About the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a
digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians,
scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All
Knowledge.
We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just
beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was
ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 28+ years
of web history accessible through the
Wayback
Machine
and we work with 1,200+ library and other partners through our
Archive-It
program to identify
important web pages.
As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions
of other published works. Today our archive contains:
Anyone with a
free account
can
upload media
to the Internet Archive.
We work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into
special collections.
Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has
access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide
universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a
program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 4,400 books per day in 20
locations around the world. Books published in or prior to 1928 are available for
download, and hundreds of thousands of
modern books can be borrowed
through our
Open Library
site. One of the Internet Archive's missions is to serve people who have difficulty interacting with physical books, so most of our digitized
books are available to
people with print disabilities
(learn about access
here
).
Like the Internet, television is also an ephemeral medium. We began archiving
television programs in late 2000, and our first public TV project was an archive
of
TV news surrounding
the events of September 11, 2001
. In 2009 we began to make selected U.S.
television news broadcasts searchable by captions in our
TV News Archive
. This service allows
researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable
reference.
The Internet Archive serves millions of people each day and is one of the top
300 web sites in the world. A single copy of the Internet Archive library
collection occupies 145+ Petabytes of server space (and we store at least 2
copies of everything). We are funded through
donations
, grants, and by providing web
archiving and
book digitization services
for our partners. As with most
libraries we value the
privacy of our patrons
, so we avoid
keeping the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of our readers and offer our site
in https (secure) protocol.
You can find information about our projects on our
blog
(including important
announcements
),
contact us
, buy swag in our
store
, and follow us on
Twitter
and
Facebook
. Welcome to
the library!
Generous funding has come from Foundations including:
The Internet Archive is a member of: