About

Using a single IIIF Presentation Collection as a data source, Canopy IIIF (Canopy) generates a scholarly digital projects platform that transforms digital collections into an accessible, discoverable research environment. Built on modern web standards and leveraging the interoperability of IIIF, Canopy creates static sites that preserve the integrity of your metadata while providing advanced search capabilities, contextual navigation, and customizable presentation layers—all without requiring content duplication or vendor lock-in.

Have an idea for a project?

Get started Read documentation

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.

The town & pass of Boondi, in Rajpootana - Situated on a southern slope of a hill at the end of a long range, the town of Boondi was the capital of the Rajput principality of that name. The palace of the Raja is a large masonry stone building about half way up the hill, according to Grindlay, with a kind of fortification extending to the top.

Use Cases

Canopy “makes easy” the creation of digital exhibits for libraries, archives, and museums by providing user-experience focused components that bring IIIF resources to life. For digital humanists and scholars, Canopy provides a straightforward method to curate works from multiple sources and provide additional perspectives and aboutness beyond the included descriptive metadata. The decentralized, interoperable, and linked-data attributes of the IIIF APIs empower Canopy to provide smaller institutions with a streamlined front-end platform, neatly sidestepping the monolithic complexities often associated with conventional digital asset management systems.

Colophon

Canopy was created by Mat Jordan (Northwestern University) and Mark Baggett (Texas A&M University) as a means to build exhibit style digital humanities projects that extend existing digital collections using IIIF Collections and Manifests. Canopy uses FlexSearch index for text search, IIIF Presentation API 3.0 delivering resource content, Markdown as MDX for content, TailwindCSS used throughout for the user interface, and various community modules from IIIF Commons and Samvera supporting presentation and resource delivery.