The Internet Archive is an American

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. , the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 8.5 million movies, videos and TV shows, 894 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4.4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 241 thousand concerts, and over 734 billion web pages in the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

. 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 crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web s ...

s, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its

web archive The Web ARChive (WARC) archive format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archive file together with related information. The WARC format is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC_IA File Format that ...

, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.

History

Internet Archive headquarters exterior February 2008

Brewster Kahle Brewster Lurton Kahle ( ; born October 21, 1960)Alexa Internet profile
, via juggle.com. accessed Novemb ...

founded the Archive in May 1996 around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company

Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stoc ...

. In October of that year, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

in large quantities, though it saved the earliest known page on May 10, 1996, at 2:42 PM. The archived content first became available to the general public in 2001, when it developed the

. 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 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site

Open Library Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, ...

. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to the

information access Information access is the freedom or ability to identify, obtain and make use of database or information effectively. There are various research efforts in information access for which the objective is to simplify and make it more effective for ...

needs of the print-disabled; publicly accessible books were made available in a protected Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format."Daisy Books for the Print Disabled"
, February 25, 2013. Internet Archive. According to its website: In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files. 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."Welcome to Archive torrents"
. Internet Archive. On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco's Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. 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". The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage. An overhaul of the site was launched as beta in November 2014, and the legacy layout was removed in March 2016. 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 Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

. 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 Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2017, and ended on January 20, 2021. Trump, a Republican from New York City, took office following his Electoral College victory ...

. 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.

Beginning in 2017,

OCLC OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It wa ...

and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Archive's records of digitized books available in

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

. 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

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s 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. Previous artists in residence include

Taravat Talepasand Taravat Talepasand (born 1979) is an Iranian-American contemporary artist, activist, and educator whose labor-intensive interdisciplinary painting practice including drawing, sculpture, and installation questions normative cultural behaviors withi ...

, Whitney Lynn, and Jenny Odell. In 2019, its headquarters in San Francisco received a

bomb threat A bomb threat or bomb scare is a threat, usually verbal or written, to detonate an explosive or incendiary device to cause property damage, death, injuries, and/or incite fear, whether or not such a device actually exists. History Bomb threat ...

which forced a temporary evacuation of the building. The Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations, See also: such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs from

Boston Public Library The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also the Library for the Commonwealth (formerly ''library of last recourse'') of the Commonwea ...

in 2017, a donation of 250,000 books from

Trent University Trent University is a public liberal arts university in Peterborough, Ontario, with a satellite campus in Oshawa, which serves the Regional Municipality of Durham. Trent is known for its Oxbridge college system and small class sizes.

in 2018, and the entire collection of

Marygrove College Marygrove College was a private Roman Catholic graduate college in Detroit, Michigan, affiliated with the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It announced its closure on December 17, 2019, at end of the fall semester. History ...

's library in 2020 after it closed. 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 Controlled digital lending (CDL) is a model by which libraries digitize materials in their collection and make them available for lending. It is based on interpretations of the United States copyright principles of fair use and copyright exhaus ...

(CDL) theory of the

first-sale doctrine The first-sale doctrine (also sometimes referred to as the "right of first sale" or the "first sale rule") is an American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellec ...

Operations

The Archive is a

501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of ...

nonprofit operating in the United States. In 2019, it had an annual budget of $36 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation. The Internet Archive also manages periodic funding campaigns. For instance, a December 2019 campaign had a goal of reaching $6 million in donations. The Archive is headquartered in San Francisco,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. From 1996 to 2009, its headquarters were in the

Presidio of San Francisco The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part ...

, a former U.S. military base. Since 2009, its headquarters have been at 300 Funston Avenue in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

, a former

Christian Science Church The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in 1879 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Mary Baker Eddy, author of '' Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,'' and founder of Christian Science. The church was founded "to commemorate the word a ...

. At one time, most of its staff worked in its book-scanning centers; as of 2019, scanning is performed by 100 paid operators worldwide. The Archive also has

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommun ...

s in three Californian cities: San Francisco,

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a po ...

, and

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, Californi ...

. To reduce the risk of data loss, the Archive creates copies of parts of its collection at more distant locations, including the

Bibliotheca Alexandrina The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Latin for "Library of Alexandria"; arz, مكتبة الإسكندرية ', ) is a major library and cultural center on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea in Alexandria, Egypt. It is a commemoration of the Library ...

"Donation to the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt"
; Alexandria, Egypt; April 20, 2002
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
. Internet Archive. in

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

and a facility in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

. The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the state of California in 2007."Internet Archive officially a library"
, May 2, 2007. Internet Archive

Web archiving

Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive capitalized on the popular use of the term "

WABAC Machine The Wayback Machine or WABAC Machine is a fictional time machine from the segment "Peabody's Improbable History", a recurring feature of the 1960s cartoon series ''The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show''. The Wayback Machine is a plot device used to t ...

" 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. This service allows users to view some of the archived web pages. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between

(owned by Amazon.com) and the Internet Archive when a three-dimensional index was built to allow for the browsing of archived web content. Millions 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". Incoming additional storage at Internet Archive

Incoming additional storage at Internet Archive

Internet Archive servers 5034 - Jason Scott

A "Save Page Now" archiving feature was made available in October 2013, accessible on the lower right of the Wayback Machine's main page. Once a target URL is entered and saved, the web page will become part of the Wayback Machine. Through the Internet address web.archive.org, users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

and

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...

