[Overview]
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a
non-profit organization that built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format for
researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored
every two months or so. In October 2001, with 30 billion web pages
stored, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to
be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. In 2006,
there were 65 billion pages from 50 million websites. In late 1999, the
Internet Archive also started to include more collections of archived
web pages on specific topics. It also became an online digital library
of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2005, the
Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with other
contributors as a collective effort to build a permanent archive of
multilingual digitized text (Text Archive) and multimedia content.