mean the Mirador module would be unnecessary in Omeka S 4.1.1? Also, would this require any changes to the items as they exist currently? I doubt that simply swapping out one IIIF viewer for another will guarantee that it immediately works as intended, but that would make it a lot easier if so. We are currently using the IIIF Server and Image Server modules as well. I’m picking up where my predecessor at our institution left off, and I’m still learning IIIF overall and how all this fits together.
Omeka S does come with a Mirador viewer, but in a far more limited capacity than the third-party modules that you mention. Our viewer is responsible for rendering “IIIF Presentation” media, but that’s the extent of it. Of course, modules may use and configure the viewer for their own purposes. The viewer exists at the /iiif-viewer route:
https://<omeka-url>/iiif-viewer?url=<iiif-manfest-url>
And configuration can be modified using the iiif_viewer.mirador_config event.
Thank you, that helps! It’d probably be a good idea for us to look at getting the Mirador module then for our archives. I will have to test it out to see what it looks like after switching viewers to see if it works for us. Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIIF Presentation has to do with linked data right? This would help with improved usability of multipart items, such as a book where each page is an individual image of the scanned page, right? Would it still be possible for us to use IIIF presentation even though we’re not using an external image server right now?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIIF Presentation has to do with linked data right?
The IIIF Presentation API publishes as JSON-LD, a linked data serialization, so it’s inherently linked data. It’s a flexible API, meant to accommodate even the most complex compound resources. But whether a IIIF module will meet your requirements is up to the individual implementation.
The Omeka Team’s IIIF Presentation module provides endpoints where consumers can fetch IIIF manifests that reflect Omeka’s data model. For example, a book “item” with many pages as “media”. You could conceivably create a module that uses the IIIF Presentation module in conjunction with the Mirador viewer to render books on site pages.
I’m not very familiar with the other, third-party IIIF modules, but they’re worth a look. They may already do what you want.