Internet Archive

Type of business	Nonprofit organization
Type of site	Digital library
Available in	English
Founded	May 10, 1996; 28 years ago (1996-05-10)[1][2]
Headquarters	Richmond District San Francisco, California, United States 37°46′56″N 122°28′18″W / 37.782321°N 122.471611°W / 37.782321; -122.471611
Founder(s)	Brewster Kahle
Chairman	Brewster Kahle
Services	Archive-It Open Library Wayback Machine (since 2001) Netlabels NASA Images Prelinger Archives
Revenue	$30.5 million (2022)[3]
Total assets	$7.3 million (2022)[3]
Employees	169 (2022)[3]
URL	archive.org
Commercial	No
Launched	1996 (1996)
Current status	Active
ASN	7941

Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library website founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle.^[1][2][4] It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024^[update], the Internet Archive held more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine.^[5] Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".^[5]

The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures.^[6][7] The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts.

Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996, around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet.^[8][9] The earliest known archived page on the site was saved on May 10, 1996, at 2:42 pm UTC (7:42 am PDT). By October of that year, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large amounts.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} The archived content became more easily available to the general public in 2001, through the Wayback Machine.

In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled; publicly accessible books were made available in a protected Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format.^[15]

According to its website:^[16]

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

In August 2012, the Archive announced^[17] that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files.^[18][19] This method is the fastest means of downloading media from the Archive, as files are served from two Archive data centers, in addition to other torrent clients which have downloaded and continue to serve the files.^[18][20] On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco's Richmond District caught fire,^[21] destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments.^[22] According to the Archive, it lost a side-building housing one of 30 of its scanning centers; cameras, lights, and scanning equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and "maybe 20 boxes of books and film, some irreplaceable, most already digitized, and some replaceable".^[23] The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage.^[24]

An overhaul of the site was launched as beta in November 2014, and the legacy layout was removed in March 2016.^[25][26]

In November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the Archive to be based somewhere in Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build a backup archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump.^[27][28][29] Kahle was quoted as saying:

On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase. Throughout history, libraries have fought against terrible violations of privacy—where people have been rounded up simply for what they read. At the Internet Archive, we are fighting to protect our readers' privacy in the digital world.^[27]

Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat.^[30]

Since 2018, the Internet Archive visual arts residency, which is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani and Andrew McClintock, helps connect artists with the Archive's over 48 petabytes^[31] of digitized materials. Over the course of the yearlong residency, visual artists create a body of work which culminates in an exhibition. The hope is to connect digital history with the arts and create something for future generations to appreciate online or off.^[32] Previous artists in residence include Taravat Talepasand, Whitney Lynn, and Jenny Odell.^[33]

The Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations,^[34] such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs from Boston Public Library in 2017,^[35] a donation of 250,000 books from Trent University in 2018,^[36] and the entire collection of Marygrove College's library in 2020 after it closed.^[37] All material is then digitized and retained in digital storage, while a digital copy is returned to the original holder and the Internet Archive's copy, if not in the public domain, is lent to patrons worldwide one at a time under the controlled digital lending (CDL) theory of the first-sale doctrine.^[38]

During the week of May 27, 2024, The Internet Archive suffered a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that made its services unavailable intermittently, sometimes for hours at a time, over a period of several days.^[39][40][41]

This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (May 2020)

The Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating in the United States. In 2019, it had an annual budget of $37 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation.^[42] The Internet Archive also manages periodic funding campaigns. For instance, a December 2019 campaign had a goal of reaching $6 million in donations.^[43]

The Archive is headquartered in San Francisco, California. From 1996 to 2009, its headquarters were in the Presidio of San Francisco, a former U.S. military base. Since 2009, its headquarters have been at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a former Christian Science Church. At one time, most of its staff worked in its book-scanning centers; as of 2019, scanning is performed by 100 paid operators worldwide.^[44] The Archive also has data centers in three Californian cities: San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond. To reduce the risk of data loss, the Archive creates copies of parts of its collection at more distant locations, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina^[45][46] in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.^[47]

The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium^[48] and was officially designated as a library by the state of California in 2007.^[49][50]

The Internet Archive capitalized on the popular use of the term "WABAC Machine" from a segment of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon (specifically, Peabody's Improbable History), and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed.^[51] This service allows users to view some of the archived web pages. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between Alexa Internet (owned by Amazon.com) and the Internet Archive when a three-dimensional index was built to allow for the browsing of archived web content.^[52] Hundreds of billions of web sites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of web sites used to look like, to grab original source code from web sites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit web sites that no longer even exist. Not all web sites are available because many web site owners choose to exclude their sites. As with all sites based on data from web crawlers, the Internet Archive misses large areas of the web for a variety of other reasons. A 2004 paper found international biases in the coverage, but deemed them "not intentional".^[53] In 2017, the Wayback Machine director announced that its crawlers would ignore robots.txt instructions and archive pages even if website owners asked bots not to access them.^[54]

A "Save Page Now" archiving feature was made available in October 2013,^[55] accessible on the lower right of the Wayback Machine's main page.^[56] Once a target URL is entered and saved, the web page will become part of the Wayback Machine.^[55] Through the Internet address web.archive.org,^[57] users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including PDF and data compression file formats. The Wayback Machine creates a permanent local URL of the upload content, that is accessible in the web, even if not listed while searching in the https://archive.org official website.

