Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is an American digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials like websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive is also an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. , the Internet Archive holds more than 39 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.6 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.7 million images, 251,000 concerts and over 828 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Their mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge." The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts. Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996 around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October of that year, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large amounts, though it saved the earliest known page on May 10, 1996, at 2:42 PM. The archived content first became available to the general public in 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library.