Much of the material in Durham collections that we have digitised and made available via our catalogues follows the IIIF standard. This means that as well as using the viewers provided here in our catalogues, the images can be re-used in other IIIF systems. See https://iiif.io/guides/ for more information on how this can work. We currently implement version 2 of the image and presentation apis for images only.
Discover is Durham University Library & Collections' general catalogue in which most of our resources are catalogued to provide a single search across all material types. It includes printed, archive, manuscript, image and object materials from the University's libraries and museums (and also from some Durham Cathedral and Ushaw College collections).
Thus an initial search of Discover can find a wide range of things, some of which will be digitised. It is possible to use discover to limit your initial search to IIIF material or to show only the search results that have images.
The Discover search box has drop down options to limit the initial search
If Special Collections is selected, the option Durham Digital Collections can then be selected from the second drop down list. This limits the search to only items with IIIF digitised content.
The same search can be made by starting with this URL which will set the same search restrictions.
The search results are displayed in the standard summary form for browsing or limiting by using facets (the Available Online link opens the digitised version).
As the search results are from several different catalogues their content may vary (in quantity and quality) and many of the facets only apply to a subset of the results. For example the Physical access and Place of production facets only apply to museum collections.
Full results appear as follows (depending upon the quality of the source description) The Available Online and Durham Digitial Collections links both open the item in a IIIF viewer and the IIIF logo next to the label IIIF manifest provides the customary IIIF drag and drop manifest into viewer facility.
For more information on the IIIF logo drag and drop see https://iiif.io/guides/using_iiif_resources/#finding-a-manifest-url
While Discover provides the best way to focus on IIIF content, other catalogues are available. The Archive catalogue includes links to digitised content and may provide a more useful way of browsing single collections that have digitised content. For exmple, the entire Weardale Chest collection has been digitised and a better understanding of it as an archive may be gained by browsing the catalogue
Where archival material is found in Discover some useful fields appear within the description
The "Search for related records" link will retrieve any other items in the same section of the archive catalogue and the "View in context in archives catalogue" link takes you to where the item is in the full archive catalogue.
It is also possible to browse all IIIF content by collection using our jalava collection viewer - this works best for anyone who understand our collection structure.