How IIIF Empowers Global Digital Scholarship in the Classroom and Community

September 09, 2026

manuscript fragments from a book of hours

Book of Hours (Use of Paris) (Fragment), Hanover, NH, Dartmouth Library, Ms. 002260 | Fragmentarium

A New Digital Collections Feature Elevates Student Research and Global Scholarship

Dartmouth Classics professor Jenny Lynn and her Latin 10.04 Latin Manuscripts and Palaeography students are contributing to a global scholarly community by adding materials from the Libraries’ digital collection of manuscript fragments into Fragmentarium. Fragmentarium is a “digital laboratory” that brings together fragments, or single leaves from previously bound manuscript codices (and the scholars who investigate and research them), from around the world to reassemble medieval documents. For various reasons, the fragments were stripped from their original bindings long before Rauner Special Collections Library acquired them. Lynn's work increases our understanding of the original manuscripts, all produced before 1600, and of their provenance, original meaning, and content.

This spring, Lynn's class used Fragmentarium to virtually reconstruct a fourteenth-century English psalter, or devotional book, that was dismembered and sold as individual leaves in the mid-20th century by the notorious manuscript dealer and “book breaker,” Otto F. Ege. “Three leaves of this manuscript are now in Dartmouth collections—two in Rauner and one in the Hood. It seemed like the perfect manuscript with which to begin our work with Fragmentarium.” Lynn's students tracked down leaves of this psalter in collections across the US and Canada, adding them to Fragmentarium with transcriptions and descriptive metadata alongside Dartmouth's leaves. Complete reconstruction is a slow process as fragments surface worldwide and as individuals or institutions choose to digitize and upload them to Fragmentarium.

Professor Lynn’s desire for continued work with the manuscript fragments was a big motivator for our IIIF integration, and I’m thrilled to see it all falling into place now.

Elizabeth Shand, Digital Collections Librarian

What you see and experience when browsing through the manuscripts in Fragmentarium is made possible thanks to critical, newly embedded library technology infrastructure called IIIF, or International Image Interoperability Framework. IIIF is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital images online, and for Lynn, “it works like a charm.” Without IIIF, the work is “very time-consuming and yields a far inferior result.”

IIIF is integral to Fragmentarium and other digital projects that similarly seek to bring together digital objects from separate institutions. Across the Connecticut River in Norwich is retired teacher, musician, local historian, and creator of Curioustorian Cameron Cross. He shares how the IIIF integration has been a “real boon” to his blog about the “vanished places, forgotten people, and hidden stories of Vermont’s Upper Valley and beyond.” He was exploring digital tools to help pull digitized items from the Dartmouth Libraries' collections into Curioustorian, specifically “fetching IIIF manifests for individual items in one shot.” For Cross, IIIF “has been a gift.”

Beauvais Missal Fragment Parchment, 1 leaf ,1270 – 1300 CE

Beauvais Missal (Fragment), Hanover, NH, Dartmouth Library, Rauner MS 002258 | Fragmentarium

Morgan Swan, Special Collections librarian for teaching and scholarly engagement, shares how “IIIF breaks down digital siloing and streamlines the hunting-and-gathering phase of digital humanities research.” With a single link, images stored on institutional websites around the world can be brought together into online workspaces for close reading and comparison—without needing to download or store any files.

Its interoperability is its superpower and ensures professors like Lynn, her students, Cross, and scholars worldwide can offer and benefit from digital projects that expand and inspire scholarship. And Lynn continues this work.

I am so excited to be part of the work that Dartmouth is doing to make its holdings available to scholars around the world.

Jennifer Lynn, Classics professor

Come spring 2027, she will again teach Latin Paleography and Manuscripts and Palaeography, and her students will do another virtual reconstruction of another codex disassembled by Ege represented in Dartmouth’s collections. “The IIIF compliance is huge for me and for scholars to find Dartmouth fragments using Fragmentarium,” says Lynn. She and the students plan to work on adding all of Rauner Library’s pre-1600 fragments onto Fragmentarium so they will be discoverable by other researchers worldwide. “The work we did this year to begin a virtual reconstruction of this English psalter made clear to me how important it is for institutions to make manuscripts in their collections discoverable. I am so excited to be part of the work that Dartmouth is doing to make its holdings available to scholars around the world.”

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Dartmouth Libraries’ IIIF integration has quickly energized digital scholarship on campus and in the community. Elizabeth Shand, digital collections librarian and IIIF project team member, adds that this integration underscores the Libraries’ desire “to empower students’ engagement with digital resources, to promote digital collections as a site of advanced research and scholarship, and to amplify Dartmouth’s collections within a scholarly ecosystem.”

The IIIF implementation into Dartmouth's digital collections involved close collaboration over the past year among specialists in library technologies, metadata services, and digital scholarship. While much of the technical work was completed over that past year, we have prepared for this for a number of years. As members of the global IIIF community, we also worked with our partners at the Hood Museum of Art and are eager to expand on the interoperability possibilities between the Hood’s and the Libraries’ digital collections.