Internet Archive

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Categories: Digital libraries | Online databases | Internet | Foundations | History of computing

Internet Archive headquarters, San Francisco

The "Internet Archive" (archive.org), located in the Presidio of San Francisco, was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 and is dedicated to maintaining an archive of the Internet. Their collections include "snapshots of the World Wide Web" (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), movies, audio recordings, many of which are high-quality live concert recordings from bands that allow it (see Taper-friendly band), books, and software.

The Archive makes the collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars. At present, it takes someone with a certain level of technical knowledge to access collections in a way other than the archive.org website, but there is no requirement that a user be affiliated with any particular organization.

According to archive.org:

"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 their collection available to all, proponents of the archive have likened it to the Library at Alexandria.

1 Project policies and examples
- 1.1 The Wayback Machine
  - 1.1.1 Origin of the name Wayback Machine
  - 1.1.2 Archived pages: legal status
- 1.2 Media collections
2 Controversy involving the archive
- 2.1 Removal of Scientology sites
3 Moving Image collection
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

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Project policies and examples

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The Wayback Machine

The archive also maintains the Wayback Machine, with content donated by Alexa Internet. Once given a URL, this tool allows the user to see versions of the corresponding web page over time.

Alexa Internet, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, designed a "three dimensional index" that allows browsing of web documents over multiple time periods, and turned this unique feature into "the Wayback Machine". [1]

The archive generally takes six months before putting 'snapshots' of pages online, though this may stretch to as long as 12 months due to time delayed donation from Alexa.

In 2003 the archive paid $301,960 to Alexa Internet.

The archive's total collection in 2003 was around 100 terabytes of data (with a growth rate of 12 TB per month). As of 2004 the Internet Archive Wayback Machine contained approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress and the British Library. [2]. The archive includes, as of 2005 over 40 billion web pages. A copy of the data is also maintained at Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

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Origin of the name Wayback Machine

The name "Wayback Machine" is a reference to a Rocky and Bullwinkle Show cartoon serial. Mr. Peabody, a bowtie-endowed dog with a professorial air, and his assistant, a boy named "Sherman", use a time machine named the "Wayback Machine" to visit famous events in history, usually going awry for comedic reasons.

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Archived pages: legal status

Polska is the American provider of TV Polonia, a Polish-language television channel. According to its pleadings in the case, it had reached a deal with EchoStar, which operates the Dish Network satellite TV service, to provide TV Polonia to Dish Network. The contract included marketing rights, giving EchoStar the right to use Polska’s trademarks to sell subscriptions to its television service. The deal was scheduled to expire in stages: absent a renewal, EchoStar's marketing rights would expire in April of 2001, and programming would stop a year afterwards. The deal was not renewed, and Polska alleges that EchoStar continued to use the "TV Polonia" name to market its satellite service after its rights to exploit that trademark had expired. EchoStar pointed out that Polska seemed to have no problem with advertisements stating that TV Polonia could be found on the Dish Network, since Polska had one on its own website after the expiration of marketing rights. EchoStar offered IA snapshots dated to various times in 2001 as proof of the past content of Polska’s website. As part of a series of motions in limine, Polska attempted to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source.

Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska’s assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska’s objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.

(from archive.org)

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Media collections

Most of their movies, books, and recordings are public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons License. The audio section largely includes music from independent artists, as well as more established artists and musical ensembles with permissive rules in regards to the recording of their concerts (e.g. The Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, Toad the Wet Sprocket, 311, Fugazi, etc.).

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Controversy involving the archive

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Removal of Scientology sites

In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites critical of Scientology from the Wayback Machine. The error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner". However, it was later clarified that lawyers from the Church of Scientology had demanded the removal, on unknown legal grounds, and that the actual site owners did not want their material removed.

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Moving Image collection

Aside from feature films, their Moving Image collection includes: newsreels; classic cartoons; pro- and anti- war propaganda; Skip Elsheimer's "A.V. Geeks" collection; and ephemeral material from Prelinger Archives, such as advertising, educational and industrial films and amateur and home movie collections.

Their Brick Films collection contains stop-motion animation filmed with Lego blocks, some of which are 'remakes' of feature films. The Election 2004 collection is a non-partisan public resource for sharing video materials related to the 2004 United States Presidential Election. The Independent News collection includes sub-collections such as the Internet Archive's World At War competition from 2001, in which contestants created short films demonstrating "why access to history matters." Among their most-downloaded video files are eyewitness recordings of the devastating 2004 tsunami.

Some of the films available on the Internet Archive are: