| The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge".It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of April 2021, the Internet Archive holds over 30 million books and texts, 8.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 649,000 software programs, 13,225,000 audio files, 3.8 million images, and 580 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.
Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996 around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet.In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, though it saved the earliest pages in May 1996. The archived content wasn't available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine.
In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software.
In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files. This method is the fastest means of downloading media from the Archive, as files are served from two Archive data centers, in addition to other torrent clients which have downloaded and continue to serve the files.
In November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the Archive to be based somewhere in Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build a backup archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump.
In 2019, its headquarters in San Francisco received a bomb threat which forced a temporary evacuation of the building. The Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations, such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs from Boston Public Library in 2017, a donation of 250,000 books from Trent University in 2018, and the entire collection of Marygrove College's library in 2020 after it closed.
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