Internet Archive

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 25+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 750+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:

588 billion web pages

28 million books and texts

14 million audio recordings (including 220,000 live concerts)

6 million videos (including 2 million Television News programs)

3.5 million images

580,000 software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections.

Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 3,500 books per day in 18 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1926 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site. Some of our digitized books are only available to people with print disabilities.

Like the Internet, television is also an ephemeral medium. We began archiving television programs in late 2000, and our first public TV project was an archive of TV news surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. In 2009 we began to make selected U.S. television news broadcasts searchable by captions in our TV News Archive. This service allows researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable reference.

The Internet Archive serves millions of people each day and is one of the top 300 web sites in the world. A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 70+ Petabytes of server space (and we store at least 2 copies of everything). We are funded through donations, grants, and by providing web archiving and book digitization services for our partners. As with most libraries we value the privacy of our patrons, so we avoid keeping the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of our readers and offer our site in https (secure) protocol.

You can find information about our projects on our blog (including important announcements), contact us, buy swag in our store, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Welcome to the library!