Internet Archive logo and wordmark.svg by The Internet Archive, March 2011, source: https://www.logoeps.net/internet-archive-logo/

The Internet Archive is a name well known for those who visit the web frequently and more than often saved them time and resources when original links are deleted. As you know it is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. The key core of this site is free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, videogames, music, audiovisual, and print materials. Its spirit is all about free access to knowledge as it should always be. The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts. I think that the website's words well encapsulate its spirits:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

Because I sometimes feed on nostalgic feelings, I would like to share here the pic and link to the very first archived image on May 10, 1996, at 2:42 pm UTC (7:42 am PDT):

link: https://web.archive.org/web/19960510144231/http://www.microsoft.com/ie/IE.HTM

If you look carefully nothing before that date is archived, we are witnessing a piece of internet archeology and it's giving me goosebumps just by looking at it. This is the earliest known archived page and then by October of that year many and many other pages were archived in large amounts. Then the archived content became more easily available to the general public in 2001, through the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives (collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life, and social history). Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library.

In August 2012 BitTorrent was added to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded 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.

Keep in mind that the Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations,(1) such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs from Boston Public Library in 2017,(2) a donation of 250,000 books from Trent University in 2018,(3) and the entire collection of Marygrove College's library after it closed in 2020 (4).

Why am I writing this boring history lesson on the Internet Archive? Because it has been brought to my attention (thank you Yatsufusa!) that the site is facing a critical moment because a coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for their work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records, here you can read the official page:

https://blog.archive.org/2025/04/17/take-action-defend-the-internet-archive/

and if you click in the link provided there you can sign the petition and even make a donation but in case you can't donate spreading both links, especially the petition one can help a lot:

https://www.change.org/p/defend-the-internet-archive

I've already signed it, and contributed with money. If you want to share it with your peers, friends, relatives, etc. this will help a lot. Thank you for reading and let's keep the knowledge for all by all. Without them I couldn't be able to retrieve important info for me and for others when I provide links to my blogs. And it's also helping with my Newgrounds archeology collection since some forum threads not more accessible can be retrieved thanks to it, and some contain crucial information that are helping me with my Newgrounds guides for beginner users of the site. Thank you for existing, Internet Archive.

References and footnotes:

(1) "How do I make a physical donation to the Internet Archive?". Internet Archive Help Center. Retrieved July 4, 2022. See also: "Tag Archives: donations". Internet Archive Blogs. Retrieved December 4, 2020

(2) "Boston Public Library transfers sound archives collection to Internet Archive for digitization, preservation, and public access". Boston Public Library. October 11, 2017. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved December 4, 2020.

(3) "Trent University donates 250,000 books to be digitized by Internet Archive as part of Bata Library transformation". Trent University. September 13, 2018. Archived from the original on November 30, 2020. Retrieved December 4, 2020

(4) Seltzer, Rick (October 21, 2020). "A new home online for closed college libraries?". Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on December 4, 2020. Retrieved December 4, 2020