Internet Archive
The Internet Archive (IA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web. The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996.
With offices located in the Presidio in San Francisco, California, USA and data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City, and Mountain View, California, USA the archive includes “snapshots of the World Wide Web” (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings. To ensure the stability and endurance of the Internet Archive, its collection is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, making it the only library in the world with a mirror.
The IA makes its collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.
History
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 the Presidio of 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 their collections, and is working to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities.
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.
Various Projects
Since its inception in 1996, Internet Archive has grown and expanded in many ways. The main facets of Internet Archive include the Wayback Machine, Open Library, Archive-It, nasaimages.org, and several media collections.
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 makes archives of the World Wide Web. 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.
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 too 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.
Open Library
The Open Library is another project of the Internet Archive. The site, still in beta, seeks to include a web page database for every book ever published, a sort of Open Source version of WorldCat. It holds nearly 20 million entries of catalog records of books, in addition to the full texts of about 1,000,000 public domain books, which are fully searchable. Open Library is a free/open source software project, with its source code freely available on the Open Library site.