The Internet Has a Memory

You know how we often say beware of what you post online because it never goes away?  Well, the web really does have a memory, and it’s called The Internet Archive.

The president of the board, Rick Prelinger says, “Our mission is universal access to all information all of the time.  We are part of the infrastructure of the web. We are the web’s memory.”

And what a memory it is!  As of last month, the non-profit organization held 281 billion webpages, and by now has most likely added billions more.  It also stores books, journals, YouTube clips and cable news.  The Internet Archive website apparently gets more than a thousand hits per second.  It seems to be the place to find whatever you want to find.

The goal of the Archive seems to be simply to keep all the information that was once available online.  “During the Iraq war the [Bush] White House quietly took down some of its earlier press releases. But we had them,” said Prelinger, whose specialty is archiving film. “Digital information is part of our cultural heritage but it’s tremendously volatile. It’s fragile.” Storing it is not just an act of historical preservation, he says, but a means to hold institutions accountable. “We want to help keep the internet honest and safe and defend it from ignorance.”

Since the Internet Archive is at a physical location in California, some critics have questioned the stability against disasters against things like earthquakes.  To this, Brewster Kahle, one of the co-founders replied, “… yes, we have a backup copy of the bits in another location in the bay area and the Library of Alexandria in [Egypt] has a partial copy and a partial copy is in Amsterdam. Not good enough, but a start. Yes, we archive onto hard drives these days. [We] used to use tape. [As] another project puts it ‘Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.’”

Internet Archive by the numbers

2 million

Unique visitors per day.

250

Rank among most popular websites.

10

Petabytes of material archived (one petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes).

350,000

TV news broadcasts archived.

2 million to 2.5 million

Digital copies of books.

100,000

Music concerts archived.

150

Employees.

Source: SFGate

Article Source:  The Guardian