Blog

The following guest post from Joanna Kolosov, Librarian and Archivist at the Sonoma County Library in California, is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories. Sonoma County Library joined Community Webs back in … Read more

This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine will reach an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion webpages preserved. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been capturing the web—saving the voices, creativity, and communities that make up our shared digital history. Nearly one trillion pages later, we’re still archiving, so that future generations can look back and understand the … Read more

Many students do not have direct or unrestricted access to their local libraries during our current health crisis. One of our goals as librarians and stewards is to bring books to these learners of all ages as they continue their educations at home. As a step toward this, we have created a collection of California State … Read more

The Internet Archive has reached a new milestone: 2 million. That’s how many modern books are now in its lending collection—available free to the public to borrow at any time, even from home. “We are going strong,” said Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive and director of the Open Libraries program. “We are making … Read more

The Internet Archive is wholly dependent on Ubuntu and the Linux communities that create a reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech), rapidly evolving operating system. It is hard to overestimate how important that is to creating services such as the Internet Archive. When we started the Internet Archive in 1996, Sun and … Read more

The glass rises and falls. Quickly and efficiently, a woman turns the pages to the rhythmic beep of the cameras. She never misses a beat. In its first 48 hours, this tweet about book scanning at the Internet Archive went viral, reaching 7.7 million people. More than 1.5 million people viewed the video, liking it 70,000 times … Read more

Academics, legal experts, and authors explained the thoughtful reasoning and compelling need for libraries to engage in Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) at a webinar hosted by the Internet Archive and Library Futures on February 11. A recording of the session is now available. The panel dispelled myths about CDL, the digital lending model in which a library lends … Read more

Written by Professor Tom Gally, University of Tokyo, and Katie Barrett, Internet Archive & JET Program AlumTranslations by Tomoki Sakakibara, University of Tokyo (日本語はページ下部にあります。 Scroll down for Japanese version.) As our global society grows ever more connected, it can be easy to assume that all of human history is just one click away. Yet language … Read more

The Dedication of Books by H.B. Wheatley (1887), as presented for scanning. View the digitized book online. Sometimes they arrive tied up in string because their binding is broken. Others are in envelopes to protect the brittle pages from further damage. Aging books are sent from libraries to the Internet Archive for preservation. Thanks to the … Read more

Since 2016, a global community of developers, organizers, entrepreneurs, and academics have gathered to share ideas and approaches to building a Decentralized Web. The DWeb they dreamt of would stand in stark contrast to today’s Web, where a handful of powerful, centralized corporations rule over our data, social networks, and network infrastructure. The DWeb would … Read more