Outline of Internet Archive Analysis

Introduction to Internet Archive

• Non-profit organization with mission to build an Internet library and provide permanent access to digital collections for researchers
• Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, funded by sale of Alexa Internet to Amazon.com
• Recognized lack of preservation of web pages during the early development of the Internet, “Digital Dark Age” -- Internet Archive sought to solve this problem
• Originally only focused on web pages, but in 1999 began to expand to other media
• Now, collections include archived web pages, texts, audio, moving images, and software

Benefits for Archival Institutions

• Archive-It Subscription Service
• Launched in 2006, this service assists institutions in building and preserving collections of digital content
• Institution provides a site map and specifies what content to collect and how often
• Archive-It bot crawls website and harvests data according to this schedule
• Service provides 24/7 access and full text search capability
• Content hosted at Internet Archive data centers
• Benefits:
• Smaller archives often lack resources to preserve online content properly
• Cheaper than in-house preservation and hosting
• Even larger archives use this service, e.g. Wisconsin Historical Society
• Hosting Digital Collections
• “Virtual Library Card,” free membership allows users to upload content, post in forums, and leave reviews
• Ideal digital collection:
• Targeted at well-defined audience
• Community participation
• Multiple people can contribute high-quality content to a digital collection
• Supports forum for community discussions
• Users can comment on, or “review,” individual items
• Easy-to-use interface
• Grateful Dead Live Music Collection is an excellent example of what a digital collection should be
• Partnerships
• Direct partnership with Internet Archive to digitize analog material
• Often with large institutions
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is digitizing space imagery: historic film, photographs, and video
• U.S. Navy’s three academic libraries are digitizing historic publications

Challenges and Complications

• Intellectual property rights
• Very little consideration of intellectual property or copyright protection when first founded
• Still has not worked out all difficulties
• Live music collections only host material from trade-friendly artists
• Requires effort to enforce this requirement
• Artists can change their policies
• Dave Matthews Band: originally allowed live recordings to be uploaded, but reversed this stance in 2003; recordings were taken down