A year after launching in 1998, Google’s mission statement was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A decade later, the company’s changed its focus and abandoned many archiving efforts. But an SF nonprofit called the Internet Archive has dutifully been cataloguing everything in the meantime.
Medium reports on the history and nature of the nonprofit whose motto is “Universal Access To All Knowledge”. The Internet Archive hosts a staggering amount of data in all kinds of media:
“The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web.
Books. One of the world’s largest open collections of digitized books, over 6 million public domain books, and an open library catalog.
Videos. 1.9 million videos, including classic TV, 1,300 vintage home movies, and 4,000 public-domain feature films.
The Prelinger Archives. Over 6,000 ephemeral films, including vintage advertising, educational and industrial footage.
Audio. 2.3 million audio recordings, including over 74,000 radio broadcasts, 13,000 78rpm records, and 1.7 million Creative Commons-licensed audio recordings.
Live music. Over 137,000 concert recordings, nearly 10,000 from the Grateful Dead alone.
Audiobooks. Over 10,000 audiobooks from LibriVox and more.
TV News. 668,000 news broadcasts with full-text search.
Scanning services. Free and open access to scan complete print collections in 33 scanning centers, with 1,500 books scanned daily.
Software. The largest collection of historical software in the world.”