IIIF Collections

As well as creating IIIF Manifests, you can create IIIF Collections.

There are three different types of Collection in the platform.

Regular IIIF Collections

You might create one of these to model a multi-volume work (e.g., three bound volumes of The Lord of the Rings). Or to group Manifests together for other purposes. Or perhaps a multi-level Collection, representing a Periodical - A Collection with multiple Collection members, each representing a volume, and each of those having multiple Manifest members, each representing an issue.

A stored IIIF Collection can contain any fields that are permitted in the IIIF specification, and reference other Collections both within and external to the IIIF Cloud Services Platform.

Storage collections

The act as containers of Manifests or other IIIF Collections, and can be optionally made public, where they appear as valid IIIF Collections. But they can't have arbitrary fields from the IIIF specification - only label. They act like directories to organise your repository of IIIF within the platform. If you choose to make a Storage Collection public, it is made available as a IIIF Collection so it can be browsed in a compatible viewer. You might choose to keep some or all of your Storage collections private, for example if they contain too many members to be usable.

IIIF Collections and Storage Collections have public URLs, and their hierarchical structure gives you hierarchical URL paths for Collections and the Manifests they contain. The root of your IIIF Presentation storage is itself a Storage Collection

Virtual collections

Similar to the projection of assets using named queries, so can Manifests and Collections be projected into IIIF Collections through named queries. This is more suited to generating IIIF Collections based on facets, typically stored in the tags property of a Manifest or Collection. These can be combined with Search services to provide powerful supporting services for application development.

You can also use existing (and future) static site generators or other tools to generate your own discovery and exploration user interfaces.^{12 (opens in a new tab)}

For example, the platform can run Canopy (opens in a new tab) for you on IIIF Collections you have created, and can (if desired) host the resulting static site.

(more collection outputs to come)

touched 2025-09-23T12:04:54