Phasing migration. The first phase will introduce a new and improved, official Internet Archive IIIF 3.0 service on the iiif archive subdomain. The unofficial, legacy service will continue to run on the iiif archivelab for a grace period, allowing partners to migrate. Once we’ve gathered enough data to be confident requests are being satisfactorily fulfilled by the new official service, the legacy iiif archivelab service will be “sunset” and any request to it will redirect to use the official iiif archive service.
At this point, all requests for IIIF manifests and IIIF images (whether to iiifarchivelab or iiif archive) will default to the latest 3.0 version of the IIIF APIs and be answered by iiif archive. A specifiable “version” endpoint will be available for consumers whose applications require manifests and images to be served using the IIIF v2.0 legacy format. More details, examples, and technical documentation will be made available on this topic in the coming weeks and will eventually be phone number database accessible from iiif archive.
1. When the iiif archivelab service was originally launched, iiif archive was set up to redirect to iiif archivelab as a convenience. Regrettably, during the first phase of development, iiif archive will no longer be a redirect for iiif archivelab and instead will run the new official IIIF service. As a result, partners whose code or applications reference iiif
archive (expecting it to redirect to iiif archivelab) will experience a breaking change and will need to either update their references to explicitly refer to the legacy “iiif archivelab” service, or update their code to use the Internet Archive’s new official iiif archive service. As far as we can tell, we’re unaware of partners currently referencing “iiif archive” within public projects on Github or Gitlab and so we hope no one is affected. Still, we want to give fair warning here. For those starting a new project and looking to use the Internet Archive’s IIIF offerings today, we strongly recommend using the iiif archive endpoint.