The Internet Archive

by

I am bit surprised the the Internet Archive isn’t much more well-known.

From their mission statement:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Just follow the links in the quote above and you’ll find an incredible amount of each of the mentioned media.

5 thoughts on “The Internet Archive”

  1. If it is the same site I have used from time to time you could spend hours wandering around there.

    Of course when it applies to looking at old websites – like anything else – Sturgeon’s law applies.

    Bill (incognito)

  2. I clicked on American Libraries. It’s a mess. Lots of windows that are basically useless; there is no clear catalog; only one window for browsing books – but it is organized in extremely unhelpful way: either by Author or by Title, alphabetically. What if you don’t know either one? What if you are looking for, say, French historical books describing America at the time of de Lafayette? Otherwise. No index by topic or following the international library system code. I don’t know how can you find anything there.

  3. Bill (incognito)

    Of course when it applies to looking at old websites – like anything else – Sturgeon’s law applies

    While it can be argued that ‘ninety percent of everything is crap’, this is old crap we are talking here and therefore kind of sacrosant.

    Tatyana,

    I agree that the contents could be organized in a more helpful way. On the other hand, this isn’t called the Internet Archive for nothing. Stuff is indeed organized just like most things online. Like with this book, for example. Istead of an alphabetical order they use weblinks that give access to categories (which are not all directly related to the title in question, I have to admit).

  4. Ralf,
    oh, a see it is possible to just type a subject into the search window, and you’ll get books with complete or partial sentence including your search words in the title of the book. Well, it’s not exactly what I’d want but it’s still a bit more than I thought previously.

    Thank you for telling us of that source, anyway

Comments are closed.