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Jun 25, 2026

IIIF Content Search

Search inside any digitised manifest in Heratio and jump straight to the matching region on the page.

Overview

Heratio supports the IIIF Content Search API 2.0. When you open a manifest in the IIIF viewer (Mirador), the search panel in the side bar can full-text query every transcribed canvas in that manifest and highlight matches over the image. Click a hit, the viewer pans and zooms to the bounding box.

What gets searched

For each digitised record, the search service queries:

  • The OCR / HTR text stored against the record's digital objects (iiif_ocr_text.full_text).
  • The per-block bounding boxes captured during indexing (iiif_ocr_block), so each hit is positioned on the right page at the right coordinates.

If a manifest has no OCR yet, the search box still appears but returns zero results. Run the OCR / HTR pipeline against the digital objects to populate the index.

Using the search box in Mirador

  1. Open any archival record's IIIF viewer page (/iiif-viewer/<slug>).
  2. Open the side panel (left edge of the window).
  3. Pick the Search tab.
  4. Type a term and press Enter.
  5. The viewer lists every hit, grouped by canvas. Click a hit to jump.

Tips:

  • Multi-word phrases are matched in natural-language mode (stop-words are dropped, common variants are folded).
  • Terms shorter than 3 characters fall back to a slower substring scan.
  • The autocomplete panel shows the most common terms in the manifest's OCR text that start with what you've typed.

Programmatic access

The search service is also a plain HTTP endpoint that any IIIF-aware client can call:

GET /iiif-manifest/<slug>/search?q=<term>
GET /iiif-manifest/<slug>/autocomplete?q=<prefix>

Both return W3C Web Annotation JSON-LD with the http://iiif.io/api/search/2/context.json context. The search response is a standard AnnotationPage; each annotation has a FragmentSelector with the xywh= value pointing at the matching region on the canvas.

The endpoint URL is also advertised in the manifest's service block (type SearchService2), so any compliant viewer discovers it without configuration.

Privacy

Search reads the same OCR text the manifest already exposes via its canvas annotations. No additional access control is layered on top of manifest visibility - if the manifest is open, the search index of that manifest is open too. Restricted manifests should be gated by the IIIF Auth pipeline.

  • IIIF Collections - /help/iiif-collection-user-guide
  • IIIF Validation - /help/iiif-compliance-validation
  • Cantaloupe deep-zoom - /help/iiif-cantaloupe-setup
  • AI - HTR / OCR pipeline that populates the search index

References