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. {, class="wikitable sortable" !Year !Archived pages (billions) , - , 2005 , 40 , - , 2006 , 85 , - , 2007 , 85 , - , 2008 , 85 , - , 2009 , 150 , - , 2010 , 150 , - , 2011 , 150 , - , 2012 , 150 , - , 2013 , 373 , - , 2014 , 430 , - , 2015 , 479 , - , 2016 , 510 273 , - , 2017 , 286 , - , 2018 , 344 , - , 2019 , 396 , - , 2020 , 486{{cite web, title=Internet Archive, url=https://archive.org/, url-status=dead, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201208201018/https://archive.org/web/, archive-date=December 8, 2020, access-date=December 8, 2022, publisher=Internet Archive} , - , 2021 , 635{{cite web, title=Internet Archive, url=https://archive.org/, url-status=dead, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211208085520/https://archive.org/web/, archive-date=December 8, 2021, access-date=December 8, 2022, publisher=Internet Archive} , - , 2022 , 771{{cite web, title=Internet Archive, url=https://archive.org/, url-status=dead, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221207110634/https://web.archive.org/, archive-date=December 7, 2021, access-date=December 8, 2022, publisher=Internet Archive} , - , colspan="2" , {{note label, old counting system, A, A Using the old counting system used before October 2016
{{note label, new counting system, B, B Using the new counting system used after October 2016 In September 2020, the Internet Archive announced a partnership with

Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in Sa ...

to automatically index websites served via its "Always Online" services.{{Clear

Archive-It{{anchor, Archive-It

Created in early 2006, Archive-It 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. In terms of accessibility, the archived web sites are full text searchable within seven days of capture. 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. Periodically, the data captured through Archive-It is indexed into the Internet Archive's general archive. {{As of, 2014, 03, 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 The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

, North Carolina State Archives and Library,

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

American University in Cairo The American University in Cairo (AUC; ar, الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة, Al-Jāmi‘a al-’Amrīkiyya bi-l-Qāhira) is a private research university in Cairo, Egypt. The university offers American-style learning progra ...

, Georgetown Law Library, and many others.

Internet Archive Scholar

In September 2020 Internet Archive announced a new initiative to archive and preserve

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

academic journals, called Internet Archive Scholar. 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.

General Index

In 2021, the Internet Archive announced the initial version of the General Index, a publicly available

index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

to a collection of 107 million academic journal articles.{{Cite journal, last=Else, first=Holly, date=2021-10-26, title=Giant, free index to world's research papers released online, url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02895-8, journal=Nature, language=en, doi=10.1038/d41586-021-02895-8, pmid=34703019, s2cid=240000069, access-date=November 12, 2021, archive-date=November 13, 2021, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211113162341/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02895-8, url-status=live

Book collections

Text collection

The Internet Archive operates 33 scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day for a total of more than 2 million books, financially supported by libraries and foundations.Kahle, Brewster (May 23, 2008)
"Books Scanning to be Publicly Funded"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090924105740/http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=194217 , date=September 24, 2009 . Internet Archive Forums. {{As of, 2013, 07, the collection included 4.4 million books with more than 15 million downloads per month. {{As of, 2008, 11, when there were approximately 1 million texts, the entire collection was greater than 0.5 petabytes, which includes raw camera images, cropped and skewed images,

s, and raw OCR data. Between about 2006 and 2008,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

had a special relationship with Internet Archive texts through its Live Search Books project, scanning more than 300,000 books that 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.{{cite web, url=http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx , title=Book search winding down , date=May 23, 2008 , work= MSDN Live Search Blog, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080820220749/http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx , archive-date=August 20, 2008 Microsoft made its scanned books available without contractual restriction and donated its scanning equipment to its former partners. Around October 2007, Archive users began uploading

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...

books from

Google Book Search Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...

."Google Books at Internet Archive"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/19971011064403/https://archive.org/index.html , date=October 11, 1997 . Internet Archive. {{as of, 2013, November, there were more than 900,000 Google-digitized books in the Archive's collection;"List of Google scans"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140126055407/https://archive.org/search.php?query=sponsor%3A%28Google%29 , date=January 26, 2014 (search). Internet Archive. the books are identical to the copies found on Google, except without the Google watermarks, and are available for unrestricted use and download. Brewster Kahle revealed in 2013 that this archival effort was coordinated by

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...

, 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

. 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.Brewster Kahle,
Aaron Swartz memorial at the Internet Archive
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150629062022/https://archive.org/details/AaronSwartzMemorialAtTheInternetArchive?start=4680 , date=June 29, 2015 ", 2013-01-24, vi
The well-prepared mind
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140814162152/http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/aaron-swartz-freed-over-900000-public-domain-books-from-googles-restrictions/ , date=August 14, 2014 , vi
S.I.Lex
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140808094118/http://scinfolex.com/2013/02/06/cest-aaron-swartz-qui-liberait-les-livres-de-google-books-sur-internet-archive/ , date=August 8, 2014 . {{anchor, RECAP US Federal Court DocumentsBesides 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 The federal judiciary of the United States is one of the three branches of the federal government of the United States organized under the United States Constitution and laws of the federal government. The U.S. federal judiciary consists primaril ...

' 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. The Archive's BookReader

web app A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

,{{cite web , title=Internet Archive BookReader , url=https://archive.org/details/BookReader , website=archive.org , access-date=June 21, 2019 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190621131721/https://archive.org/details/BookReader , archive-date=June 21, 2019 , url-status=live built into its website, has features such as single-page, two-page, and

thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and imag ...

modes; fullscreen mode;

page zooming In computing, page zooming is the ability to zoom in and out a document or image at page level. It is usually found in applications related to document layout and publishing, e.g. word processing and spreadsheet programs, but it can also be found ...

high-resolution Image resolution is the detail an image holds. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies how cl ...

images; and flip page animation.

Number of texts for each language

{, class="wikitable" , - !Number of all texts
(2022) , 34,000,000{{Cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/texts?tab=collection, title=Internet Archive: texts collection, at=language facets {, class="wikitable sortable" , - !style="text-align:center;", Language !Number of texts
(2022) , - ,

