We’ve said it before and will say it again and again, we’re longtime supporters and users of the Internet Archive, including The Wayback Machine* around here. Over the years we’ve had a number of opportunities to have interesting and informative chats with members of the IA team including the IA’s founder, Brewster Kahle, a person we admire and respect both professionally (look at what he’s created and important and essential resource now and more so in the future) and personally (a wonderful guy).
So, here’s a new audio report about the Internet Archive that features comments from Kahle.
The segment aired last night on Crosscurrents from KALW (a public radio station in San Francisco).
It runs 7:14 and also includes a text report.
From the Text:
“If it’s not online, it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” says Kahle. “People aren’t going and necessarily hunting things down in libraries in the way that they used to 50 years ago. So we’re if we’re going to be bringing up our kids with this as their whole experience of information, we better put the best we have to offer within reach of our children – and it’s not there now.”
The Internet Archive is working to change that. With 30 scanning centers in eight countries, they’ve uploaded more than three million books in 184 languages. Those books are publicly available, for free.
Sometimes libraries pay the Internet Archive to digitize their entire collections. If that sounds like an incomprehensible, even impossible, amount of data to you, it doesn’t to Brewster Kahle.
Direct to Audio and Text Report: “In an old church, the Internet Archive stores our digital history” (via KALW)
But Wait There’s More…
How about a couple of quick Internet Archive and Wayback Machine tips?
1. We continue to come across Wayback Machine users who remain unaware that for over a year it has been possible and very easy to use Wayback to instantly crawl, capture, and archive most (but not all) open web pages and PDFs. Pages and PDF’s you YOU SELECT at a time you select. In other words, you call the shots and tell Wayback to capture web pages and PDF then be given a direct URL to that specific archived version.
Look for the “Save Page Now” box on the Wayback Machine homepage. Paste in the url of a web page or PDF and click the “Save Page” button. In a second you’ll be given a direct link to this specific archived copy. To be clear, what you capture will be available to all Wayback users.
2. The Internet Archive’s fee-based service Archive-It service continues to grow recently partnering with the California Digital Library.
Archive-It works with various organizations including schools, government, museums, non-profits, etc. to automatically crawl, capture, and archive web content they select.
Nearly 2800 these topic or event focused collections are publicly accessible and can be keyword search (unlike Wayback Machine). Browse and search what’s available here.
It total, Archive-It has captured and archived material from close to 10 billion urls.
See Also: More About Web Archiving and The Internet Archive in this recent New Yorker article.
About Gary Price
