Website of the Week

Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org
Review by John Stanton, SWC Library Faculty

“Sherman, set the WABAC Machine for …” – Mr. Peabody, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

In 1996 one of the early millionaires of the Internet, Brewster Kahle, created a non-profit organization called the Internet Archive. They have a staff of 200, most of whom are book scanners. The Archive has an annual budget of $10 million, is a member of the ALA and is recognized as a library in the state of California.

The Internet Archive has several initiatives. Their most famous project is the Wayback Machine which can be used to view website snapshots over the past 10-15 years. Another of their initiatives is Archive-It which can be used by institutions to create digital archives that are stored on their computers. They have an extensive repository of NASA images. Their most ambitious project is called the Open Library.

The Open Library’s goal is to build a web page for every book ever published and they want to make digital copies of books they have scanned available to the public through public libraries. "We're trying to build an integrated digital lending library of anything that is available anywhere, where you can go and find not just information about books, but also find the books themselves and borrow them," said Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive.
With its latest project, the organization is making inroads into the idea of loaning in-copyright books to the masses. Only one person at a time will be allowed to check out a digital copy of an in-copyright book for two weeks. While on loan, the physical copy of the book won't be loaned, due to copyright restrictions.
More information can be found here: http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/59332

The most well-known feature of the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine. This project is a three dimensional index of information found on the internet. Software robots "crawl" the Internet creating snapshots of information found, most notably websites. The size of the Internet Archive is measured in petabytes (thousands of terabytes) and located in with a backup in the Library of Alexandria. The Internet Archive provides snapshots of the Internet that are available for public viewing at archive.org.

Have a question? Ask a librarian!