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Archive.org, the great library on the Internet
An immense store of both contents and information. That is what it is, roughly speaking, the Internet Archive, also known as Archive.org. For more than one decade, this virtual library of Alexandria has been keeping copies of all the web sites that can be found on the Internet, and thus it is very useful in order to study the evolution of Internet during the last few years. But there is still more.
Archive.org has also thousands of films, texts and music whose copyrights have expired or have Creative Commons licenses or other types of licenses that allow their free distribution.
Internet Archive is a non-profit project that was born in 1996 at San Francisco prison (U.S.A.) promoted by Alexa Internet, a subsidiary company of Amazon.com, and by the Library of the Congress of the United States with a clear purpose: preserving the past of the Internet. Day by day, the computers of Alexa search the Internet tirelessly and store the contents of the different sites. Their storage capacity is, therefore, gigantic. Nowadays, it is estimated that it has some 85,000 million pages, apart from all the audio, video and text files.
Its searcher, called WayBack Machine, makes it possible to enter the webs stored. Thanks to this system it is possible to observe, for instance, the extent up to which the design of the portal of Yahoo! in Spain since 1998 up to this moment, or even access sites that have already disappeared, such as the site of the extinct newspaper Diario 16.
When the address searched for is introduced, a chart with the years and dates in which that web site was copied appears. For instance, in the case of Repsol, a total of 314 pages appear between 2002 and 2007 that can be visited by internauts. Some dates are marked with an asterisk, which means that it was at that time that the site went through a substantial change.
Spreading culture
But Archive.org is not only devoted to keeping web pages so that they may be remembered and used by nostalgic users, it also carries out a praiseworthy task spreading culture. And the thing is that this library stores hundreds of thousands of films, texts and music that have been made public. Therefore, they can be downloaded, used and distributed, as far as it is not done with commercial purposes, of course.
Moving Images is the most popular section and the most venerated one by the lovers of the seventh art. They can enjoy it downloading more than 2,000 complete films, from master pieces such as Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922, or relatively recent films such as Night of the Living Dead (1966), by George A. Romero, or other gems such as the first film by Francis Ford Coppola, Dementia 13 (1963).
There are also animated films, documentaries, trailers, video blogs, videogames, compilations of programmes and news, recordings carried out and uploaded by internauts (Open Source Movies), with Creative Commons licences, and even sport videos. All these files can be downloaded in different formats (MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4) and qualities, depending on the connection speed and on the purpose for which they are downloaded.
In Moving Images we should point out a subsection called Prelinger Archives. Created in 1983 in New York by the movie maker and writer Rick Prelinger, these archives are a collection consisting in film material considered ephemeral, especially home-made movies, documentaries, as well as advertorial, promotional and educational material.
The complete collection -some 4,000 films, most of them VHS- was acquired by the Library of the Congress of the United States back in 2002. The Prelinger Archives are estimated to agglutinate 10% of the total production of ephemeral material filmed between 1927 and 1987, before the “boom” of home-made videos. In Arvhive.org there are some 2,000 files available.
As to the audio section, apart from audio books and MP3, there are live concerts by thousands of bands, from myths such as Grateful Dead, which even has its own section, to consolidated bands, unknown for the public, such as Calexico, and the revived -and renewed- Smashing Pumpkins, or the always eclectic Hank William III and Ryan Adams.
Texts have their own space in Archive.org too. The section Text Archive keeps the collections American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Library and Children´s Library, as well as different books donated by the community of users. We should mention the Gutenberg Project, which includes works such as Alice's Adventures Under Ground, a facsimile edition of the book that would later on become Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
In Internet Archive users can also get software and different applications that are obsolete, yet necessary in order to access the documents that do not operate with the support of the new programmes. In this section, we should point out the collection Tucows Software Library, the biggest free software library in the Internet.
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