In October 2016, it was announced that the way web pages are counted would be changed, resulting in the decrease of the archived pages counts shown. Embedded objects such as pictures, videos, style sheets, JavaScripts are no longer counted as a "web page", whereas HTML, PDF, and plain text documents remain counted.^[58]

In September 2020, the Internet Archive announced a partnership with Cloudflare – an American content delivery network service provider – to automatically index websites served via its "Always Online" services.^[81]

Created in early 2006, Archive-It^[82] is a web archiving subscription service that allows institutions and individuals to build and preserve collections of digital content and create digital archives. Archive-It allows the user to customize their capture or exclusion of web content they want to preserve for cultural heritage reasons. Through a web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, browse, search, and view their archived collections.^[83]

In terms of accessibility, the archived web sites are full text searchable within seven days of capture.^[84] Content collected through Archive-It is captured and stored as a WARC file. A primary and back-up copy is stored at the Internet Archive data centers. A copy of the WARC file can be given to subscribing partner institutions for geo-redundant preservation and storage purposes to their best practice standards.^[85] Periodically, the data captured through Archive-It is indexed into the Internet Archive's general archive.

As of March 2014^[update], Archive-It had more than 275 partner institutions in 46 U.S. states and 16 countries that have captured more than 7.4 billion URLs for more than 2,444 public collections. Archive-It partners are universities and college libraries, state archives, federal institutions, museums, law libraries, and cultural organizations, including the Electronic Literature Organization, North Carolina State Archives and Library, Stanford University, Columbia University, American University in Cairo, Georgetown Law Library, and many others.

In September 2020 Internet Archive announced a new initiative to archive and preserve open access academic journals, called Internet Archive Scholar.^[86][87][88] Its full-text search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest open access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

In 2021, the Internet Archive announced the initial version of the General Index, a publicly available index to a collection of 107 million academic journal articles.^[89][90]

The scanning performed by the Internet Archive is financially supported by libraries and foundations.^[91] As of November 2008^[update], when there were approximately 1 million texts, the entire collection was greater than 0.5 petabytes, which included raw camera images, cropped and skewed images, PDFs, and raw OCR data.^[92]

As of July 2013^[update], the Internet Archive was operating 33 scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day for a total of more than 2 million books, in a total collection of 4.4 million books – including material digitized by others and fed into the Internet Archive; at that time, users were performing more than 15 million downloads per month.^[93]

The material digitized by others includes more than 300,000 books that were contributed to the collection, between about 2006 and 2008, by Microsoft through its Live Search Books project, which also included financial support and scanning equipment directly donated to the Internet Archive.^[94] On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced it would be ending its Live Book Search project and would no longer be scanning books, donating its remaining scanning equipment to its former partners.^[94]

Around October 2007, Archive users began uploading public domain books from Google Book Search.^[95] As of November 2013^[update], there were more than 900,000 Google-digitized books in the Archive's collection;^[96] the books are identical to the copies found on Google, except without the Google watermarks, and are available for unrestricted use and download.^[a] Brewster Kahle revealed in 2013 that this archival effort was coordinated by Aaron Swartz, who, with a "bunch of friends", downloaded the public domain books from Google slowly enough and from enough computers to stay within Google's restrictions. They did this to ensure public access to the public domain. The Archive ensured the items were attributed and linked back to Google, which never complained, while libraries "grumbled". According to Kahle, this is an example of Swartz's "genius" to work on what could give the most to the public good for millions of people.^[97]

In addition to books, the Archive offers free and anonymous public access to more than four million court opinions, legal briefs, or exhibits uploaded from the United States Federal Courts' PACER electronic document system via the RECAP web browser plugin. These documents had been kept behind a federal court paywall. On the Archive, they had been accessed by more than six million people by 2013.^[97]

The Archive's BookReader web app,^[98] built into its website, has features such as single-page, two-page, and thumbnail modes; fullscreen mode; page zooming of high-resolution images; and flip page animation.^[98][99]

The Open Library is another project of the Internet Archive. The project seeks to include a web page for every book ever published: it holds 25 million catalog records of editions. It also seeks to be a web-accessible public library: it contains the full texts of approximately 1,600,000 public domain books (out of the more than five million from the main texts collection), as well as in-print and in-copyright books,^[100] many of which are fully readable, downloadable^[101][102] and full-text searchable;^[103] it offers a two-week loan of e-books in its controlled digital lending program for over 647,784 books not in the public domain, in partnership with over 1,000 library partners from six countries^[93][104] after a free registration on the web site. Open Library is a free and open-source software project, with its source code freely available on GitHub.

The Open Library faces objections from some authors and the Society of Authors, who hold that the project is distributing books without authorization and is thus in violation of copyright laws,^[105] and four major publishers initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive in June 2020 to stop the Open Library project.^[106]

Many large institutional sponsors have helped the Internet Archive provide millions of scanned publications (text items).^[107] Some sponsors that have digitized large quantities of texts include the University of Toronto's Robarts Library, University of Alberta Libraries, University of Ottawa, Library of Congress, Boston Library Consortium member libraries, Boston Public Library, Princeton Theological Seminary Library, and many others.^[108]

In 2017, the MIT Press authorized the Internet Archive to digitize and lend books from the press's backlist,^[109] with financial support from the Arcadia Fund.^[110][111] A year later, the Internet Archive received further funding from the Arcadia Fund to invite some other university presses to partner with the Internet Archive to digitize books, a project called "Unlocking University Press Books".^[112][113]

The Library of Congress created numerous Handle System identifiers that pointed to free digitized books in the Internet Archive.^[114] The Internet Archive and Open Library are listed on the Library of Congress website as a source of e-books.^[115]

In addition to web archives, the Internet Archive maintains extensive collections of digital media that are attested by the uploader to be in the public domain in the United States or licensed under a license that allows redistribution, such as Creative Commons licenses. Media are organized into collections by media type (moving images, audio, text, etc.), and into sub-collections by various criteria. Each of the main collections includes a "Community" sub-collection (formerly named "Open Source") where general contributions by the public are stored.