Updates from the Internet Archive
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The Web just got a little bit more reliable. Available today, starting with version 1.4 of its desktop browser, Brave has added a 404 detection system, with an automated Wayback Machine lookup process to its desktop browser. By default, it now offers users one-click access to archived versions of Web pages that might…
After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984. While there are certainly…
Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. The DLARC is funded by a significant grant from the Amateur Radio Digital…
Internet Archive has archived and identified 9 million open access journal articles-- the next 5 million is getting harder Open Access journals, such as New Theology Review (ISSN: 0896-4297) and Open Journal of Hematology (ISSN: 2075-907X), made their research articles available for free online for years. With a quick…
Research and cultural heritage institutions are facing increasing costs to provide long-term public access to historically valuable collections of scientific data, born-digital records, and other digital artifacts. With many institutions moving data to cloud services, data sharing and access costs have become more…
We’re standing up for the digital rights of all libraries in court! On Monday at 1pm ET, the Southern District of New York will hear oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the lawsuit against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending, brought by 4 of the world’s largest…
Extinction isn’t just a biological issue. In the 21st century, it’s a technical, even digital one, too. The average web page might last three months before it’s altered or deleted forever. You never know when access to the information on these web pages is going to be needed. It might be three months from now;
The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as "Dungeons and Drag Queens". Once thought to…
It was supposed to be magazines.Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do - in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines
Two different, but somewhat related additions to the archive you might want to check out. First, I was contacted earlier this week about a project to recover information off of an old Cray-1 supercomputer hard drive. Unlike, say, trying to get your old floppies to read or pulling an old mix tape off of a
Ask publishers to restore access to the 500,000 books they've caused to be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library. Sign the Open Letter I’m Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive. The lawsuit against our library—Hachette v. Internet Archive—is fast approaching the oral argument stage of its…
Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but…
From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, there is a growing movement to challenge books in schools that some suggest are inappropriate for students. Concern goes beyond explicit content; it now includes opposition to LGBTQIA material, the history of racism, and material that may cause discomfort to readers. While…
It’s the classic librarian’s dilemma: Because no library has unlimited storage, every library has to carefully manage its physical collection, and that means removing books to make space for new ones. On one hand, it’s exciting to bring in fresh voices, new stories and modern research, but on the other, a library’s…
Brewster Kahle, Chairman of the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, November 2015 [NYtimes story, Motherboard, BoingBoing. Liquidation.] All deposits are safe, all loans performing, great and dedicated staff, wonderful members. So why difficult? Despite five years of effort, $1 million in donations spent (from the…
As someone who's uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to the Internet Archive's stacks and who has probably done a few million transactions with the materials over the years, I just "know" about the Internet Archive python client, and if you're someone who wants to interact with the site as a power user (or were
In 1847, Frederick Douglass started a newspaper advocating the abolition of slavery that ran until 1851. After the Civil War, there was a newspaper for freed slaves, the Freedmen’s Record. The Internet Archive is bringing these and many more works online for free public access. But there’s a problem: Our Optical…
The US Copyright Office sought comments in its ongoing study of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 512 safe harbor study. They are generally looking to find out how well the notice and takedown system is working for everyone—Internet platforms and users, as well as creators and copyright holders. We…
Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways: Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 22 - both virtual and in-person. Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest. Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2025, below. On January 1, 2025…
When you visit a public library, you get to meet the librarians and others who build and care for those collections. You know there are people who empty the garbage cans, who put back the borrowed books, who maintain the computers, and who determine what ends up on the shelf.
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum's Universal Robots (or…
A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all. The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer…
The following guest post from humanities scholar Katie Livingston is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once…
Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual…
Last week, the American public finally got its hands on the Mueller report–more than 400 pages, much of the text redacted, detailing the special counsel’s much anticipated findings. Within minutes of that release, many copies of that file were uploaded to the Internet Archive. On Amazon, other outfits were charging…
To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners…
The Wayback Machine has an exciting new feature: it can list the dates and times, the Timestamps, of all page elements compared to the date and time of the base URL of a page. This means that users can see, for instance, that an image displayed on a page was captured X days before the
Ten Petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of cultural material saved! On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive’s massive collections. We also announced full 80Terabyte web crawl to researchers; the…
Every January we feature works that are entering the public domain. And this year the big story is in recorded music. Recorded Music from 1922 and earlier Approximately 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 will join the public domain in the U.S. for the first time due to the Music Modernization Act (read more at
A Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade, are now inaccessible; our analysis shows that the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise dead pages.