Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Just like a paper library, we make these materials freely available to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to make all knowledge accessible to everyone.

We began archiving the Internet itself in 1996, when the Internet was a medium that was just beginning to gain popularity. Like newspapers, content published on the Web is ephemeral—but unlike newspapers, no one is preserving it. Today, we have access to more than 28 years of Web history through the Wayback Machine, and we work with more than 1,200 libraries and other partners through the Archive-It program to identify important Web pages.

As our web archive continues to grow, we are committed to providing digital versions of other published works. Our archive currently contains:

• 835 billion web pages
• 44 million books and texts
• 15 million sound recordings (including 255,000 live concerts)
• 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million TV news programs)
• 4.8 million images
• 1 million software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We work with thousands of partners around the world to save copies of their works in special collections.

Because we are a library, we focus on books. Not everyone has access to a well-stocked public or academic library, so to provide universal access, we need to provide digital versions of books. We started a book digitization program in 2005, and today we scan 4,400 books a day at 20 locations around the world. Books published in 1928 or earlier are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books are available for loan through our Open Library site. One of the Internet Archives missions is to serve people who have difficulty interacting with physical books, so most of our digitized books are accessible to people with print disabilities (learn about access here).

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

The Internet Archive serves millions of people every day and is one of the top 300 websites in the world. One copy of the Internet Archive librarys collection takes up 145+ petabytes of server space (we store at least 2 copies of everything). We are funded by donations, grants, and providing web archiving and book digitization services to partners. Like most libraries, we value the privacy of our patrons, so we avoid keeping readers IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and use the https (secure) protocol to deliver our website.