Coordinates: 
37°46′56.3″N 122°28′17.65″W
Internet Archive headquarters was in the
Presidio, a former US military base in San Francisco, from 1996 to 2009.
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| http://www.archive.org/web/web.php |
The
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."
[2][3] It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive was founded by
Brewster Kahle in 1996. It is a member of the IIPC (
International Internet Preservation Consortium).
[4]
With offices located in
San Francisco, California, USA and data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City, and Mountain View, California, USA, the Archive's largest collection is its web archive, "
snapshots of the World Wide Web." To ensure the stability and endurance of the Internet Archive, its collection is mirrored at the
Bibliotheca Alexandrina in
Egypt.
The Archive allows the public to both upload and download digital material to its data cluster, and provides unrestricted online access to that material at no cost. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects. It is a member of the
American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of
California as a library.
[5]
In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.
The Archive is a
501(c)(3) non-profit operating in the United States. It has a staff of 200, most of whom are book scanners in its book scanning centers. Its main office in San Francisco houses about 30 employees. The Archive has an annual budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources: revenue from its
Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the
Kahle-Austin Foundation.
[6]
History
Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company
Alexa Internet. The Archive began to archive the
World Wide Web from 1996, but it did not make this collection available until 2001, when it developed the
Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, beginning with the
Prelinger Archive. 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. Recently, the Archive has begun working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled.
According to its website:
- 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.
Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive has capitalized on the popular use of the term "
WABAC Machine" from a segment of the old
Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed.
[7] This service allows users to see archived versions of
web pages of the past, what the Internet Archive calls a "three dimensional index". Millions of websites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a gigantic database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of websites used to look like, to grab original source code from websites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit websites that no longer even exist. Not all websites are available, however, because many website 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. International biases have also been found in its coverage, although this does not seem to be the result of a deliberate policy
[8]
Examples from the Wayback
Machine's archives:
The use of the term "Wayback Machine" in the context of the Internet Archive has become so common that "Wayback Machine" and "Internet Archive" are almost synonymous. This usage occurs in popular culture, e.g., in the television show
Law and Order: Criminal Intent ("Legacy", first run Aug. 3, 2008), an extra playing a computer tech uses the "Wayback Machine" to find an archive of a student's Facebook style website. Snapshots usually take at least 6–18 months to be added.
Open Library
Main article:
Open LibraryThe Open Library is another project of the Internet Archive. The site seeks to include a web page database for every book ever published, a sort of open source version of
WorldCat. It holds 23 million catalog records of books, in addition to the full texts of about 1,600,000 public domain books, which are fully readable and downloadable.
[9][10] Open Library is a
free/
open source software project, with its source code freely available on the Open Library site.
Archive-It
First deployed in early 2006, Archive-It is a subscription service that allows institutions and individuals to build and preserve collections of born digital content.
[11] Through a web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and within 24 hours browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted by the Internet Archive and available to the public with full-text search. Content collected through Archive-It is stored with a primary and back up copy, is periodically indexed into the Internet Archive's general archive, and a copy of the data can be sent to the partner institutions.
As of March 2009, Archive-It has 125 partner institutions in 42 US States and 11 countries who have captured over a 1.5 billion URL's for 963 public collections.
Archive-It partners are universities and college libraries, state archives, federal institutions, museums and cultural organizations, including the
Electronic Literature Organization, the State Archives of
North Carolina, the
Texas State Library and Archives Commission,
Stanford University, the
National Library of Australia, the
Research Libraries Group (RLG), and
many others.
nasaimages.org
NASA Images was created through a Space Act Agreement between the Internet Archive and
NASA to bring public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource. The NASA Images team works closely with all of the NASA centers to keep adding to the ever-growing collection at
nasaimages.org. The site launched in July 2008 and now has more than 100,000 items online.
Media collections
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. The 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 an "
Open Source" sub-collection where general contributions by the public are stored.
Moving image collection
Aside from feature films, IA's Moving Image collection includes:
newsreels; classic
cartoons; pro- and anti-war
propaganda; Skip Elsheimer's "A.V. Geeks" collection; and ephemeral material from
Prelinger Archives, such as
advertising, educational and industrial films and amateur and home movie collections.
IA's
Brick Films collection contains
stop-motion animation filmed with
Lego bricks, some of which are "remakes" of feature films. The
Election 2004 collection is a non-partisan public resource for sharing video materials related to the
2004 United States Presidential Election. The
Independent News collection includes sub-collections such as the Internet Archive's
World At War competition from 2001, in which contestants created short films demonstrating "why access to history matters." Among their most-downloaded video files are eyewitness recordings of the devastating
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The
September 11th Television Archive contains archival footage from the world's major television networks of the terrorist attacks of
September 11th, 2001 as they unfolded on live television.
