Making IIIF Official at the Internet Archive

Each year, the Internet Archive receives feedback from friends and partners asking about our long-term plans for supporting IIIF. In response, the Internet Archive is announcing an official IIIF service which aims to increase the resourcing and reliability of the Internet Archive's IIIF service, upgrade the service to utilize the latest version 3.0 of the IIIF specification, and graduate the service from the iiif. In 2015, a team of enthusiastic Internet Archive volunteers from a group called Archive Labs implemented an experimental IIIF service to give partners and patrons new ways of using Archive.org images and texts. Josh Hadro, managing director of the IIIF Consortium, sees the Internet Archive as filling a critical role "In serving the average Internet user who may not benefit from the same access to or affiliation with infrastructure offered by traditional research institutions." The IIIF-C promotes interoperability as a core element of IIIF: the ability to streamline access to information and make cultural materials as easy to use and reuse as possible. In service of this outcome, the Internet Archive has teamed up with a number of IIIF community members to officialize and upgrade the IIIF service in order to make the best use of the new capabilities introduced into the IIIF specifications in recent years. First, we want to lay out our current plan for the update, including backwards compatibility affordances, to ensure existing consumers have the information they need to successfully migrate from the unofficial to the official IIIF API. Both the original IIIF labs service the Internet Archive has been running, as well as the new upcoming official IIIF service, wouldn't have been possible without huge support from volunteers within the IIIF community and Internet Archive staff. For more updates, including September 13 IIIF Consortium community call announcing the Internet Archive's IIIF service, please visit the IIIF community calendar at https://iiif.io/community/#calendar. The first phase will introduce a new and improved, official Internet Archive IIIF 3.0 service on the iiif.