Updates from the Internet Archive
Visit blog.archive.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2011 – Sep 2026
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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;
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
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.
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.
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area. “We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental
The Internet Archive is headquartered in a building that used to be a Christian Science church. The great room includes a gorgeous stained glass dome, a pipe organ, and graceful wooden pews. We seat 400+ people in this space to show movies and to host conferences on a regular basis. The room is beautiful, but those
The following guest post from digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now. Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t…
The Internet Archive jumped into bitcoin in 2011 after many people asked to donate bitcoins-- a non-techy set up our wallet (good sign), and we got about $2,000 worth of donations that first year. In 2012 we got about $6,000 worth-- interesting. I think of it as the local currency of the Internet. I figured
Written by Professor Tom Gally, University of Tokyo, and Katie Barrett, Internet Archive & JET Program AlumTranslations by Tomoki Sakakibara, University of Tokyo (日本語はページ下部にあります。 Scroll down for Japanese version.) As our global society grows ever more connected, it can be easy to assume that all of human history is…
With more than 3.1 million views to date, “Night of the Living Dead” is among the most popular feature films on the Internet Archive. The 1968 movie is also generally acknowledged as one of the landmark films of the horror genre, as well as the work that single handedly created the modern conception of the
As many of you have already seen, we are working on the next generation of the archive.org web site, which we call Version 2.0 (v2). It's in beta right now, so go check it out! We get a lot of feedback from the people who have elected to try out v2, and we read ALL of
Amidst the speculative boom for NFTs and crypto-currencies, one decentralized technology foundation is taking the long view by investing in deep history and the far future. Today, the Filecoin Foundation announced a 50,000 FIL grant to the Internet Archive - the largest single donation in the digital library’s 25-year…
With the Internet Archive being mentioned prominently in the news for the past couple of weeks, we've had thousands of people discuss us in social media, and contact us directly with strong concerns and worries. Above all, many want, in some way, to "help" and have asked us what they can do, if anything.While your