About

Canopy IIIF is an open-source static site generator designed for fast creation, contextualization, and customization of a discovery-focused digital scholarship and collections website using IIIF APIs.

Contributors

Creators

Mat Jordan (opens in a new tab) - Northwestern University Libraries

Mark Baggett (opens in a new tab) - Texas A&M University Libraries

Adam Arling (opens in a new tab) - Northwestern University Libraries

Additional Credits

Emily Gore - University of Georgia Libraries

David Schober - Northwestern University Libraries

Martim Passos (opens in a new tab) - Instituto Moreira Salles, Arka

Bruno Buccalon (opens in a new tab) - Rice University, Arka

Tarje Lavik (opens in a new tab) - University of Bergen Library

Origination

Canopy was initially conceived by Mat Jordan, Mark Baggett, and Emily Gore at the University of Tennessee Libraries in the Summer '21 as a statically generated web application for the Rising from the Ashes: The Chimney Tops 2 Wildfires Oral History Project (opens in a new tab). This project was generated from a single IIIF Collection; however, the components delivering the user interface became heavily tailored to the source material of the Rising from the Ashes project, thus limiting the reuse of the codebase for other collections. The original Canopy featured a heavily integrated IIIF A/V Viewer designed to deliver Sound and Video resources. This A/V viewer would eventually evolve into a partial inspiration for Clover IIIF (opens in a new tab).

Canopy was reimagined as Canopy IIIF in early Winter '22 with the primary focus of the project maintaining the the ability to build an interoperable site from any IIIF Collection following IIIF Presentation API 2.0 and 3.0 specifications.

Colophon

The project name "Canopy" is inspired by the tree motiff in the presentation, A Tree's Strength Is Its Trunk: IIIF as Central Operational Infrastructure (opens in a new tab), delivered by M.A. Matienzo (formerly Stanford University Libraries) and Esmé Cowles (Princeton University Library) at the CNI Fall 2020 Virtual Membership Meeting. Following this infrastructure vision, Canopy was created as a front end solution for rapid and easy creation of static sites using a IIIF Collection and its Manifests.

Canopy IIIF is created using Next.js 13 (opens in a new tab), with a FlexSearch (opens in a new tab) index for text search, IIIF Presentation API 3.0 (opens in a new tab) delivering resource content, Radix UI (opens in a new tab) and Stitches (opens in a new tab) used throughout for the user interface, and various community modules from IIIF Commons (opens in a new tab) and Samvera (opens in a new tab) supporting the work presentation and resource delivery.