The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation that started building a digital library of internet sites and digital artifacts 25 years ago. In 2021, it is commemorating the titanic achievement of two and a half decades of providing universal access to all knowledge.
The remarkable collection of resources contained in the Internet Archive is accessible to everyone, including historians, scholars, researchers and the general public.
To date, the organisation offers a massive archive of more than 558 billion web pages, 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio recordings, six million videos and other resources. The archive is hosted on the Wayback Machine, which can also show you what a webpage or an internet resource looked like at a certain point in the past.
On its 25th anniversary, the Internet Archive invites everyone to look at the way forward and to foster cooperation and collective work towards ensuring free and open access to knowledge. With its Wayforward Machine, visitors can check what the internet would look like in 2046, 25 years from now. On their Twitter page, Internet Archive is also running a campaign that gives us a glimpse into an information dystopia and how it would affect internet users around the world.
APC is delighted to join the celebrations of this important milestone and we encourage everyone to accept the Internet Archive's invitation to look forward and ensure that people’s ’s knowledge will be accessible for future generations. Check out this anniversary page to learn how you can get involved. Their 25th anniversary is marked with a virtual event, a campaign page and a social media campaign.
In the video below, you can go way back to 1996 when a young computer scientist named Brewster Kahle dreamed of building a “Library of Everything” for the digital age.