LITA Nashville -- Concurrent Session 2

Archiving the Digital Frontier: Saving Today’s Information for Tomorrow’s Use
Kristine Hanna, Internet Archive

The Internet Archive (IA) takes a snapshot of the web every two months, saving two billion pages per month. In 2002, it added the ability to save audio and moving images—these are generally contributed rather than crawled. It holds 55 billion pages from 55 million sites. Sixty-thousand unique visitors visit www.archive.org each day.

They aim to save everything because we don’t know what will be valuable in the future and because internet items are at risk; they disappear. IA did a study of the Nigerian election, collecting as many sites as they could find on it. When they checked 6 months later, 75 – 80 percent of those sites were gone, so that only the Internet Archive had copies.

The Internet Archive does topical collections, asking partners and users to contribute URLs to sites they believe should be archived. For example, there’s a special collection on Hurricane Katrina and one on the upcoming 2006 election. Sometimes, these special collections are made at the request and with the support of large institutional partners like the Library of Congress or the National Library of Australia.

For smaller institutions, the Internet Archive offers the web-based application, Archive It. For an annual subscription fee of $10,000 (a negotiable amount since IA is non-profit and just needs to recover costs), Archive It will collect and archive particular sites or groups of sites as requested by the institution, up to 10 million pages. The University of Texas used this service to create the Latin American Government Documents Archives.

Another project of the Internet Archive is its involvement in Open Content Alliance, a digital books project. Taking a different approach than Google, they are starting with public domain material.

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