Some of the films available on the Internet Archive are:
See also
Wikipedia list of films freely available on the Internet Archive.
Audio collection
The audio collection includes
music,
audio books, news broadcasts,
old time radio shows and a wide variety of other audio files.
The Live Music Archive sub-collection includes over 50,000 concert recordings from independent
artists, as well as more established artists and musical ensembles with permissive rules about recording their concerts such as the
Grateful Dead, and more recently,
The Smashing Pumpkins.
Jordan Zevon has also allowed anyone to share concert recordings of his father
Warren Zevon on the Internet Archive.
Text collection
The texts collection includes digitized books from various libraries around the world as well as many special collections. The Internet Archive operates 23
scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day, financially supported by libraries and foundations.
[12] As of November 2008, when there were about 1 million texts, the entire collection was over 0.5 petabytes, which includes raw camera images, cropped and skewed images, PDFs, and raw OCR data.
[13]
Between about 2006 and 2008 Microsoft Corporation had a special relationship with Internet Archive texts through its
Live Search Books project, scanning over 300,000 books which were contributed to the collection, as well as financial support and scanning equipment. On May 23, 2008 Microsoft announced it would be ending the Live Book Search project and no longer scanning books.
[14] Microsoft made its scanned books available without contractual restriction and donated its scanning equipment to its former partners.
[14]
Around October 2007 Archive users began uploading public domain books from
Google Book Search.
[15] As of May 2011 there were over 900,000 Google-digitized books in the Archive's collection, out of a total of 2.8 million books. The books are identical to the copies found on Google, except without the Google watermarks, and are available for unrestricted use and download, like all Internet Archive materials.
[16]
Controversies and legal disputes
National Security Letter
 |
|  |
An NSL issued to the Internet Archive demanding information about a user |
On May 8, 2008, it was revealed that the Internet Archive successfully challenged an
FBI National Security Letter asking for logs on an undisclosed user.
[17][18]
Scientology
In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites critical of
Scientology from the Wayback Machine.
[19] The error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner."
[20] It was later clarified that lawyers from the
Church of Scientology had demanded the removal and that the actual site owners did not want their material removed.
[21]
Healthcare Advocates, Inc.
In 2003, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey defended a client from a trademark dispute using the Archive's
Wayback Machine. The lawyers were able to show that the plaintiff's claims were invalid based on the content of their web site from several years prior. The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the
DMCA and the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Healthcare Advocates claimed that, since they had installed a
robots.txt file on their website, even if after the initial lawsuit was filed, the Archive should have removed all previous copies of the plaintiff website from the Wayback Machine.
[22] The lawsuit was settled out of court.
[23]
Robots.txt is used as part of the
Robots Exclusion Standard, a voluntary protocol the Internet Archive respects that disallows bots from indexing certain pages delineated by the creator as off-limits. As a result, the Internet Archive has rendered unavailable a number of websites that are now inaccessible through the Wayback Machine. Currently, the Internet Archive applies robots.txt rules retroactively; if a site blocks the Internet Archive, like Healthcare Advocates, any previously archived pages from the domain are also rendered unavailable. In cases of blocked sites, only the robots.txt file is archived.
However, the Internet Archive also states, "Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site. We comply with these requests."
[24] In addition, the website says: "The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection."
[25]
Suzanne Shell
On December 12, 2005, activist
Suzanne Shell demanded Internet Archive pay her US$100,000 for archiving her website profane-justice.org between 1999 and 2004.
[26] Internet Archive filed a
declaratory judgment action in the
United States District Court for the Northern District of California on January 20, 2006, seeking a judicial determination that Internet Archive did not violate Shell’s
copyright. Shell responded and brought a
countersuit against Internet Archive for archiving her site, which she alleges is in violation of her
terms of service.
[27] On February 13, 2007, a judge for the
United States District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed all counterclaims except
breach of contract.
[26] The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss
copyright infringement claims Shell asserted arising out of its copying activities, which will also go forward.
[28]
On April 25, 2007, Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell jointly announced the settlement of their lawsuit. The Internet Archive said, “Internet Archive has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms. Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation. We are happy to have this case behind us.” Ms. Shell said, “I respect the historical value of Internet Archive’s goal. I never intended to interfere with that goal nor cause it any harm.”
[29]
Grateful Dead
In November 2005, free downloads of
Grateful Dead concerts were removed from the site.
