From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Internet Archive, repository of modern culture, turns 20
When the Internet Archive was created 20 years ago, few envisioned how a small galaxy of about 500,000 websites would evolve into the center of human communication and culture.
Now, the nonprofit San Francisco organization — which celebrated the milestone with a party Wednesday night — curates a vast digital archive that includes more than 370 million websites and 273 billion pages, many captured before they disappeared forever.
It’s more than an archive of Internet sites. The organization, founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, now has a virtual storehouse ranging from digitally converted books and historic film to funny memes and audio recordings of Grateful Dead concerts.
A bit more:
The archive is best known for the Wayback Machine, which uses computer algorithms to crawl the Web and constantly save snapshots of sites. Online visitors use it to compare how websites, like SFGate.com, have changed over the years. It’s also a repository of Internet firms that went belly-up long ago, like Pets.com.
The site’s 3 million to 4 million visitors a day show that “people want old stuff, they want to remember,” Kahle said.
And:
In another section is an archive of about 3 million hours of TV news broadcasts. That includes a searchable database of political ads captured during the current election season, which political scientists 100 years from now might use to figure out what we were thinking during this “craziest, most disruptive election since the Civil War,” said Roger Macdonald, the TV archive’s director.
And:
Kahle said the archive has digitized about 2.5 million books, although it’s still a long way from its goal of 10 million books by 2020, and from the Library of Congress. But archive visitors can now search through books it has digitized, a feat not possible until recently.
An amazing resorce - I use it several times/week. Lots of blacksmithing and radio resources on there.
Leave a comment