Internet Archive Website Review

Internet Archive Website Review

Internet Archive website review – In a nutshell, the Internet Archive is a library to preserve digital contents that are available across the internet. The website contains various contents ranging from websites, books, software, music, and more.

The way this internet archive website works is by allowing the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster. However, the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible.

What is the purpose of the Internet Archive?

The name of the website is actually self-explanatory of what is the purpose of the site. The internet archive’s purpose is to preserve various digital contents across the internet. It collects various internet materials such as websites, books, software, music, games, movies and many more.

Similar to real-world content, something like books, writings, CDs, paintings, various tools and many other things will eventually stop being produced and at some point, it becomes scarce and turns into part of history. Places such as museums and libraries will attempt to conserve them so that those from the future can see them.

While digital content might not become scarce in the sense that it degrades or breaks due to its age, there are lots of contents that got lost in history either being upgraded over time, deleted, or just disappearing due to the contents stopped being shared across the internet.

For example, with the help of Waybackmachine, the website page archiver by Internet Archive, we can see the layout of the very early Facebook login page dated back to 2005. The archived website is also still functional to some extent such as being able to click the about page, terms and privacy and so on.

Internet Archive Website Review

The internet archive online book websites are also one of the highlight features of the site. As of writing, they have stored more than 7 million books that users can download and read. Some of them, however, are only able to be “borrowed” and read through its site’s built-in reader.

Internet Archive Website Review

Aside from books, they also offer various archived media from video, audio files, software, and images curated by the users. One of the interesting things that can be found in the video section is the list of old classic television programs dating from the 1940s that everyone can freely watch or download.

Who is behind the Internet Archive website?

The Internet Archive was founded and still is owned by a digital librarian Brewster Kahle. In 1996, Kahle began archiving and preserving various contents on the internet and its earliest known saved page was dated back to 10 May 1996.

Despite having been running for years, this web archive sites surprisingly heavily relies on donations from individual users as stated on its site. This is because the Internet Archive is an independent nonprofit library.

Bottom line

The Internet Archive is a digital library that preserves various digital contents across the Internet such as websites, movies, music, books and many more. It may also be more popularly known as the way back machine which is one of the internet archive’s features that documents various website pages.

Archive org, the domain for Internet Archive, was dated back to 1996. It was initiated and is still run by the digital librarian Brewster Kahle as his passionate project.

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