About

Using IIIF Presentation Collection(s) as a data source, Canopy IIIF (Canopy) generates a scholarly digital projects platform that transforms provided digital collections into an accessible, discoverable research environment. Built on modern web standards and leveraging the interoperability of IIIF, Canopy creates static sites that extend existing IIIF resources while providing advanced localized search capabilities, contextual navigation, and customizable presentation layers.

Overview

Picture two source IIIF collections with digitized items relating to a famous author: Collection A providing 70 manifests and Collection B contributing 35 more. A team is tasked with building out a unified digital project for these items that allows users to browse their content, as well aso interact with contextual essays, timelines, and maps. By using Canopy, impementers can quickly stand-up a working projecty with every manifest becoming its own work page, authored Markdown files providing context, and both streams feeding a shared search index before everything is written out to static HTML, CSS, and data assets. The diagram below walks through that pipeline so you can see how these raw manifests become a ready-to-host digital project.

Comprehensive documentation is integrated into the application and serves as both a development guide and a demonstration of Canopy's potential for digital scholarship and humanities projects. To highlight what Canopy can do, this paragraph is authored in markdown from a simple text file and below is an example of an <Image> component rendering a IIIF image resource along with an inline annotation and caption. This same image is provided by Northwestern University Libraries as a IIIF Manifest from their Digital Collections platform and aggregated into this project as a static page during the Canopy build process.

As authors create content using Markdown, they can reference the source material directly within the text using the <ReferencedItems /> component below. This component dynamically generates a list of all IIIF Manifests that have been explicitly referenced within the markdown content of the page.

Colophon

Canopy was created by Mat Jordan (Northwestern University) and Mark Baggett (Texas A&M University) as a method to quickly build exhibit style digital humanities projects that extend existing digital collections using IIIF Collections and Manifests. It continues to be an active open-source initiative of Northwestern University Libraries, where it supports digital scholarship in many forms. This example site is built from the Donald K. Adams and Lawrence D. Stewart Collection of Prints and the Indian Paintings on Mica collection hosted by Northwestern University Libraries' Digital Collections.

Canopy uses the IIIF Presentation API to deliver rich media from providing institutions, Markdown as MDX for authoring contextual content and layout, TailwindCSS for the user interface, and a static FlexSearch index for search. Easy aggregation and retrieval of IIIF resources is made possible by the IIIF helpers developed by Stephen Fraser. In addition, Clover IIIF, developed by Northwestern University Libraries with contributions from other institutions, is integral to Canopy and provides the rendering of IIIF resources, annotations, and metadata throughout the interface.