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

, 25,000,000 , - ,

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

, 700,000 , - ,

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, 700,000 , - ,

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

, 700,000 , - , Chinese , 550,000 , - ,

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

, 450,000 , - ,

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

, 400,000 , - ,

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

, 300,000 , - ,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

, 150,000 , - ,

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, 150,000 , - ,

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

, 150,000 , - ,

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' (July 5, 2021) , - , 1800s , 82,587{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1800-01-01%20TO%201809-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 800-01-01 TO 1809-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184056/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1800-01-01%20TO%201809-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1810s , 100,048{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1810-01-01%20TO%201819-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 810-01-01 TO 1819-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160326053037/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1810-01-01%20TO%201819-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 26, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1820s , 151,669{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1820-01-01%20TO%201829-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 820-01-01 TO 1829-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160315065543/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1820-01-01%20TO%201829-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 15, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1830s , 203,287{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1830-01-01%20TO%201839-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 830-01-01 TO 1839-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184108/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1830-01-01%20TO%201839-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1840s , 239,343{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1840-01-01%20TO%201849-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 840-01-01 TO 1849-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160326003423/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1840-01-01%20TO%201849-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 26, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1850s , 307,302{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1850-01-01%20TO%201859-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 850-01-01 TO 1859-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160317101935/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1850-01-01%20TO%201859-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 17, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1860s , 322,843{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1860-01-01%20TO%201869-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 860-01-01 TO 1869-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160313144015/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1860-01-01%20TO%201869-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 13, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1870s , 336,637{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1870-01-01%20TO%201879-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 870-01-01 TO 1879-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160315072622/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1870-01-01%20TO%201879-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 15, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1880s , 445,046{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1880-01-01%20TO%201889-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 880-01-01 TO 1889-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160316181145/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1880-01-01%20TO%201889-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 16, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1890s , 570,017{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1890-01-01%20TO%201899-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 890-01-01 TO 1899-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160311063253/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1890-01-01%20TO%201899-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 11, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , {, class="wikitable" , +XX century , - !Decade !Number of texts
(July 5, 2021) , - , 1900s , 767,201{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1900-01-01%20TO%201909-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 900-01-01 TO 1909-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160318045422/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1900-01-01%20TO%201909-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 18, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1910s , 744,445{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1910-01-01%20TO%201919-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 910-01-01 TO 1919-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160319012820/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1910-01-01%20TO%201919-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 19, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1920s , 473,331{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1920-01-01%20TO%201929-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 920-01-01 TO 1929-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184113/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1920-01-01%20TO%201929-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1930s , 342,779{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1930-01-01%20TO%201939-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 930-01-01 TO 1939-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184117/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1930-01-01%20TO%201939-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1940s , 400,490{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1940-01-01%20TO%201949-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 940-01-01 TO 1949-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160326054436/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1940-01-01%20TO%201949-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 26, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1950s , 560,730{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1950-01-01%20TO%201959-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 950-01-01 TO 1959-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160316185045/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1950-01-01%20TO%201959-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 16, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1960s , 711,449{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1960-01-01%20TO%201969-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 960-01-01 TO 1969-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160315045623/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1960-01-01%20TO%201969-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 15, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1970s , 2,540,807{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1970-01-01%20TO%201979-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 970-01-01 TO 1979-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184121/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1970-01-01%20TO%201979-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1980s , 1,124,927{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1980-01-01%20TO%201989-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 980-01-01 TO 1989-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184159/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1980-01-01%20TO%201989-12-31%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 1990s , 1,379,398{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1990-01-01%20TO%201999-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 990-01-01 TO 1999-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160311000946/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B1990-01-01%20TO%201999-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 11, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , {, class="wikitable" , +XXI century , - !Decade !Number of texts
(July 5, 2021) , - , 2000s , 1,754,932{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B2000-01-01%20TO%202009-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 000-01-01 TO 2009-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160326171415/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B2000-01-01%20TO%202009-12-31%5D, archive-date=March 26, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 2010s , 3,317,801{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B2010-01-01%20TO%2019-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 010-01-01 TO 2019-12-31publisher=Internet Archive, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160409184814/https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B2010-01-01%20TO%202014-1-24%5D, archive-date=April 9, 2016, url-status=live, access-date=July 5, 2021 , - , 2020s , 205,178{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20AND%20date%3A%5B2020-01-01%20TO%2029-12-31%5D, title=Internet Archive Search : mediatype:texts AND date: 020-01-01 TO 2029-12-31publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=July 5, 2021

Open Library

{{main, Open Library 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, many of which are fully readable, downloadable and

full-text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...

able; it offers a two-week loan of

e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

s in its

program for over 647,784 books not in the public domain, in partnership with over 1,000 library partners from six countriesHoffelder, Nate (July 9, 2013)
"Internet Archive Now Hosts 4.4 Million eBooks, Sees 15 Million eBooks Downloaded Each Month"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131110091506/http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/07/09/internet-archive-now-hosts-4-4-million-ebooks-sees-15-million-ebooks-downloaded-each-month/ , date=November 10, 2013 . The Digital Reader. after a free registration on the web site. Open Library is a

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

project, with its source code freely available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...

. The Open Library faces objections from some authors and the

Society of Authors The Society of Authors (SoA) is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, founded in 1884 to protect the rights and further the interests of authors. , it represents over 12,000 members and ass ...

, who hold that the project is distributing books without authorization and is thus in violation of copyright laws, and four major publishers initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive in June 2020 to stop the Open Library project.{{cite web , url = https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/1/21277036/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-open-library-ebook-lending , title = Publishers sue Internet Archive over Open Library ebook lending , first = Russell , last = Brandom , date = June 1, 2020 , access-date = June 1, 2020 , work =

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts. The website launched on November 1, 2011, and uses Vox Media ...

, archive-date = June 1, 2020 , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20200601185706/https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/1/21277036/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-open-library-ebook-lending , url-status = live

Digitizing sponsors for books

Many large institutional sponsors have helped the Internet Archive provide millions of scanned publications (text items). Some sponsors that have digitized large quantities of texts include the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

Robarts Library The John P. Robarts Research Library, commonly referred to as Robarts Library, is the main humanities and social sciences library of the University of Toronto Libraries and the largest individual library in the university. Opened in 1973 and n ...

, the University of Alberta Libraries, the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

, the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...

Boston Library Consortium The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is a library consortium based in the Boston area with 23 member institutions across New England. Membership The Boston Library Consortium is an academic consortium of twenty-three institutions: sixteen in M ...

member libraries, the

, the Princeton Theological Seminary Library, and many others. In 2017, the

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...

authorized the Internet Archive to digitize and lend books from the press's

backlist A backlist is a list of older books available from a publisher. This is opposed to newly-published titles, which is sometimes known as the frontlist. Business Building a strong backlist has traditionally been considered the best method to produ ...

, with financial support from the

Arcadia Fund The Arcadia Fund is a UK charity organization founded by Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin. Established in 2001, the organization provides grants on a worldwide basis focusing on numerous projects outside the UK. The primary focus of th ...

