The non-profit
Internet Archive
suffered a major setback this morning
when a fire broke out at its San Francisco office
, causing an estimated $600,000 in damages. Fortunately there were no injuries and no data was lost, but the digital library, which seeks to give “universal access to all knowledge,” lost high-end scanners and digitization equipment. The Internet Archive is seeking donations to help rebuild its scanning capabilities for books, microfilm and movies, and allow employees continue digitization work at another location. You can
donate here
.
As fans of Internet Archive know, the site is not just a place where you can go to laugh (and cry) at your old Geocities pages via the
Wayback Machine
, the World Wide Web’s backup. The organization has archived over ten petabytes (or a whopping 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information so far, including
everything every written in Balinese
. Its latest initiatives include the
TV News Search and Borrow
project, which has over 495,000 archived broadcasts available for borrowing on DVD, so you can factcheck things like news reports or claims by politicians.
Other Internet Archive projects include
Open Library
, with more than 2 million e-books. There are a lot of public domain classics (as well as modern books for borrowing), but one of the best things about Open Library is being able to browse thousands of antiquarian and vintage curiosities such as this
1912 copy of “Ballads weird and wonderful”
and
a groovy manual of magic tricks from 1970
.
Other cool things in that 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data include: the
librivox audio book collection
; feature films (here’s the campy anti-drug classic
Reefer Madness
); radio shows, such as
Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy
; and
more than 2,200 digitized textbooks
. The Library of Congress’s Prelinger Archives has 60,000 pieces of “ephemeral” footage, like
Red-Headed Riot
, a compilation of vintage burlesque and striptease clips, and
American Look
, for fans of mid-century industrial, interior and product design.
During last month’s government shutdown, the Wayback Machine also
made it possible for people to view important government sites while they were offline
, including the Library Of Congress, National Park Service and Federal Communication Commission.
As the Internet Archive noted in its blog post about the fire: “This episode has reminded us that digitizing and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation. We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect.”
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