Bringing IIIF Manifests to Life in Wikidata with Mirador 3 - 2021 IIIF Annual Conference

Wikidata is an open knowledge base of structured data that describes any type of entity, including people, organizations, concepts, events, places, and works. Some works described in Wikidata now include a IIIF Presentation Manifest URL. In Wikidata’s default user interface, that URL appears as a link to the Manifest JSON. But Wikidata can be customized to alter the user interface and add new features.

In this presentation we will discuss and demonstrate a Wikidata user script that, for items that include a IIIF Presentation Manifest URL, will embed the ProjectMirador viewer and load the Manifest JSON so that the images referenced in the Manifest can be viewed in the context of other Wikidata statements about the work. 

The discussion will cover how the user script embeds the Mirador3 viewer within a Wikidata item page and how it detects that the viewer should be added. We will also illustrate how one library is including IIIF manifests in Wikidata, with a conversation about learnings from that work, and about how the user script has contributed to the library's understanding of IIIF metadata and Wikidata. The demonstration will show how Wikidata user scripts are created and shared and look at ways in which Wikidata queries can uncover IIIF manifests.