. 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". The

created numerous

handle system The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, acces ...

identifiers that pointed to free digitized books in the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive and Open Library are listed on the Library of Congress website as a source of e-books.

Media collections

Videocassettes and VCRs at Internet Archive

In addition to web archives, the Internet Archive maintains extensive collections of digital media that are attested by the uploader to be in the

in the United States or licensed under a license that allows redistribution, such as

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

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.

Audio

{{anchor, aaAudio Archive

The Audio Archive is an

audio archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

that includes music,

audiobook An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in sc ...

s, news broadcasts,

old time radio The Golden Age of Radio, also known as the old-time radio (OTR) era, was an era of radio in the United States where it was the dominant electronic home entertainment medium. It began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the earl ...

shows, and a wide variety of other audio files. There are more than 200,000 free digital recordings in the collection. The subcollections include audio books and poetry,

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...

s, non-English audio, and many others."Welcome to Audio Archive"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140117045201/https://archive.org/details/audio , date=January 17, 2014 . Internet Archive. The sound collections are curated by B. George, director of the

ARChive of Contemporary Music The ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) is a non-profit music library and archive based in New York City. It contains over five million items. People The ARC was founded in 1985 by current Director, B. George and David Wheeler (1957–1997) in ...

.{{cite web, last1=Pritchard, first1=Will, title=How The Great 78 Project is saving half a million songs from obscurity, url=https://thevinylfactory.com/features/great-78-project-archive-interview/, website=The Vinyl Factory, access-date=November 2, 2017, date=August 18, 2017, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171107004227/https://thevinylfactory.com/features/great-78-project-archive-interview/, archive-date=November 7, 2017, url-status=live Next to the stock

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

audio player,

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...

-resembling ''Webamp'' is available.

Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

A project to preserve recordings of amateur radio transmissions, with funding from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications foundation.

Live Music Archive

{{main, Live Music Archive The

Live Music Archive The Live Music Archive (LMA), part of the Internet Archive, is an ad-free collection of over 170,000 concert recordings in lossless audio formats. The songs are also downloadable or playable in lossy formats such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3. The web ...

sub-collection includes more than 170,000 concert recordings from independent musicians, as well as more established artists and musical ensembles with permissive rules about recording their concerts, such as the

Grateful Dead The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass, blues, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, world music, ...

, and more recently,

The Smashing Pumpkins The Smashing Pumpkins (also referred to as simply Smashing Pumpkins) are an American alternative rock band from Chicago. Formed in 1988 by frontman and guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Ch ...

. Also, Jordan Zevon has allowed the Internet Archive to host a definitive collection of his father

Warren Zevon Warren William Zevon (; January 24, 1947 – September 7, 2003) was an American rock singer, songwriter, and musician. Zevon's most famous compositions include "Werewolves of London", " Lawyers, Guns and Money", and " Roland the Headless Th ...

's concert recordings. The Zevon collection ranges from 1976 to 2001 and contains 126 concerts including 1,137 songs.

The Great 78 Project

{{main, The Great 78 Project

The Great 78 Project The Great 78 Project is an initiative developed by the Internet Archive which aims to digitize 250,000 78 rpm singles (500,000 songs) from the period between 1880 and 1960, donated by various collectors and institutions. The project has been develo ...

aims to digitize 250,000

78 rpm A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near ...

singles (500,000 songs) from the period between 1880 and 1960, donated by various collectors and institutions. It has been developed in collaboration with the Archive of Contemporary Music and George Blood Audio, responsible for the audio digitization.

Netlabels

{{distinguish, Netlabel The Archive has a collection of freely distributable music that is streamed and available for download via its ''Netlabels'' service. The music in this collection generally has Creative Commons-license catalogs of virtual record labels."Welcome to Netlabels"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140404162519/https://archive.org/details/netlabels , date=April 4, 2014 . Internet Archive.{{cite web, url=http://lifehacker.com/208221/download-free-music-at-the-internet-archive , title=Download free music at the Internet Archive , work=

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on January 31, 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is currently owned by G/O Media. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including: Microso ...

, date=October 21, 2006 , first=Wendy , last=Boswell , quote=The Internet Archive has a ginormous collection of free, downloadable music in their NetLabels category ..., url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120505115952/http://lifehacker.com/208221/download-free-music-at-the-internet-archive , archive-date=May 5, 2012

Images collection

This collection contains more than 3.5 million items. Cover Art Archive,

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

- Gallery Images, NASA Images,

Occupy Wall Street Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest movement against economic inequality and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, in September 2011. It gave rise to the ...

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

Archive, and

USGS Maps The Libre Map Project is an online collection of all digital USGS 1:24K scale topographic maps (as well as various other GIS data) covering the United States, available as a free download. The Libre Map Project was started by Jared Benedict and aro ...

are some sub-collections of Image collection.

Cover Art Archive

The Cover Art Archive is a joint project between the Internet Archive and

MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for so ...

, whose goal is to make cover art images on the Internet. {{As of, 2021, 04, post=, this collection contains more than 1,400,000 items.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/coverartarchive , title=Cover Art Archive: Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103140633/https://archive.org/details/coverartarchive , archive-date=January 3, 2015

Metropolitan Museum of Art images

The images of this collection are from the

. This collection contains more than 140,000 items.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/metropolitanmuseumofart-gallery , title=Metropolitan Museum of Art – Gallery Images: Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103140654/https://archive.org/details/metropolitanmuseumofart-gallery , archive-date=January 3, 2015

NASA Images

The NASA Images archive 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 IA NASA Images team worked closely with all of the NASA centers to keep adding to the ever-growing collection. The nasaimages.org site launched in July 2008 and had more than 100,000 items online at the end of its hosting in 2012.

Occupy Wall Street Flickr archive

This collection contains

-licensed photographs from Flickr related to the

movement. This collection contains more than 15,000 items.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/flickr-ows , title=Occupy Wall Street Flickr Archive: Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103140621/https://archive.org/details/flickr-ows , archive-date=January 3, 2015

USGS Maps

This collection contains more than 59,000 items from

Libre Map Project The Libre Map Project is an online collection of all digital USGS 1:24K scale topographic maps (as well as various other GIS data) covering the United States, available as a free download. The Libre Map Project was started by Jared Benedict and aro ...

