From archives to new tabs: surfacing SLV's image collection

The browser extension that brings Victoria's history back into view

What if every time you opened a new browser tab, you could discover a forgotten slice of Victoria's past?

That's the curious question behind ManIIIFestor, a browser extension created by State Library Victoria's SLV LAB. This digital tool transforms the mundane act of opening a browser tab into a moment of discovery, displaying a compelling image from the Library's vast copyright-free collection each time you click ‘+’.

It sounds simple, but the project wouldn’t have been possible without a multi-departmental hackathon 1, an expert eye for visually compelling images in a stack of over 225,000 options, and a quirk of copyright law that’s held back thousands of images from entering the public domain since 2017. Read on for the full scoop.

The origin story

The ManIIIFestor extension was born during SLV’s Public Domain Day 2 hackathon, prompted by the massive amount of material soon to be unveiled on Public Domain Day 2026. For 8 years, tens of thousands of items have been kept from the public domain after Australia entered a new trade agreement that significantly extended its copyright laws. Phizz Telford 3, the Library’s expert on all things copyright for the collections, wanted to meet the upcoming flood of new material with a bang.

'I was talking to [Code Club’s co-organiser] Susannah Bourke 4 about wanting to do something for Public Domain Day next year, and she said, "Why wait a year? Let’s do a little trial of something now"', recalls Phizz. So Phizz brought the idea to a Code Club meeting, where Sotirios Alpanis 5, one of the club’s other organisers, suggested a library-wide hackathon. From there, SLV LAB got involved, management backed the idea, and the date was set.

'It was this wonderfully productive free-for-all', recalls Phizz. 'Because we had these core themes that we could focus the event on, we were able to go back and forth with these problems and say, "This doesn’t work, but who can I talk to about what we can do?"'

One such problem was the limited visibility of the Library’s pool of over 225,000 copyright-free images 6. Before the hackathon, these images were hidden away on a single, easily overlooked page on the Library’s website. But Sotirios had a plan to change that. For the past 18 months, he’d been using the David Rumsey MapTab extension, which presents users with a new map each time they open a tab. 'It’s a really nice thing to add to your daily browsing experience. A map comes up and you can explore it - I find myself zooming around and really enjoying it. So I thought it’d be nice to try and do the same sort of thing with our collection.'

Still, such an extension is as interesting as the images behind it. That’s where Monika Osang 7 and Julia Rodwell 8 from the Library's Digitising and Document Delivery team come in. For the hackathon, they were asked to create a workable set of visually compelling images from the pool. With the expert knowledge of the Library’s digitised collection, they pulled together approximately 2,000 images that faithfully represent the different genres and physical formats in the collection. The set includes everything from hand-drawn botanical artworks to studio portraits from Bendigo, vintage posters, postcards from Ballarat, architectural drawings, and 19th century images of Victoria. Overall, the images span approximately two centuries of time, and build a representation of Victoria's recent history image by image.

Now equipped with a representative set of interesting images, Sotirios began building the extension.

The magic of deep zoom

These images, however, are not your standard phone camera photographs. All of the Library’s images are extremely high resolution, which opens up an avenue for deeper exploration. To showcase this, Sotirios used the IIIF-compliant image viewer OpenSeadragon, which enables the ability to deep-zoom into all the nitty-gritty details.

Now, what is IIIF? IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is a critical technology for State Library Victoria - it’s how the Library makes all of its digitised images publicly available. More than that, IIIF provides a community-crafted set of tools for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) across the world to share and experiment with their digitised collections. Yet few at the Library know about this foundational technology.

'Part of my banging the drum about IIIF here is just to raise internal awareness', says Sotirios. 'Paula [Bray, Chief Digital Officer] 9 suggested we need a way of demonstrating its power, rather than just talking about protocols and technical standards. This extension shows you're using IIIF without really thinking about it.'

For Sotirios, highlighting IIIF is about making sure the systems underlying public access are robust and lasting. 'IIIF really helps with digital sustainability. It means the decisions we make now will stand the test of time.' Even further, IIIF’s open-source and open standard approach frees up these institutions to focus on what to share from their collections, rather than if they can share it. 'It distributes the risk and cost for the institutions,' says Sotirios, 'and that means that a lot more can be done'.

With the IIIF-compliant OpenSeadragon viewer, the ManIIIFestor extension lets you examine the fine details of historical photographs, artwork, and documents as if you were leaning in close to the original item—something that would be much more difficult to do with the physical artifacts themselves due to preservation concerns. It unlocks that feeling of peering into an old book and absorbing all the little details. Suddenly, anyone can have the experience of viewing the artifact itself, up-close and in person.

Crafting a captivating experience

To add further style to the experience, Sotirios backed the images with custom colour gradients formed out of another recent experiment. Each image in the extension also undergoes colour palette analysis using k-means clustering 10 (a technique that identifies key colours in each image). This palette is then used to create a unique background that complements the displayed image. 

With a little user interface tweaking and backend adjustments from Creative Studio’s Mike Daly 11 and Nick Paustian 12 the extension rolled out to the Library.

'A lot of these images I've never seen before, and I've seen thousands and thousands of the Library’s images over the past decade of digitising the Library’s collections', Monika shares. 

'Julia and I have it set up in our browser', she adds. 'So every day you’ll open a tab and wonder what it’s going to be, and then you’re like "Oh, I really like that", so you keep it open. It’s been really exciting, the discovering and rediscovering.' 

'I have seven tabs open right now that are just from the extension!' says Phizz.

A chat group has even formed around the extension, where Library staff share their favourite images of the day and offer feedback on the extension’s design. Yet the project’s impact is not limited to the Library alone. Even before the official release, the extension has been motivating the broader spread of these images. Nick Paustian, who helped refine the code, got inspired to make something for his mum’s birthday while working on the project. 'The extension has these really nice flower illustrations, so I actually made this little digital postcard app and sent her one.'

Overall, ManIIIFestor represents a creative solution to the challenge of making catalogued materials visible outside the Library walls. The extension serves a dual purpose: making copyright-free images more accessible while demonstrating the practical benefits of IIIF technology. This balance exemplifies SLV LAB's approach to innovation—creating tools that solve real problems by experimenting with technology.

By integrating historical images into the everyday act of web browsing, the extension increases not just awareness of the Library’s copyright-free image pool, but enjoyment of it.

'It's taken on a life of its own, and it's lovely,' notes Phizz. 'It’s the kind of sensation that gets people hooked and interested.'

To try the extension for yourself, install it on your browser follow the links to the Firefox Add-on and Chrome webstores. To explore the Library's full copyright-free image collection, visit slv.vic.gov.au/images.

What will you discover on your next tab?