Internet Archive



Launched in 1996, the Internet Archive is Exactly What it Says on the Tin - an archive that's on the Internet. Their goal is to be a “Library of Everything”, to quote the site's founder, Brewster Kahle.

Their best-known section is the Wayback Machine, which has its own page here and its own search box on the Internet Archive's front page. But that's only part of what they make available.

They started with websites, including MTV in their pre-launch web crawls in 1996. Rick Prelinger added moving pictures in December 2000; the Prelinger Archive is still an important part of the Internet Archive's movie collection. 9/11 caused the creation of their first television news archive, although their generic Television News archive wouldn't be created until 2012. The Wayback Machine became a distinct section in 2001, looking very different than it does in the early-2020s. Open Library, the site's core book collection, was added in 2007, and a group of brick-and-mortar libraries including the Boston Public Library made their online lending libraries available through the Internet Archive in 2011 (starting the Controlled Digital Lending section of the site). And they started their Software Archive in 2013.

They heavily advertised their news archives in the late 2010s, offering them as an impartial, unbiased collection that could be used to distinguish real news from falsifications.


 * Archive Binge: Go in looking for a particular public-domain song, come out hours later with the performer's complete back catalog and related entire runs of radio shows saved to your device to listen to later.
 * The Internet Is for Porn: Yes, there are no-longer-copyrighted issues of Playboy magazine in the Magazine Rack section.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: A goldmine of things that would otherwise forever vanish is archived here.
 * No Archive for You: Respects requests (both automated and not) to not archive things; as a result, not everything you might look for is there to be found.