The Victoria and Albert Museum

The challenge - you have digitised collections and a standard viewer (or set of viewers) for displaying individual items from the collections.

You also have editorial requirements, to use the digital collections in new and interesting ways on your web site. Different content requires different ways of telling stories, and it's far too expensive to commission and populate new narrative forms every time.

For the V&A, Digirati built reusable narratives - viewers, but with very specific user experiences - and plugins for our Manifest Editor that allow editors to load existing IIIF resources and build new content for those viewers.

In itself, this isn't new. But we did it with open standards, meaning anyone can build new stories with these tools, from any IIIF collections in the world. And the Manifest Editor framework can be extended, as new viewing experiences are developed, to capture any extra information required to drive new experiences.

This dramatically reduces the cost of developing new stories, and even reduces the cost of entirely new viewing experiences, because the editorial UI and infrastructure are already present. If a new user experience requires a little extra information to render, the extensibility of IIIF allows us to add extra settings and hints for the custom viewers that will be ignored anywhere else.

Read more about storytelling from collections

If you would like to build new narrative forms and user experiences from IIIF content, get in touch!

Main image: Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli after Jacob Philipp Hackert (Rome, about 1777). Attributed to Giacomo Raffaelli (1753–1836), The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Link