The Internet Archive has been one of my favorite sites for quite a few years, and many of its hidden powers are not that obvious at first glance, so I figured I might as well write up a few posts. With that said, this is part 1 of a 6 part series.
What is the Internet Archive? According to their about page:
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. … Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software, as well as archived web pages in our collections.
That sure is a lot to take in, and from a non-profit organization too! In short, the Internet Archive is dedicating to digitally preserving both our physical and digital history, and making it all freely available to the world, in many ways more than any other library or museum out there. Besides its core offerings, the Internet Archive has a large number of fascinating connected projects, including Open Library and most recently Political TV Ad Archive which collects this year’s political ads and reports some fascinating data.
There sure is a lot going on at the Internet Archive, and that’s why they’re always open to donations. There are quite a few things I couldn’t do without the Internet Archive, and over the next few days (weeks?) I hope to share some of the far less obvious ones with you. For now, browse around it and see what you can discover!