.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/maps_usgs , title=USGS Maps: Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103140641/https://archive.org/details/maps_usgs , archive-date=January 3, 2015

Mathematical images

This collection contains mathematical images created by mathematical artist

Hamid Naderi Yeganeh Hamid Naderi Yeganeh ( fa, حمید نادری یگانه; born July 26, 1990 in Iran) is an Iranian mathematical artist and digital artist. He is known for using mathematical formulas to create drawings of real-life objects, intricate and symme ...

.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/mathematicsimage , title=Mathematics – Hamid Naderi Yeganeh (Image): Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141014214955/https://archive.org/details/mathematicsimage , archive-date=October 14, 2014

Machinima Archive

One of the sub-collections of the Internet Archive's Video Archive is the Machinima Archive. This small section hosts many Machinima videos. Machinima is a digital artform in which

computer games A personal computer game, also known as a PC game or computer game, is a type of video game played on a personal computer (PC) rather than a video game console or arcade machine. Its defining characteristics include: more diverse and user-dete ...

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs. The "engine" terminology is similar to the term "software engine" used in the software ...

s, or software engines are used in a sandbox-like mode to create motion pictures, recreate plays, or even publish presentations or keynotes. The archive collects a range of Machinima films from internet publishers such as

Rooster Teeth Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC is an American digital media company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2003 by Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Jason Saldaña, Gus Sorola, and Joel Heyman, Rooster Teeth is a subsidiary of W ...

and Machinima.com as well as independent producers. The sub-collection is a collaborative effort among the Internet Archive, the How They Got Game research project at Stanford University, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, and Machinima.com."Welcome to Machinima"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130323173619/https://archive.org/details/machinima , date=March 23, 2013 . Internet Archive.

Microfilm collection

This collection contains approximately 160,000

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. ...

ed items from a variety of libraries including the

University of Chicago Libraries The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the ...

, the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

, the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

Allen County Public Library The Allen County Public Library (ACPL) is a public library system located in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana, United States. Founded in 1895 as the Fort Wayne Public Library, the library served residents with 3,606 books out of a single room ...

, and the

National Technical Information Service The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. The primary mission of NTIS is to collect and organize scientific, technical, engineering, and business information generated by U.S. Gove ...

.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Amicrofilm%20AND%20collection%3Aadditional_collections , title=Internet Archive Search: collection:microfilm , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=March 20, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160331224824/https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Amicrofilm%20AND%20collection%3Aadditional_collections , archive-date=March 31, 2016 {{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/microfilm , title=Microfilm , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=March 20, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140320180301/https://archive.org/details/microfilm , archive-date=March 20, 2014

Moving image collection

{{See also, Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Internet Archive film{{!Wikipedia list of films freely available on the Internet Archive The Internet Archive holds a collection of approximately 3,863 feature films.{{cite web, title=Internet Archive Search: Collection: Feature Films , url=https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Afeature_films&sort=-%2Fadditional%2Fitem%2Fdownloads , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=March 6, 2013 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130402214317/https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Afeature_films&sort=-%2Fadditional%2Fitem%2Fdownloads , archive-date=April 2, 2013 Additionally, the Internet Archive's Moving Image collection includes:

newsreel A newsreel is a form of short documentary film, containing news stories and items of topical interest, that was prevalent between the 1910s and the mid 1970s. Typically presented in a cinema, newsreels were a source of current affairs, inform ...

s, classic

cartoon A cartoon is a type of visual art that is typically drawn, frequently animated, in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved over time, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of imag ...

s, pro- and anti-war

propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...

, The Video Cellar Collection, Skip Elsheimer's "A.V. Geeks" collection, early television, and ephemeral material from Prelinger Archives, such as

advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

, educational, and industrial films, as well as amateur and home movie collections. Subcategories of this collection include: * IA's ''Brick Films'' collection, which contains

stop-motion Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames ...

animation filmed with

Lego Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocki ...

bricks, some of which are "remakes" of feature films. * IA's ''Election 2004'' collection, a non-partisan public resource for sharing video materials related to the

2004 United States presidential election The 2004 United States presidential election was the 55th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. The Republican ticket of incumbent President George W. Bush and his running mate incumbent Vice President Dick Che ...

. * IA's ''FedFlix'' collection, Joint Venture NTIS-1832 between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org that features "the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors"{{cite web, publisher=Internet Archive, title=FedFlix, url=https://archive.org/details=FedFlix, access-date=December 14, 2013 * IA's ''Independent News'' collection, which 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 An earthquake and a tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami and, by the scientific community, the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, occurred at 07:58:53 local time ( UTC+7) on 26 December 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of northern ...

. * IA's ''September 11 Television Archive'', which contains archival footage from the world's major television networks of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as they unfolded on live television."September 11th Television Archive"
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140403154832/https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive , date=April 3, 2014 . Internet Archive.

Open Educational Resources

{{see also, Open educational resources Open Educational Resources is a digital collection at archive.org. This collection contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

. The contributors of this collection are ArsDigita University,

Hewlett Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation aw ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Monterey Institute The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), formerly known as the Monterey Institute of International Studies, is an American graduate school of Middlebury College, a private college in Middlebury, Vermont. Established ...

, and

Naropa University Naropa University is a private university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the 11th-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. The university describes itself a ...

.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/education , title=Download & Streaming : Open Educational Resources : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=June 17, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140702122916/https://archive.org/details/education , archive-date=July 2, 2014

TV News Search & Borrow

In September 2012, the Internet Archive launched the TV News Search & Borrow service for searching U.S. national news programs.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/tv/ , title=TV NEWS : Search Captions. Borrow Broadcasts : TV Archive : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=April 13, 2013 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130420214957/https://archive.org/details/tv , archive-date=April 20, 2013 The service is built on closed captioning transcripts and allows users to search and stream 30-second video clips. Upon launch, the service contained "350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C." According to Kahle, the service was inspired by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a similar library of televised network news programs. In contrast to Vanderbilt, which limits access to streaming video to individuals associated with subscribing colleges and universities, the TV News Search & Borrow allows open access to its streaming video clips. In 2013, the Archive received an additional donation of "approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes" from the estate of a

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since ...

woman,

Marion Stokes Marion Marguerite Stokes ( Butler; November 25, 1929December 14, 2012) was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for her compulsive ho ...

