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Member   About the Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering
permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded
in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive
includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections. Why the Archive is Building an 'Internet Library'Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts
and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology,
it's essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world. Many early movies were recycled to recover
the silver in the film. The Library of Alexandria - an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world - was eventually burned to the ground. Even
now, at the turn of the 21st century, no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist. But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from
its successes and failures. And paradoxically, with the explosion of the Internet, we live in what Danny Hillis has referred
to as our "digital dark age." The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet
- a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the
past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come. Open
and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of
an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages. The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars.
The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization. At present, the size of our Web collection is such that using it requires programming skills. However, we are hopeful about the development of tools and methods that will give the general public easy and meaningful
access to our collective history. In addition to developing our own collections, we are working to promote the formation of
other Internet libraries in the United States and elsewhere. Find
out How to make a Monetary Donation to the Archvive About our announcement and discussion lists on Internet libraries and movie archives as well as our user forums Future Libraries - How People Envision Using Internet LibrariesFrom
ephemera to artifact: Internet libraries can change the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts
of our political and cultural lives. "I believe
historians need every possible piece of paper and archived byte of digital data they can muster. The Smithsonian Institution
sees the value, and has affiliated with the Archive to preserve the 1996 campaign Web sites, official and unofficial."
Dan
Gillmor, computing editor, San Jose Mercury News, 1 September 1996 Protecting our right to know: Most states have pre-Internet sunshine laws that require
public access to government documents. Yet while the Internet has generally increased public access to information, states
have just begun to amend those laws to reflect today's Internet environment. According to Bill Chamberlin, director of
the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, such laws are being enacted "piecemeal,
one state at a time," and cover information that varies widely in nature - everything from "all public records"
to specialized information such as education reports and the licensing status of medical practitioners. In the meantime, while
public officials are posting more information on the Internet than their state legislatures require, there's little regulatory
control over exactly what is posted, when it's taken off, or how often it's updated. This leaves a gap that online
libraries can help to fill. Exercising our "right
to remember": Without paper libraries, it would be hard to exercise our "right to remember" our political
history or hold government accountable. With much of the public's business now moving from paper to digital media, Internet
libraries are certain to become essential in maintaining that right. Imagine, for instance, how news coverage of an election
campaign might suffer if journalists had only limited access to previous statements that candidates had made in the media. "The Internet Archive is a service so essential that its founding is bound
to be looked back on with the fondness and respect that people now have for the public libraries seeded by Andrew Carnegie
a century ago.... Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is
the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice
the problem properly. The Internet Archive is the beginning of a cure - the beginning of complete, detailed, accessible, searchable
memory for society, and not just scholars this time, but everyone."
Establishing Internet centers internationally:
What is a country without a memory of its cultural heritage? Internet libraries are the place to preserve the aspect of a
country's heritage that exists on the Internet. Tracing
the way our language changes: During the late 19th century, James Murray, a professor at Oxford University, built
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary by sending copies of selected books to "men of letters"
who volunteered to search them for the first occurrences of words and to trace the migration of their various meanings. Internet
libraries could allow linguists to automate much of this extremely labor-intensive process. Tracking the Web's evolution: Historians, sociologists, and journalists
could use Internet libraries to hold up a mirror to society. For example, they might ask when different ethnic groups or special
interests or certain businesses became a presence on the Internet. "We don't know where this Internet is going, and once we get there it will be very instructive
to look back."
Reviving dead links: A few services
- such as UC Berkeley's Digital Library Project, the Online Computer Library Center, and Alexa Internet are starting to offer access to archived versions of Web pages when those pages have been removed from the Web. This means
that if you get a "404 - Page Not Found" error, you'll still be able to find a version of the page. Understanding the economy: Economists could use Archive data
such as link structures - what and how many links a site contains - to investigate how the Web affects commerce. Finding out what the Web tells us about ourselves: Researchers
could use data on links and traffic to better understand human behavior and communication. "Researchers could use the Archive's Web snapshots in combination with
usage statistics to compare how people in different countries use the Web over long periods of time.... Political scientists
and sociologists could use the data to study how public opinion gets formed. For example, suppose a device for increasing
privacy became available: Would it change usage patterns?"
"The Internet Archive has created
a kind of test tube that allows a broad range of researchers to analyze the Web in ways that have never been possible before.
