INTERNET ARCHIVE

Open Library
Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 3K books per day in 15 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1926 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library and Archive.org sites. Some of our digitized books are only available to the print disabled.

Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive is home to the Wayback Machine, a searchable digital archive of the public web. The collection contains more than 475 billion web pages and counting and is an invaluable resource for journalists, academics, researchers, activists, students, and the general public alike. The average lifecycle of a webpage before it is edited or removed is 100 days – our goal is to ensure web resiliency and preserve our cultural memory now and for future generations to come. More than 550,000 Wayback Machine users are served per day.

Community Webs
Community Webs is a program that educates and empowers local librarians to digitally capture and preserve their communities’ historical records. More than ever, the lives of communities are documented online. The web remains a vital resource for traditionally under-represented groups to write and share about their lives and experiences. Preserving this web-published material allows libraries to build more expansive, inclusive, and community-oriented archival collections. This program exists in more than 150 libraries thanks to generous funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. With additional funding, we hope to expand the program to more locations around the US and Canada highlighting the vast amounts of untold or underrepresented stories, voices, and perspectives.

We operate in partnership with education, library, and museum partners around the world to archive and catalogue data via our scanning centers to digitize information that is not currently available to the wider world. We also run the "Wayback Machine" that catalogues the internet and provides a historical search function to find captures of websites and other ephemera that might not be available any longer.

We have created and continue to improve the "Wayback Machine" which is hosted at archive.org. We also have scanning centers around the globe working to digitize information of all sorts (i.e. textbooks, musical scores, catalogues, medical papers, etc) and work in close partnership with Open Library to make all public domain information available to anyone with an internet connection.

In 2020 we grew from 40M to 65M public media items, including texts, images, videos, and audio files. Right now, we’re storing over 70 petabytes of data (equivalent to the contents of 186M filing cabinets) and serve more than 1.5M visitors daily. The Wayback Machine has grown rapidly, too; right now there are 475B web pages archived inside it, and we’re capturing another 750M pages every single day! We made a number of improvements to our systems to handle this growth—this past fall, we installed a fiber optic connection at our headquarters in San Francisco, allowing us to drastically expand our bandwidth in response to increased demand.

As a library, we pay special attention to books, and this was a year to remember. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library this spring. In the middle of a massive public health crisis, we provided digital access to essential books for students, teachers, library patrons, and quarantined citizens who were cut off from their libraries and schools. Educational professionals everywhere relied on us for access to digital materials, and the National Library of Aruba utilized our resources to provide study resources for thousands of students preparing to take graduation exams while their island was shut down.

This year we also added to and expanded our collections with some fascinating new finds. Last August, the Tytell Typewriter Company donated thousands of manuals, records, books, and even historic machines to be preserved for future generations. Marygrove College, a social-justice oriented liberal arts college that was forced to close last year, donated its entire library to be digitized and shared on the Internet Archive, reopening the stacks last October. And although support for Flash has ended, this past November we launched a Flash browser emulation for hundreds of games, animations, and other cultural artifacts—letting anyone take a trip back in time to the early 2000s.