. Stokes "had recorded more than 35 years of TV news in Philadelphia and

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

with her VHS and

Betamax Betamax (also known as Beta, as in its logo) is a consumer-level analog recording and cassette format of magnetic tape for video, commonly known as a video cassette recorder. It was developed by Sony and was released in Japan on May 10, 1975, ...

machines."

Miscellaneous collections

Brooklyn Museum

This collection contains approximately 3,000 items from

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...

.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/brooklynmuseum , title=Brooklyn Museum: Free Image : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=December 4, 2014 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103140547/https://archive.org/details/brooklynmuseum , archive-date=January 3, 2015

Michelson library

In December 2020, the film research library of Lillian Michelson was donated to the archive.

Other services and endeavors

Physical media

Vintage wall intercom at Internet Archive

Voicing a strong reaction to the idea of books simply being thrown away, and inspired by the

Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Svalbard Global Seed Vault ( no, Svalbard globale frøhvelv) is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term stor ...

, Kahle now envisions collecting one copy of every book ever published. "We're not going to get there, but that's our goal", he said. Alongside the books, Kahle plans to store the Internet Archive's old servers, which were replaced in 2010.

Software

The Internet Archive has "the largest collection of historical software online in the world", spanning 50 years of

computer history The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. The first aids to computation were purely mechanic ...

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s of computer magazines and journals, books,

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

discs, FTP sites,

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedba ...

s, etc. The Internet Archive has created an archive of what it describes as "vintage software", as a way to preserve them.{{cite web , url=https://archive.org/details/clasp , title=The Internet Archive Classic Software Preservation Project , publisher=Internet Archive , access-date=October 21, 2007, archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20071019034848/https://archive.org/details/clasp, archive-date= October 19, 2007 , url-status= live The project advocated for an exemption from the United States

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

to permit them to bypass copy protection, which was approved in 2003 for a period of three years.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/about/dmca.php, title=Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption To Help Archive Vintage Software, access-date=October 21, 2007, archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20071020011825/https://archive.org/about/dmca.php, archive-date= October 20, 2007 , url-status= live The Archive does not offer the software for download, as the exemption is solely "for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive." The exemption was renewed in 2006, and in 2009 was indefinitely extended pending further rulemakings. The Library reiterated the exemption as a "Final Rule" with no expiration date in 2010.{{cite journal, url=https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/07/27/2010-18339/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control , title=Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies , author=Library of Congress Copyright Office , journal=Federal Register , date=July 27, 2010 , volume=75 , issue=143 , pages=43825–43839 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150627172044/https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/07/27/2010-18339/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control , archive-date=June 27, 2015 In 2013, the Internet Archive began to provide abandonware video games Web browser, browser-playable via Multi Emulator Super System, MESS, for instance the Atari 2600 game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game), ''E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial''. Since December 23, 2014, the Internet Archive presents, via a browser-based DOSBox emulation, thousands of MS-DOS, DOS/PC gamescollection:softwarelibrary_msdos
{{webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150628201230/https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Asoftwarelibrary_msdos&page=1 , date=June 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive (December 29, 2014) for "scholarship and research purposes only".{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/about/terms.php , title=Internet Archive's Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Copyright Policy , date=December 31, 2014 , access-date=January 8, 2015 , quote=''Access to the Archive's Collections is provided at no cost to you and is granted for scholarship and research purposes only.'' , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150103160557/https://archive.org/about/terms.php , archive-date=January 3, 2015 In November 2020, the Archive introduced a new emulator for Adobe Flash called Ruffle (software), Ruffle, and began archiving Flash animations and games ahead of the December 31, 2020 end-of-life for the Flash plugin across all computer systems.

{{Anchor, ttscribeTable Top Scribe System

A combined hardware software system has been developed that performs a safe method of digitizing content.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem, access-date=October 23, 2018, title=Table Top Scribe System, website=Internet Archive, url-status=live, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181010084141/https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem, archive-date=October 10, 2018{{cite web, url=https://www.linux.com/news/linux-help-library-congress-save-american-history, title=Linux to help the Library of Congress save American history, first=Michael, last=Stutz, publisher=The Linux foundation, website=Linux.com, date=March 28, 2007, url-status=live, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023085241/https://www.linux.com/news/linux-help-library-congress-save-american-history, archive-date=October 23, 2017

Credit Union

From 2012 to November 2015, the Internet Archive operated the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, a federal credit union based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with the goal of providing access to low- and middle-income people. Throughout its short existence, the IAFCU experienced significant conflicts with the National Credit Union Administration, which severely limited the IAFCU's loan portfolio and concerns over serving Bitcoin firms. At the time of its dissolution, it consisted of 395 members and was worth $2.5 million.

Controversies, legal disputes, and activism

{{see also, Wayback Machine#In legal evidence The main hall at Internet Archive (2013)

Grateful Dead

In November 2005, free downloads of

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 an article in ''The New York Times''.{{cite news, first1=Jeff , last1=Leeds , first2=Jesse Fox , last2=Mayshark , title=Wrath of Deadheads stalls a Web crackdown , url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/technology/01iht-deadheads.html , newspaper=The New York Times , date=December 1, 2005 , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150508194949/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/technology/01iht-deadheads.html , archive-date=May 8, 2015 Phil Lesh commented on the change in a November 30, 2005, posting to his personal web site: {{blockquote, 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.{{cite web, url = http://www.phillesh.net/philzonepages/friends_stuff/hotline-051130.html, title = An Announcement from Phil Lesh, first= Phil , last=Lesh, author-link = Phil Lesh, date = November 30, 2005, type=blog, work = Hotline, publisher = PhilLesh.net , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070715072102/http://www.phillesh.net/philzonepages/friends_stuff/hotline-051130.html, archive-date=July 15, 2007 A November 30 forum post from

Brewster Kahle Brewster Lurton Kahle ( ; born October 21, 1960)Alexa Internet profile
, via juggle.com. accessed Novemb ...

summarized what appeared to be the compromise reached among the band members. Audience recordings could be downloaded or streamed, but Mixing console, soundboard recordings were to be available for streaming only. Concerts have since been re-added.{{cite web, url=https://archive.org/post/49553/good-news-and-an-apology-gd-on-the-internet-archive , title=Good News and an Apology: GD on the Internet Archive , first1=Brewster , last1=Kahle , first2=Matt , last2=Vernon , date=December 1, 2005 , work=Live Music Archive Forum , publisher=Internet Archive , url-status=live , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140806205924/https://archive.org/post/49553/good-news-and-an-apology-gd-on-the-internet-archive , archive-date=August 6, 2014 ''Authors and date indicate the first posting in the forum thread''.

