Wrote a 58 line shell script and now #gitAnnex can treat Internet Archive items as remotes, tracking changes to files in them and downloading files from them as needed like from any other remote.
This is a new git-annex feature and it really just comes down to a few lines of shell script, with the meat of it being a `curl | jq`. The rest is boilerplate that would be the same in any script doing this for any web resource.
https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/external/git-annex-remote-internetarchive
