Josh Hadro, managing director of the IIIF Consortium (IIIF-C), 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. Because the Internet Archive enables any patron to upload eligible materials, everyone has the opportunity to benefit from IIIF’s capabilities. IIIF-C counts the Internet Archive as a natural ally because of its ongoing support of open collections delivered via open web standards and protocols.
With this project, IIIF-C hopes to make the Internetthat facilitates IIIF work for students and scholars unaffiliated with the kinds of institutions that historically have provided IIIF infrastructure. This is an phone number database essential step toward a strategic goal of lowering barriers to IIIF usage and adoption worldwide.
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.
In the coming weeks, we’ll share more details about the IIIF improvements that will become available to users of the Internet Archive. 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.