| The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this archive includes "snapshots of the World Wide Web" (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings. To ensure the stability and endurance of the archive, IA is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the only library in the world with a mirror.[1] The IA makes the collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library
The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996.
According to its website:
Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.
Because of its goal of preserving human knowledge and artifacts, and making its collection available to all, proponents of the Internet Archive have likened it to the Library of Alexandria.
Users who want to permanently archive material and immediately cite an archived version can use the Archive-It system, a for-fee subscription service, instead.[5] Data collected with Archive-It is periodically indexed into the general Wayback Machine. As of December 2007, Archive-It had created over 230 million URLs for 466 public collections, including government bodies, universities, and cultural institutions. Some of the organizations participating in Archive-It include the Electronic Literature Organization, the State Archives of North Carolina, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Stanford University, the National Library of Australia, the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and many others
The Internet Archive is a member of the Open Content Alliance, and operates the Open Library where more than 200,000 scanned public domain books are made available in an easily browsable and printable format.[23][24] Their "Scribe" book imaging system was used to digitize most of these books.[25] The software that runs it is free/open source software—Scribe Software
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