Photo of the Internet Archive

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The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 28+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 1,200+ library and other partners through c level contact list our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:

835 billion web pages
44 million books and texts
15 million audio recordings (including 255,000 live concerts)
10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million Television News programs)
4.8 million images
1 million software programs
Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections.

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 4,400 books per day in 20 locations around the world. Books published in or prior to 1928 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site. One of the Internet Archive's missions is to serve people who have difficulty interacting with physical books, so most of our digitized books are available to people with print disabilities (learn about access here).

Like the Internet, television is also an ephemeral medium. We began archiving television programs in late 2000, and our first public TV project was an archive of TV news surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. In 2009 we began to make selected U.S. television news broadcasts searchable by captions in our TV News Archive. This service allows researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable reference.