John Perry Barlow identified
Bob Weir,
Mickey Hart, and
Bill Kreutzmann as the instigators of the change, according to a
New York Times article.
[30] Phil Lesh commented on the change in a November 30, 2005, posting to his personal website:
- It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right before Thanksgiving. I was not part of this decision making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.[31]
A November 30 forum post from
Brewster Kahle summarized what appeared to be the compromise reached among the band members. Audience recordings could be downloaded or
streamed, but
soundboard recordings were to be available for streaming only. Concerts have since been re-added.
[32]
Opposition to Google Books Settlement
The Internet Archive is a member of the
Open Book Alliance, which has been among the most outspoken critics of the
Google Book Settlement. The Archive advocates
an alternative digital library project.
See also
Similar projects
Other
References
- ^ "archive.org - Site Information from Alexa". Retrieved 2011-04-17.
- ^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions
- ^ Internet Archive: Universal Access to all Knowledge
- ^ Members (International Internet Preservation Consortium)
- ^ "Internet Archive officially a library", May 2, 2007.
- ^ CabinetMagazine.org
- ^ Green, Heather (February 28, 2002). "A Library as Big as the World: Brewster Kahle has the technology to assemble the ultimate archive of human knowledge. What's stopping him? Restrictive copyright laws". Business Week Online. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
- ^ Thelwall, M. & Vaughan, L. (2004). A fair history of the Web? Examining country balance in the Internet Archive, Library & Information Science Research, 26(2), 162-176.
- ^ Gonsalves, Antone (December 20, 2006). "Internet Archive Claims Progress Against Google Library Initiative". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
- ^ "The Open Library Makes Its Online Debut". Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wired Campus. July 19, 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
- ^ Stefanie Olsen, "Preserving the Web one group at a time", CNet News.com, May 1, 2006.
- ^ "Books Scanning to be Publicly Funded", announcement by Brewster Khale, May 23, 2008.
- ^ "Bulk Access to OCR for 1 Million Books", via Open Library Blog, by raj, November 24, 2008.
- ^ a b "Book search winding down", Live Search Blog. Official announcement from Microsoft. Last accessed May 23, 2008.
- ^ Google Books at Internet Archive.
- ^ Books imported from Google have a metadata tag of scanner:google for searching purposes. The archive links back to Google for PDF copies, but also maintains a local PDF copy, which is viewable under the "All Files: HTTP" link.
- ^ FBI rescinds secret order for Internet Archive records, CNet.
- ^ Nakashima, Ellen, "FBI Backs Off From Secret Order for Data After Lawsuit", Washington Post, May 8, 2008.
- ^ Bowman, Lisa M (September 24, 2002). "Net archive silences Scientology critic". CNET News.com. Retrieved 2007-01-04.
- ^ Jeff (September 23, 2002). "exclusions from the Wayback Machine" (Blog). Wayback Machine Forum. Internet Archive. Retrieved 2007-01-04. Author and Date indicate initiation of forum thread.
- ^ Miller, Ernest (September 24). "Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for Scientology" (Blog). LawMeme. Yale Law School. Retrieved 2007-01-04. The posting is billed as a 'feature' and lacks an associated year designation; comments by other contributors appear after the 'feature' .
- ^ Dye, Jessica (2005). "Website Sued for Controversial Trip into Internet Past". EContent. 28 (11): 8–9.
- ^ Bangeman, Eric (August 31 2006). "Internet Archive Settles Suit Over Wayback Machine". Ars technica. Retrieved 2007-11-29.
- ^ Some sites are not available because of Robots.txt or other exclusions.
- ^ How can I remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?.
- ^ a b Lewis T. Babcock (February 13, 2007). Internet Archive v. Shell (PDF), Civil Action No. 06cv01726LTBCBS.
- ^ Claburn, Thomas (March 16, 2007). "Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2007-07-29.
- ^ Samson, Martin. Internet Archive v. Suzanne Shell. via Phillips Nizer LLP.
- ^ Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell Settle Lawsuit, April 25, 2007.
- ^ Jeff Leeds; Jesse Fox Mayshark (December 1, 2005). "Wrath of Deadheads stalls a Web crackdown". International Herald Tribune (republication of article from The New York Times). Retrieved July 14, 2010.
- ^ Phil Lesh (November 30, 2005). "An Announcement from Phil Lesh" (Blog). Hotline. PhilLesh.net. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
- ^ Brewster Kahle; Matt Vernon (December 1, 2005). "Good News and an Apology: GD on the Internet Archive". Live Music Archive Forum. Internet Archive. Retrieved July 14, 2010. Authors and date indicate the first posting in the forum thread.
Further reading
External links
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