Use Internet Archive’s IIIF Endpoint to Unlock Your Images’ Potential

Many libraries, archives, and museums rely on the Internet Archive to preserve their materials, but have often overlooked the role IA can play in improving access. Last year, the Internet Archive announced it would expose all of its image and book resources through the IIIF protocol, under the auspices of its new experimental arm, archivelab.org. The move made more than 9.3 million images and millions of books available in an interoperable way. Here’s how to make the most use of that new capability.

Viewing IA Materials through IIIF

Every Internet Archive resource, whether a webpage, book, video, or image, has a unique identifier that bundles its resources together across the IA system. When you search for items on the Internet Archive homepage, you’ll eventually arrive at a results page looking something like this:

True to form, the Internet Archive has excellent taste in URLs. This last segment is the unique identifier for the digital object this result page represents:

Now for the good stuff. Any single image or book url on IA that has one of these identifiers has an alternate representation on archivelab.org — its IIIF endpoint. To see any IA image in OpenSeadragon, simply paste its identifier after the archivelab IIIF endpoint base url (https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/).

Try it live on Archive Labs: https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/mma_irises_436528

The same is true for books on Internet Archive. View them in Mirador the same way. Here’s some Plato:

https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/platowithenglish04platuoft

Getting an IA Image into Your Third-Party Viewer

It’s nice to view materials on IA’s own site, but the real advantage of IIIF is its support for interoperable exposure of the resources. You can display a resource from the Internet Archive using any client viewer of your choosing, on your own domain, for the benefit of your users.

By this point, IIIF veterans will be baying, “Where is the info.json!? Where is the manifest!?”

For images, just add “/info.json” to the url, or “/manifest.json” to any url to get the raw IIIF or “linked data” representations. The links we looked at above were just previews after all. Try it:

Irises (The Met):

Plato: https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/platowithenglish04platuoft/manifest.json

Getting an IA Book into Mirador or the UV

Just as we can add /info.json to the end of an archivelab iiif endpoint to retrieve an image resource’s info.json, we can add /manifest.json to the end of

How the System Works

How IIIF Support Could Be Improved

One thing I would like to see (although it would require the IIIF endpoint service to mature out of labs first) is a drag-and-drop icon added to the list of download options in the result pages, or perhaps a separate section for various linked data representations of IA resources.