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Type of business | Nonprofit organization |
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Type of site | Digital library |
Available in | English |
Founded | May 10, 1996[1][2] |
Headquarters | Richmond District San Francisco, California, United States 37°46′56″N 122°28′18″W / 37.782321°N 122.471611°W |
Founder(s) | Brewster Kahle |
Chairman | Brewster Kahle |
Services |
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Revenue | ![]() |
Total assets | ![]() |
Employees | ![]() |
URL | archive |
Commercial | No |
Launched | 1996 |
Current status | Active |
ASN | 7941 |
Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library website founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle.[1][2][4] It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024[update], the Internet Archive held more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine.[5] Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".[5]
The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures.[6][7] The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts.
In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now.