The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It offers permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books; as of October 2012 it holds over 10 petabytes in cultural material.
The Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, and provides unrestricted online access to that material at no cost. Its largest collection is its web archive, "snapshots of the World Wide Web." The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.
Founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit operating in the United States. It has an annual budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources: revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA, where about 30 of its 200 employees work. Most of its staff work in its book scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City, and Mountain View, California, USA. Its collection is mirrored for stability and endurance at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.
Read more about Internet Archive: History, Opposition To Google Books Settlement, Opposition To S.O.P.A. and P.I.P.A.
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“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)