[Summary]
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California,
the Internet Archive wanted to offer a permanent access of the web
“through the ages” to present and future generations. In October 2001,
with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the
Wayback Machine, for internet users throughout the world to be able to
surf the archive of a given website by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were
65 billion webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion
webpages in 2008, and 150 billion webpages in March 2010. The Internet
Archive has also defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library
dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge", building
up an online library of text, audio, software, image and video content.
In October 2005, it launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with a
number of partner organizations to build a universal digital library of
multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
***
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive wanted to
offer permanent access of the web “through the ages” to present and
future generations.
As explained on the website at the time, throughout history, societies
have sought to preserve their culture and heritage for present and
future generations, and libraries have been created to preserve the
paper trail of that culture and legacy, and to facilitate its access to
the general public and researchers. Therefore it seems essential to
extend their mission to new technology. Paradoxically this was done
poorly in the early 20th century. Many movies were recycled -- and thus
lost forever -- to retrieve the silver layer. Many radio or TV programs
were not saved. It is important not to repeat the same mistakes for the
internet, especially for the web, a new medium the extent of which is
still unknown in 1996. This is the raison d’être of the Internet
Archive, that has defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library
dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge."
The whole web was stored every two months or so on the servers of the
Internet Archive in San Francisco, California, for researchers,
historians and scholars to be able to access it.
In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive
launched the Wayback Machine, for internet users throughout the world
to be able to surf the archive of a given website by date.
In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12
terabytes per month. There were 65 billion pages (from 50 million
websites) in 2006, 85 billion pages in 2008, and 150 billion pages in
March 2010.
In late 1999, the Internet Archive also became an online library of
text, audio, software, image and video content, for example some books
of the Million Book Project (10,520 books in April 2005), films for the
period 1903-1973, live concerts, software, sites about September 11,
sites about elections, and sites about the web pioneers, with all
collections freely available on the web.
As a side remark, the Million Book Project, also called the Universal
Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL), was launched in January
2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania) with the aim to
digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in
libraries from India and China. The project was completed in 2007, with
one million books available on the university website, as image files
in DjVu and TIFF formats, and three mirror sites (India, Northern
China, Southern China).
In October 2005, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) as a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and
governmental organizations, with the aim to build a world public
permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia
content. The OCA started to digitize public domain books around the
world, and to include them in the collection of the Internet Archive.