The Internet Archive Announces Launch of the Offline Archive Project

In the past few days the Internet Archive (IA) has been busy announcing improved and enhanced services. Wonderful news!

We have already noted the launch of a new streaming music player, more MS-DOS games you can play online and will soon have much more to say about the launch of several new features (go and try them out today) that the Wayback Machine just released that make this essential and important tool even more useful and valuable.

But wait, that’s not all.

This week the Internet Archive announced the launch of the “Offline Archive” project that will help bring IA collections to locations around the globe that have poor or no Internet access.

From the IA Blog: 

Since lack of an internet connection is a major obstacle to that goal [the Internet Archive’s central mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge] , we created the Offline Archive project—that works to make online collections available regardless of internet availability.

As part of a solution to this problem, we have built an offline server that transfers Internet Archive collections to a local server, caches content while browsing, and delivers the Internet Archive UI offline in the browser. The system moves content between servers by “sneakernet”—on disks, USB sticks, and SD cards. This approach should improve access for anything from a Raspberry Pi to an institutional server holding terabytes of data. Right now, we’re working to make it available in a variety of different languages, so that anybody can utilize it—not just English speakers.

Best of all, the Offline Archive project is open source, so that people around the world can collaborate to make it better. We are currently integrating the Archive’s APIs with those of our partners, to make it easier for them to incorporate Internet Archive content.

Learn More About the Offline Archive Project in the Complete Blog Post

Direct to the Offline Archive Info Page

Other “Offline” Internet Tools and Projects

• LibraryBox
• Arizona State University Professor’s Solar-Powered Library is Transforming Global Education

Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News