Exhibit

Annotate multiple pages of multiple items for a more advanced presentation

Exhibit was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to assist library and academic staff tasked with delivering remote teaching with rare books and archives. It continues to be invaluable as a free digital tool for creating professional interactive presentations and quizzes for audience engagement and education.

Unlike Storiiies, Exhibit does not support non-IIIF images. However, it supports the annotation of multiple views of books, manuscripts, and objects, in 2D or 3D, from any institution in the world that uses IIIF to deliver its digital collections.

Narrative presentation can be customised according to need:

• Scroll - move seamlessly through images from top to bottom using a mouse wheel

• Slides - move left to right as a slideshow using a mouse click or arrow keys

• Kiosk - play pre-timed images on a loop, requiring no user interaction

• Quiz - create interactive quizzes using multiple choice and pinpoints

Exhibit offers a simple user interface and a high degree of customisation. Users can create presentations from scratch, or modify a basic template. Presentations can either be public or password protected, making them suitable for submission by students as formal assessments.

Set up

Open the editor. Start by choosing your template from the options listed above: scroll, slides, kiosk or quiz (you can change this later).

Give your presentation a title, author, and description. The last field can be formatted with coloured text, headings, bold, italic, quotes, hyperlinks, bulletpoints or numbered lists. If you want to get started quickly, you can enter a single space in all of these fields, and complete them later.

Add a rights statement if needed. This can be a good opportunity to discuss intellectual property rights with students, and introduce them to Creative Commons licences.

Set the presentation to public or password protected. If you choose the latter, set a password. If you plan to use Exhibit for assessment, you could ask students to use their student number as the password, or another form of identification that would be simple for an examiner to enter when they need to mark the work.

Tick allow duplication if you would like other users to be able to modify your presentation. This could be useful for assessment. A module leader could pre-load a number of digital objects to a project. If this option is ticked, a duplicate button will appear on the final presentation. When a student clicks this button, they will be prompted to add their name, creating a new, personal version of the presentation to which they can add annotations, without needing to worry about the set up.

Finally, confirm your agreement with the terms of service and privacy policy. Digital content made available by heritage organisation using IIIF is unlikely to be covered by licenses restricting educational use, but this can be a good opportunity to discuss issues around copyright and image licensing with students.

Click create exhibit!

Adding items

You now have a blank canvas on which to start building your presentation. Before going any further, copy the URL and either save it to a document or email it to yourself. Exhibit does not support user accounts, so you will not be able to log in at a later date and retrieve your work - the presentation URL is the only means of access, so save it now.

Click Add item, and paste in your first IIIF manifest. Click on the imported item, then Add to exhibit. Repeat this stage until all your items are loaded.

Adding annotations

Use the preview to navigate to the preferred page or view of the first item you've loaded, and zoom in to a detail you want to add an annotation to.

Use the text box to write your annotation. It can be formatted with coloured text and background, headings, bold, italic, quotes, hyperlinks, bulletpoints or numbered lists. When complete, and you are happy with the zoom positioning, click the ✓ button. This will save your annotation to that section of the manifest.

Use the + button to add another annotation. Move to a new section, and complete the text box as above.

Descriptions can be edited or deleted at any time by clicking on the description panels, and reordered using drag and drop. Exhibits can be previewed at any time using the Preview button.

Save, share, and embed

The Share button at the bottom of the editor provides all the important information you will need in future. To make changes (edit link), to share the final version with others (view link, may be password protected), and to host elsewhere (embed code). You can copy and paste this code into other websites, some examples of which we'll look at in the next section.