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Internet Archive is a non-profit library holding millions of books, websites, recordings, and other digitized works.

Since 1996 our mission has been to ensure Universal Access to All Knowledge.

Wayback Machine is a great project for sure! We have been saving copies of popular web pages on a regular basis since 1996, allowing anybody to travel back in time (be it weeks or decades) and view web content as originally posted.

Open Library is an amazing gift to humanity! We have collected and/or scanned millions of books which are free borrow or download without restriction.

Amazing! We've been recording live television since the year 2009 or so, and have many hours of footage that can be viewed right now in the browser!

Coming soon: radio content

Yup, we've even got music too. Like tons of early American 78 RPM records that we've digitized with George Blood, and thousands of hours of live concert recordings made by fans. Listen up! You can stream or download for offline access.

Oh right, film and video, we have a bunch of that also! Like the Prelinger Archives of historical Bay Area street content, tons of educational and government reels, and complete out-of-copyright early films. For example, check out this anti-fascist reel.

If you thought we might also have thousands of programs you can run right now in your browser, including hypercard classics, retro games, and more, you're correct! Also copies of old mainframe software, contemporary open source projects, and CD-ROMs.

And that's definately not all. We've got millions of scholarly papers, complete database dumps of popular websites, a bunch of big photo collections, etc.

GET EXCITED!

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Featured Content: September 2017

Headquarters Photo

This month's featured content is the Jazz track "Sugar Foot Stomp", as performed by Russel Procope in 1931. Recently digitized as part of Great 78 collaboration with George Blood, in which we are making hundreds of thousands of 78rpm records of 20th Century American folk music available online.

Stream or Download »

Upcoming Events at Headquarters

Headquarters Photo

300 Funston Ave, Inner Richmond
San Franscisco, CA, USA

Keep in Touch!

Our Newsletter is Lovely and we'll try not to spam you.

Latest from the blog...

The world is flooding and we won't forget. Archive-It has hurricane-specific collections being crawled.

Why the largest democracy in the world blocked our domain. Hint: all of our services blocked over one or two items.

What we're doing with robots.txt these days? Touchy subject for webmasters; our policy has evolved over decades.

Twitter: it's unavoidable

What Does Internet Archive Do?

Scan Lots of Books

We built our own scanning hardware and digital workflow, probably second largest effort ever. Have dozens of workers in centers world-wide. Work with partners like DPLA, have XYZ books so far, all of which are available in Open Library for lending.

Browse our holdings »

Record The News

News is important. Who said what? We have been recording for years and have a lot of it, Search by captions, see what you can find, hold everybody accountable! Check these examples.

Search transcripts since 2009 »

Crawl The Web

Web is flux-y, always disapearing, big 20th/21st century cultural heritige. We use Heritrix to crawl the web a whole bunch. Some pay for Archive-It, all results available via Wayback Machine.

Petabox Datacenter

We are pretty in to storing data for a very long time. Own our own real-estate, hardware, etc instead of using cloud storages. Save money, waste heat building, have a couple sites, lots of disks, great good.

Read about technology »

Physical Archives

Physical artifacts are cool as well, so we have a bunch of that over in the east bay. XYZ tons! Neato! Fork-lifts, long-term thinking, minimizing costs, redundancy, earthquake risk.

Blog post about new locations »

Partnerships and Sustainability

Archive-It

We can't decide everything to crawl, so partner with universities, libraries, other organizations, who provide funding and lists of what to crawl, then we go and do it, archive forever. Over a petabyte so far, thousands of partners.

Plans and Sign-Up »

ArchiveTeam

Have a great and unique relationship with the radical self-organized Archive Team group, which goes out and saves the web. Horray! Eg, Geocities, URLteam, MySpace,

Check Their Wiki »

Archival Organizations

Sometimes other archives (like Prelinger, George Blood, etc) work with us to do digitization and physical archiving. Great content, big win!

Alexa Search Engine

We go way back (get it?) with the Alexa search engine. In the early days they were most of our content, and still provide a bunch. Thanks!

Governments

We're in the USA and have done some crawling with Library of Congress and National Records (NARA).

Also work with national libraries and governments from around the world!

Foundation Grants

Here is where we name-drop the big private foundations that often fund feature development and high-impact projects. Thanks!

Contributors Like You!

You can volunteer, or just start uploading random furry convention photos from your laptop right now!. Or download and make copies, use our APIs, whatever!

Create an account

Please read our terms, don't get us sued or raided, don't melt our servers or consume thousands of dollars of disk without asking first.

Online Communities

It's great when we find online communities which have already organized content. Sometimes a big collection, sometimes user-generated like stack overflow or reddit.

"Lock it open"!

Donations

Funded by viewers like you!

Also accept some equipment, and you can volunteer.

Researchers

Want to use our huge set of data in a research context? Great. Contact us.

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