The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge".[2][3] It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes.[4][5] In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

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 over 150 billion web captures.[6][7] The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.

Founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit operating in the United States. It has an annual budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources: revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation.[8] Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees work. Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond. Its collection is mirrored for stability and endurance at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.[9]

The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.[10] This non-profit digital library was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007.[11]

The Web is a wonderful place, created by hundreds of millions of people. But it's also fragile. Parts of it disappear every day. That's why I founded the Internet Archive — to give us a memory. To give everyone free and universal access to our digital world.

But what if the Internet Archive didn't exist?  

We'd live in the land of the perpetual present, an Orwellian world where people could effectively change the past — because there would be no record of it. No ability to look back.

Instead, together we are building the digital library of the future. A place where we can all go to learn and explore.

At the Internet Archive we've preserved 430 billion web pages. People download 20 million books from our site each month. We get more visitors in a year than most libraries do in a lifetime.  The key is to keep improving — and to keep it free. That's where you can help us.

Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. We don't run ads. We don't sell your personal information — in fact, to protect your privacy we don't even save your IP address. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and bandwidth.

This is the one time of year I ask you to support our mission. Please consider donating  $10, $25, $50 or whatever you can afford to support the Internet Archive. It's a small amount to inform millions. Help us do more. I promise you — it's money well spent.

Thank you,

Brewster Kahle
Founder, Digital Librarian
Internet Archive