National security letters

{{Anchor, National security letter {{multiple image , width = 160 , image1 = EFF-IA National security letter.pdf , image2 = EFF-IA National security letter.pdf{{!page=2 , footer = A national security letter issued to the Internet Archive demanding information about a user , direction = horizontal On May 8, 2008, it was revealed that the Internet Archive had successfully challenged an Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI national security letter asking for logs on an undisclosed user. On November 28, 2016, it was revealed that a second FBI national security letter had been successfully challenged that had been asking for logs on another undisclosed user.

Opposition to SOPA and PIPA bills

The Internet Archive blacked out its web site for 12 hours on January 18, 2012, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act Bill (law), bills, two pieces of legislation in the United States Congress that they claimed would "negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive". This occurred in conjunction with the Protests against SOPA and PIPA#Wikimedia community, English Wikipedia blackout, as well as Protests against SOPA and PIPA, numerous other protests across the Internet.

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 Search Settlement Agreement, Google Book Settlement. The Archive advocates an alternative digital library project.

''Nintendo Power'' magazine

In February 2016, Internet Archive users had begun archiving digital copies of ''Nintendo Power'', Nintendo's official magazine for their games and products, which ran from 1988 to 2012. The first 140 issues had been collected, before Nintendo had the archive removed on August 8, 2016. In response to the take-down, Nintendo told gaming website ''Polygon (website), Polygon'', "[Nintendo] must protect our own characters, trademarks and other content. The unapproved use of Nintendo's intellectual property can weaken our ability to protect and preserve it, or to possibly use it for new projects".

Government of India

In August 2017, the Department of Telecommunications of the Government of India blocked the Internet Archive along with other file-sharing websites, in accordance with two court orders issued by the Madras High Court,{{cite web , title=Indian ISP Ban on Wayback Machine Lifted? Confirmation Awaited , url=https://www.guidingtech.com/70862/wayback-machine-ban-india-internet-archive/ , publisher=Guiding Tech , access-date=12 April 2020 , date=9 August 2017 , archive-date=April 12, 2020 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200412131313/https://www.guidingtech.com/70862/wayback-machine-ban-india-internet-archive/ , url-status=live citing piracy concerns after copies of two Bollywood films were allegedly shared via the service. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP version of the Archive was blocked but it remained accessible using the HTTPS protocol.

Turkey

{{See also, Censorship in Turkey On October 9, 2016, the Internet Archive was temporarily blocked in Turkey after it was used (amongst other file hosting services) by hackers to host 17 GB of leaked government emails.

Hosting of terrorist material

In May 2018, a report published by the cyber-security firm ''Flashpoint'' stated that the Islamic State was using the Internet Archive to share its propaganda.{{cite web, access-date=6 February 2022, title=IS propaganda 'hidden on Internet Archive', date=15 May 2018, last=Kelion, first=Leo, publisher=BBC News, url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44112431, archive-date=February 6, 2022, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220206225416/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44112431, url-status=live Chris Butler, from the Internet Archive, responded that they regularly spoke to the US and EU governments about sharing information on terrorism. In April 2019, Europol, acting on a referral from French police, asked the Internet Archive to remove 550 sites of "terrorist propaganda".{{cite web, access-date=6 February 2022, title=Internet Archive denies hosting 'terrorist' content, date=12 April 2019, publisher=BBC News, url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47908220, archive-date=February 6, 2022, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220206225410/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47908220, url-status=live The Archive rejected the request, saying that the reports were wrong about the content they pointed to, or were too broad for the organization to comply with. In January 2022, a former UCLA lecturer uploaded an 800-page manifesto, containing racist ideas and threats against UCLA staff, to the Internet Archive.{{cite news, url=https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvn5g3/archivists-are-putting-terrorist-manifestos-online-should-they-stay-there, title=Archivists Are Putting Terrorist Manifestos Online. Should They Stay There?, last=Woodcock, first=Claire, date=14 February 2022, access-date=2 March 2022, publisher=Vice, archive-date=March 2, 2022, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220302220806/https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvn5g3/archivists-are-putting-terrorist-manifestos-online-should-they-stay-there, url-status=live The manifesto was removed by the Internet Archive after a week, amidst discussion about whether such documents should be preserved by archivists or not.

National Emergency Library

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic which closed many schools, universities, and libraries, the Archive announced on March 24, 2020, that it was creating the National Emergency Library by removing the lending restrictions it had in place for 1.4 million digitized books in its Open Library but otherwise limiting users to the number of books they could check out and enforcing their return; normally, the site would only allow one digital lending for each physical copy of the book they had, by use of an encryption, encrypted file that would become unusable after the lending period was completed. This Library would remain as such until at least June 30, 2020, or until the US national emergency was over, whichever came later. At launch, the Internet Archive allowed authors and rightholders to submit opt-out requests for their works to be omitted from the National Emergency Library.{{Cite web , title=Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library , url=https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds-why-we-released-the-national-emergency-library/ , last=Freeland , first=Chris , date=2020-03-30 , website=Internet Archive Blogs , language=en-US , access-date=2020-05-26 The Internet Archive said the National Emergency Library addressed an "unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research material" due to the closures of physical libraries worldwide. They justified the move in a number of ways. Legally, they said they were promoting access to those inaccessible resources, which they claimed was an exercise in fair use principles. The Archive continued implementing their

policy that predated the National Emergency Library, meaning they still encrypted the lent copies and it was no easier for users to create new copies of the books than before. An ultimate determination of whether or not the National Emergency Library constituted fair use could only be made by a court. Morally, they also pointed out that the Internet Archive was a registered library like any other, that they either paid for the books themselves or received them as donations, and that lending through libraries predated copyright restrictions. However, the Archive had already been criticized by authors and publishers for its prior lending approach, and upon announcement of the National Emergency Library, authors, publishers, and groups representing both took further issue, equating the move to copyright infringement and digital piracy, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to push the boundaries of copyright (see also: {{slink, Open Library#Copyright violation accusations). After the works of some of these authors were ridiculed in responses, the Internet Archive's Jason Scott requested that supporters of the National Emergency Library not denigrate anyone's books: "I realize there's strong debate and disagreement here, but books are life-giving and life-changing and these writers made them."

