The widespread adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in cultural institutions and universities presents the opportunity for seamless collaboration on the scholarly annotation of images.

Glycerine is uniquely positioned in the IIIF ecosystem as a specialist platform for scholarly annotation publishing. It combines sophisticated collaboration and engagement features with elegant presentation values. The Glycerine suite of modules has been engineered from the ground up as an institutional implementation framework for integration into existing asset management infrastructure and collections workflows.

Scholarly Annotation Publishing

Glycerine Workbench provides configurable tools and end-to-end workflows for collaborative scholarly annotation. Glycerine Viewer provides a gallery-level publishing experience for image collections. With Glycerine Plugin you can embed collections or individual annotations in your site.

Institutional Implementation Framework

Glycerine Server provides the backend data model and IIIF services for integration with enterprise digital asset and collections management infrastructure. Glycerine Editor can be embedded in an organisation’s collections management system to support curatorial and research workflows.

Glycerine Workbench

Glycerine Workbench provides annotation tools, configurable templates, and end-to-end workflows for researchers, curators, and students to collaborate on projects across repositories.  Images can be organised into collections and shared with collaborators. Sets of annotations can combine semantic tags from domain-specific vocabularies with critical analysis in multiple languages. Fully IIIF-compliant, annotated images can be published as research outputs and archived in sustainable formats.

Glycerine Viewer

Designed for research, gallery, and museum use cases, Glycerine Viewer has been released as an open-source IIIF viewer. It supports the IIIF Presentation API and displays manifests and compliant annotations built with other tools. Developed with a contemporary UI framework, Glycerine Viewer has an elegant interface and provides a sophisticated annotation feature set.  Glycerine Viewer can be a component in a Vue 3 application or embedded in any JavaScipt framework. Go to Glycerine Viewer on GitHub for source code and integration documentation.

Glycerine Plugin

Rapidly develop non-traditional research outputs and collection exhibitions by embedding annotated images in your WordPress site.  Glycerine Plugin supports searchable galleries of annotated images, presentation carousels, and individual annotation segments.  It provides flexible configuration options to generate and publish virtual collections of annotations, their image segments, metadata, and content.  The open-source plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin store.

Glycerine Server

Glycerine Server provides the back-end data model and APIs for integration with the institution’s digital asset and collections management infrastructure.  It provides access to all Glycerine’s IIIF support, collection, and collaboration features. Also included is Glycerine Image Server—a scalable, high-performance IIIF Image server built on Cantaloupe—that provides a controlled environment for resource access and management.

Click the Try Integration button on the right to explore our live demo of integration: it gives an example of aggregating multiple annotation collections with an authoritative IIIF manifest using Glycerine Editor and Glycerine Server as the annotation data store.

Glycerine Editor

Glycerine Editor provides the annotation editing features of Glycerine Workbench within a delightfully intuitive Glycerine Viewer user experience.  Curators can create and edit annotations on a IIIF image from within the institution’s existing collections management workflows.  GLAM institutions and cultural aggregators can integrate the Glycerine Editor into their content management system and support researchers and external contributors to add layers of annotations to images from their site.  


Australian Researchers and Curators
For Australians with .edu.au or .gov.au addresses, Glycerine Workbench is hosted on a Nectar server provided by ARDC at no cost. Systemik can provide support services for larger projects and consulting for institutional implementation.

International Researchers and Institutions
For researchers and institutions outside Australia, Glycerine Workbench is hosted by Systemik. Systemik provides subscription plans to support larger projects and consulting for institutional implementation.


Glycerine received co-investment for Glycerine Workbench from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) as part of the HASS and Indigenous RDC CDL project. The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).