Internet Archive
Self-portrait
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes: texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.
Description
Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library of millions of books, movies, software, audio, images and websites. The Archive’s purpose is to offer researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities and and the general public, permanent access to historical collections in digital format.
The project was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California, to usher the educational function of libraries into the digital technologies era and build a thorough archive of the web’s memory in collaboration with institutions such as the Library Of Congress and the Smithsonian. One of the project’s main goals is providing universal access to knowledge and exercising the right to memory with a complete, detailed, accessible and searchable database of multimedia content.
IA also sets out to track the Internet’s evolution, bring back expired links and previously removed websites, as well conduct sociological research on the people’s behavior online across different regions and time periods. The Wayback Machine preserves websites for free and allows browsing cached websites on different dates. In order to ensure its preservation, the archive relies on a large amount of data storage and several copies of each document in case of emergencies, migrating data on to the newest, most relevant formats.
IA has several projects, such as Open Library, with over 2 million digitized books, each of which has its website. The Scanning Service project works on digitizing large private and public book collections, while the Software Archive project enables access to all kinds of unusual and hard-to-find software. The Archive-It tool (currently being used by universities and federal institutions) is a paid service that helps users analyze, store and organize their website collections. The BookServer platform allows to sell, lend and distribute books online through a network of bookstores, publishers and booksellers, In collaboration with NASA, IA has built a website collecting astronomic content and video, open to the general public. Open Content Alliance is a project generating a reference archive with content collected in collaboration with several international organizations. Petabox is an archive for the preservation of petabytes (a million gigabytes of information each), while 301Works.org stores URL maps. Bookmobile is a digital, mobile library that allows downloading any kind of material anywhere. IA is also developing a Community Networking project, providing residents of San Francisco with free internet.
Links
URL: https://archive.org/
Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://archive.org/web/
