Internet Archive, the Largest Digital Library in the World, Celebrates its 25th Anniversary

Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based digital library is celebrating its 25th year of preserving the history of the internet, radio, and TV broadcasts.

The digital library is currently storing 475 billion web pages, 28 million scans of books and texts, and 14 million audio recordings. This adds up to 30 petabytes of data and more.

Internet Archive Celebrates 25 Years

The Internet Archive has collected writings from one hundreds million people. The Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kale, says that the organization's goal is to reach more than a billion people, according to PCMag.

Kale stated that now more than ever, they need the help of the public so they can continue to collect, preserve, and share their digital culture artifacts.

They want to have platforms and systems that are driven by altruism and not advertising models. They wish to have a world with a lot of winners, where the public can learn, participate, and find communities that they can fit in.

Currently, there is a two-to-one matching offer for donations to the nonprofit organization. For example, a $10 donation will raise $30 with matching funds.

The Internet Archive is fighting a legal battle from four massive publishers over its ability to lend out more digital copies of a book than it has physical copies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping Internet Archive with their legal defense.

There is currently a two-to-one matching offer for donations to the nonprofit organization. A $10 donation, for example, will raise a total of $30 with matching funds.

Internet Archive's History

As the Internet Archive turns 25, the digital library is preparing to create a backup. Years ago, it got a function that a lot of computers today still does not have, a backup service.

That is the time when the Internet Archive was released in bits and began in San Francisco, staging its first comprehensive indexing of the web in 1996, according to USA Today.

Since then, it became a key resource for researchers and readers who rely on its collection of more than 622 billion pages to review a site that suddenly went offline or see how a part of the internet looked years ago.

Most of that use happens at an Archive tool launched in 2001 called the Wayback Machine, which gives a versioned backup of the web like what Apple's Time Machine software does for files on a Mac.

You can type in a page address or words describing a home page, then choose a year from the timeline atop of the page to wander through the history of the home page.

You can also click on the link counting how many times the Internet Archive has done a capture of the page to select a specific date from an onscreen calendar, according to ZDNet.

The Internet Archive's copies of these pages may take some time to display and it sometimes lack media widgets or images. But mostly, they will look antique.

The oldest available content on the Internet Archive is the 1996 edition of USA Today. It speaks to a simpler school of web design and a smaller range of screen sizes.

It is less obvious that you can add to the Internet Archive, which gets funding from numerous foundations and individual donations, by saving a page into it.

In the unlikely event of a page not appearing in the results, you can paste its address into the "Save Page Now" form on the Wayback Machine's home page.

In 2016, Internet Archive's malware museum presented what a malware looked like in the 80s and 90s.

In 2019, the archive team of Internet Archive adds posts from Google+ in its library.

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Written by Sophie Webster