IIIF and Project Mirador

For the exhibition website we had planned to implement a IIIF viewer for the display of the manuscripts as we had seen many examples of through the semester.  For this we decided to select the open source Project Mirador viewer due the nature of it being one of the largest projects. However our efforts ran into issues due to the fact that it is an actively and rapidly developed project, this meant that a lot of the projects documentation is left unfinished or still work in progress.  This led to many issues in trying to implement the project and after a period of experimentation and work we eventually had to change to try and find a different option this led to us attempting to use several different IIIF viewers such as openseadragon, a far more lightweight program, but we also failed to be able to get those to work.  After the failures in trying to succeed in getting either  of the IIIF viewers to work we settled on using a simple image zoom tool to view the images.  The struggles we encountered in these attempts demonstrated one of the main problems with open source projects in that no matter how good the actual project is that they are producing if they haven’t taken the steps to properly document there processes and steps using the software becomes extremely difficult to use, in an ideal world of course all programs and projects would have detailed in depth documentation and assistance, of course though when you are developing a project and are focusing on making it work and become high quality to stop and go back to do that can easily become a low priority task.