Thursday, 22nd June 2006

Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle Profiled in a New Article

While digitizing content gets tons of press these days, archiving the web is a very important issue for info pros that deserves lots of attention and work. Although many web archiving projects exist around the globe, The Internet Archive is perhaps the most well known.

The IA is home to The Wayback Machine (over 55 million pages archived back to 1996). along with serveral special collections.

The IA's founder, leader, Internet legend (and ResourceShelf reader (-; ), Brewster Kahle, is profiled in this new News.com report by Elinor Mills.

We were happy to see that Elinor's article not only talks about The Wayback Machine but other IA archiving initiatives (including the Open Content Alliance, its live music archive, its moving image archive (including the Prelinger Collection and Vintage Cartoon Collection) and more. Of course, legal issues are also discussed in the article.

The only thing the article is missing is a look at the important work that the IA is doing with its Archive-It program allowing institutions to create their own web archives. Examples include:

• NEW Archive: National Government Statistical Websites

The websites of statistical agencies of countries may contain data, reports, statistical yearbooks, press releases, methodological guides, and other information of continuing interest to social scientists and historians. 75 websites in roman alphabets from Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Eurasia, East Asia, Latin America, the Near East, Russia and Eastern Europe, and South Asia are included.

• Latin American Governments Document Archive
• Archive of Venezuelan Political Discourse
• North Carolina State Government Web Site Archive
• Canadian Political Parties And Political Interest Groups
• Canadian Labour Unions

A complete and growing list of Archive-It projects can be found here.

It's also worth pointing out that the Internet Archive is working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In January, NARA, with the help of the IA, released the “2004 Presidential Term Web Harvest” containing over 75 million pages. In March 2006, this archive became keyword searchable using Nutch technology.

The IA's crawler, Heretix, is open source.

"Let's have a library system that is in the great traditions of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, and the Library of Alexandria," he [Kahle] says while showing a reporter around the Internet Archive's offices in San Francisco's Presidio. "If we are able to build that library again with the vision of the Greeks but the technology of the modern era, that's something to be proud of."

See Also: Archived April 2006 Webinar About Archive-It Program (via Educause)

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