Every now and then, while bumbling around the vastness of the world wide web one comes across something truly impressive. This is one of those times. The Internet Archive is a project like no other.


A public nonprofit endeavor The Internet Archive, which is physically located in the Presidio of San Francisco was founded in 1996.


The Presidio

A huge undertaking the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet, Quantum Corporation and others. The intent of the Internet Archive is to build a digital library consisting of a collection of information, both visual and text, that exist in digital format with the purpose of offering permanent access to researchers, historians, scholars and blessedly anyone with a computer and a curiosity. All this information is there for the taking, there is no charge.

When asked why undertake such an endeavor The Internet Archive responses:

"Societies have always placed importance on preserving their culture and heritage. However, much early 20th-century media - television and radio, for example - was not saved. The Library of Alexandria - an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world - disappeared when it was burned to the ground.

But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory, and without memory it has no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. In 1996, as our culture began to produce more and more artifacts in digital form, the Archive set out to help prevent publicly available material on the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - from disappearing into the past. Despite the many challenges involved in collecting and preserving digital materials, we feel it is necessary to proceed as best we can."

To say the size of and the amount of information contained within the archive is impressive is an understatement. The amount of or sheer vastness of information contained within this digital archive verges on being inconcealable. The Archive's Internet collections include Web pages, Usenet bulletin boards, FTP sites and a giant library of digitally converted films. Here are some examples in the form of numbers. It is estimated that as of 2001 "The Internet Archive" contains over:

4 Billion web pages
200 Million pages covering the United States election of 2000
16 million Usenet postings
A movie Collection consisting of approximately 956 films ranging from 10 to over 500mb in size
5000 pages of Arpanet Historical documentation

Add that all together and according to numbers provided by The Internet Archive it equals over 43 terabytes. To better grasp just how much information 43 terabytes represents, understand that the United States Library of Congress (20 million books, not counting pictures) is estimated to contain the digital equivalent of 20 terabytes.

There is a world of information available to all of us in this archive. The film collection alone is astounding. Have a look, but be prepared to stay awhile. Thankfully there is no closing time or grumpy security guard to deal with at this particular library.