In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled publicly accessible books were made available in a protected Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format. 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. Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. The archived content first became available to the general public in 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. 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. History Headquarters in Building 116 of the Presidio of San Francisco in 2008īrewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996 around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. 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 mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge". As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive holds more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials.
The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. Since late 2009, the headquarters of the Internet Archive has been the building that formerly housed the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist (San Francisco, California).