It’s been 25 years since Brewster Kahle svelò l’Internet Archive: it was 1996, and since then billions of pages have been preserved thanks to the monumental archiving activity carried out by this non-profit digital library.
The anniversary is the occasion chosen by the founder and the organizers for retrace the steps and celebrate successes of the project, inviting people to a dedicated virtual space to join the initiative with tweets, messages and videos of testimony and support.
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An Archive of everything and for everyone
Internet Archive was born with a very ambitious goal: the dream of founder (who recently wrote about it), a computer engineer with a degree at MIT, was to create a library in a digital version capable of containing all human works making them available to everyone on the Web to ensure universal access to knowledge.
Once the foundation stone has been laid, this public archive, which uses software and technology to methodically scan the Net and take snapshots of the Web cataloged according to the date of acquisition, began to grow and to enrich itself with multimedia material.
The space occupied is currently enormous, having reached the figure of 70 petabytes of data: there are 602 billion, the pages collected and accessible through the Wayback Machine, 4.6 million digitized books, 4 million videos, 14 million audio files, including concerts by independent artists such as the Smashing Pumpkins, 15 thousand computer games e 580mila software.
Online content is known to disappear or are constantly being changed and removed for various reasons and that the average duration of a page on the web is around a hundred days, but thanks to the Internet Archive, which represents the permanent and global memory of the online world, an increasingly dimension of social life, a digital copy is preserved.
This archiving work, aimed at a global user, is useful for maintaining information capable of documenting significant historical changes and passages. And those who carry out a control and verification function also benefit from it. To understand its importance, an example linked to current events is useful: in the United States, the Republican Party has deleted a page from its website in which the results of the agreement promoted in 2020 by the former president were praised. Trump with the Taliban, which in the light of what is happening in Afghanistan was evidently judged in bad taste. Thanks to the Internet Archive, however, this page has been recovered and can still be consulted.
Also for this, many newspapers rely on the Wayback Machine, because the simple screenshot of an old page can be unreliable, because it is easily editable.
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With everyone’s contribution
The staff of the Internet Archive, consisting of about 200 people, collaborates with institutions, libraries, museums, universities and research centers pursuing non-profit purposes.
However, even individuals can make a contribution: each of us can become an archivist and participate in the digital preservation process of a page. activating a specific function of the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive, that matters 1.5 million unique visitors per day and appears in the ranking of the 250 most important sites in the world, encourages the collaboration of the public, which allows you to upload and download digital material at no cost.
In order not to infringe copyright rights it is possible apply a Creative Commons license, also because the Internet Archive’s mission is to preserve a important heritage of contents and works, but also to favor a freer and more open access to information and their circulation.
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