Publishers' lawsuit

The operation of the National Emergency Library was part of a lawsuit filed against the Internet Archive by four major book publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – in June 2020, challenging the copyright validity of the controlled digital lending program. In response, the Internet Archive closed the National Emergency Library on June 16, 2020, rather than the planned June 30, 2020, due to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs, supported by the Copyright Alliance, claimed in their lawsuit that the Internet Archive's actions constituted a "willful mass copyright infringement". In August 2020 the lawsuit trial was tentatively scheduled to begin in November 2021. By June 2022, both parties to the case requested summary judgment for the case, each favoring their respective sides, which Judge John G. Koeltl approved of a summary judgment hearing to take place later in 2022. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, chairman of the intellectual property subcommittee on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to the Internet Archive that he was "concerned that the Internet Archive thinks that it—not Congress—gets to determine the scope of copyright law".{{cite news , last1=Harris , first1=Elizabeth , title=Internet Archive Will End Its Program for Free E-Books , url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/books/internet-archive-national-emergency-library-coronavirus.html , access-date=15 June 2020 , publisher=NY Times , date=11 June 2020 , archive-date=June 15, 2020 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200615094026/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/books/internet-archive-national-emergency-library-coronavirus.html , url-status=live As part of its response to the publishers' lawsuit, in late 2020 the Archive launched a campaign called Empowering Libraries (hashtag #EmpoweringLibraries) that portrayed the lawsuit as a threat to all libraries. In a 2021 preprint article, Argyri Panezi argued that the case "presents two important, but separate questions related to the electronic access to library works; first, it raises questions around the legal practice of digital lending, and second, it asks whether emergency use of copyrighted material might be fair use" and argued that libraries have a public service role to enable "future generations to keep having equal access—or opportunities to access—a plurality of original sources". In December 2020, ''Publishers Weekly'' included the lawsuit among its "Top 10 Library Stories of 2020".

Wayforward Machine

On 30 September 2021, as a part of its 25th anniversary celebration, Internet Archive launched the "Wayforward Machine", a satire, satirical, Web fiction, fictional website covered with pop-ups asking for personal information. The site was intended to depict a fictional dystopian timeline of real-world events leading to such a future, such as the repeal of Section 230 of the United States Code in 2022 and the introduction of advertising implants in 2041. There are plans to remove Wayforward Machine in 2022, after Internet Archive's 25th anniversary celebration. {{Update after, 2022 {{Citation Needed, date=December 2022

Ceramic archivists collection

Ceramic Archivists by sculptor Nuala Creed at Internet Archive

The Great Room of the Internet Archive features a collection of more than 100 Ceramic art, ceramic figures representing employees of the Internet Archive. This collection, inspired by the Terracotta Army, statues of the Xian warriors in China, was commissioned by Brewster Kahle, sculpted by Nuala Creed, and is ongoing.

Artists in residence

The Internet Archive visual arts residency, organized by Amir Saber Esfahani, is designed to connect emerging and mid-career artists with the Archive's millions of collections and to show what is possible when open access to information intersects with the arts. During this one-year residency, selected artists develop a body of work that responds to and utilizes the Archive's collections in their own practice.{{Cite web, url=https://blog.archive.org/2019/06/22/the-internet-archives-2019-artist-in-residency-exhibition/, title=The Internet Archive's 2019 Artists in Residency Exhibition {{! Internet Archive Blogs, date=June 22, 2019, language=en-US, access-date=August 1, 2019, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190731232042/https://blog.archive.org/2019/06/22/the-internet-archives-2019-artist-in-residency-exhibition/, archive-date=July 31, 2019, url-status=live 2019 Residency Artists: Caleb Duarte, Whitney Lynn, and Jeffrey Alan Scudder. 2018 Residency Artists: Mieke Marple, Chris Sollars, and

. 2017 Residency Artists: Laura Kim, Jeremiah Jenkins, and Jenny Odell

Notes

References

{{Reflist

External links

{{Commons category * {{Official website
Internet Archive Scholar
{{Internet Archive navbox {{Ebooks {{Tor hidden services {{Authority control Internet Archive 1996 establishments in California 1996 in San Francisco 501(c)(3) organizations Access to Knowledge movement Articles containing video clips Charities based in California Foundations based in the United States Internet properties established in 1996 Online archives of the United States Organizations established in 1996 Public libraries in California Richmond District, San Francisco Sound archives Web archiving initiatives Tor onion services Webby Award winners

History

Operations

Web archiving

Wayback Machine

Archive-It{{anchor, Archive-It

Internet Archive Scholar

General Index

Book collections

Text collection

Number of texts for each language

Open Library

Digitizing sponsors for books

Media collections

Audio

{{anchor, aaAudio Archive

Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

Live Music Archive

The Great 78 Project

Netlabels

Images collection

Cover Art Archive

Metropolitan Museum of Art images

NASA Images

Occupy Wall Street Flickr archive

USGS Maps

Mathematical images

Machinima Archive

Microfilm collection

Moving image collection

Open Educational Resources

TV News Search & Borrow

Miscellaneous collections

Brooklyn Museum

Michelson library

Other services and endeavors

Physical media

Software

{{Anchor, ttscribeTable Top Scribe System

Credit Union

Controversies, legal disputes, and activism

Grateful Dead

National security letters

Opposition to SOPA and PIPA bills

Opposition to Google Books settlement

''Nintendo Power'' magazine

Government of India

Turkey

Hosting of terrorist material

National Emergency Library

Publishers' lawsuit

Wayforward Machine

Ceramic archivists collection

Artists in residence

See also

Similar projects

Other

Notes

References

Further reading

External links