Bringing IIIF to the DSpace Community

Starting with version 7.1 DSpace, provides basic support for IIIF out of box. The work was the result of a joint effort between Willamette University and 4Science. Willamette University had begun work on DSpace version 7 and IIIF as a way to enhance access to digital content that was being hosted on two local systems. A key objective was to replace this existing infrastructure with a single, community-supported solution.  4Science since  2017 had been developing an addon for DSpace  (starting from version 5) to support IIIF, easily integrated  with a set of external Image Servers such as Cantaloupe or Digilib.  On the basis of these experiences, an effective collaboration  started, aimed at integrating IIIF support  in the official DSpace codebase. DSpace 7 can now provide IIIF manifest for items based on item and bitstream (images) level metadata. Ideally, any IIIF compliant image server can be used, although instructions and full configuration examples are provided for Cantaloupe. Experimental support for the IIIF Search API is also available and it is expected to be refined in future releases.