What makes this type of research unique is that it often requires the fusion of traditional tools and techniques with new
methods, and it results in the development of new theories, techniques, and metrics."
Looking back: With a "way-back
machine" - a device that displayed the Web as it looked on a given date - historians and others would literally have
a window on the past. How would you use an Internet library? Related Projects and ResearchInternet libraries raise many issues
in a range of areas, including archiving technology, copyright, privacy and free speech, trademark, trade secrets, import/export
issues, stolen property, pornography, the question of who will have access to the libraries, and more. Below are links to projects, resources, and institutions related to Internet libraries. Internet Libraries and Librarianship
Archiving Technology
Internet Mapping
Internet Statistics
Copyright
Privacy and Free Speech
Internet Libraries and Librarianship Alexa
Internet has catalogued Web sites and provides this information in a free service.
www.alexa.com The American Library Association is a major
trade association of American libraries.
www.ala.org The Australian National Library collects
material including organizational Web sites.
pandora.nla.gov.au/documents.html The Council on Library and Information Resources
works to ensure the well-being of the scholarly communication system.
www.clir.org
See its publication Why Digitize? at
www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80.html The Digital Library Forum (D-Lib) publishes
an online magazine and other resources for building digital libraries.
www.dlib.org Attorney I. Trotter Hardy explains copyright
law and examines its implications for digital materials in his paper Internet Archives and Copyright.
copyright_TH.php The Internet Public Library site has many
links to online resources for the general public.
www.ipl.org Brewster Kahle is a founder of WAIS Inc.
and Alexa Internet and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive. See his paper The Ethics of Digital Librarianship
at
ethics_BK.php Michael Lesk of the National Science Foundation
has written extensively on digital archiving and digital libraries.
www.purl.net/NET/lesk The Library of Congress is the national
library of the United States.
www.loc.gov The Museum Digital Library plans to help
digitize collections and provide access to them.
www.digitalmuseums.org The National Archives and Records Administration
oversees the management of all US federal records. It also archives federal Web sites including the Clinton White House site.
www.nara.gov The National Science Foundation Digital Library Program
has funded academic research on digital libraries.
www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/dli/start.htm National Technical Information Service (NTIS),
U.S. Department of Commerce, Technology Administration. NTIS is an archive and distributor of scientific, technical, engineering
and business related information developed by and for the federal government.
www.ntis.gov Network Wizards has been tracking Internet
growth for many years.
www.nw.com Project Gutenberg is making ASCII versions
of classic literature openly available. www.gutenberg.org The Radio and Television Archive has many
links to related resources.
www.rtvf.unt.edu/links/histsites.htm Revival of the Library of Alexandria is
a project to revive the ancient library in Egypt.
www.bibalex.org The Society of American Archivists is a
professional association focused on ensuring the identification, preservation, and use of records of historical value.
www.archivists.org The Royal Institute of Technology Library in Sweden
is creating a system of quality-assessed information resources on the Internet for academic use.
www.lib.kth.se/main/eng The United States Government Printing
Office produces and distributes information published by the US government.
www.access.gpo.gov The University of Virginia is building a
catalog of digital library activities.
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/
Archiving Technology The Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) computing and public policy page includes papers and news on pending legislation on
issues including universal access, copyright and intellectual property, free speech and the Internet, and privacy.
www.acm.org/serving The Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Digital
Video Library Project is studying how multimedia digital libraries can be established and used.
www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu The Intermemory Project aims to develop
highly survivable and available storage systems.
www.intermemory.org The National Film Preservation Board, established
by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, works with the Library of Congress to study and implement plans for film and
television preservation. The site's research page includes links to the board's 1993 film preservation study, a 1994 film preservation plan, and a 1997 television and video study. All the documents warn of the dire state of film and television preservation in the United States.
lcweb.loc.gov/film/filmpres.html The National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) posts IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in data processing
and data transmission.
www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) encourages
research in information retrieval from large text collections.
trec.nist.gov
Internet Mapping An Atlas of
Cyberspaces has maps and dynamic tools for visualizing Web browsing.
www.cybergeography.com/atlas/surf.html The Internet Mapping Project is a long-term
project by a scientist at Bell Labs to collect routing data on the Internet.
www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map The Matrix Information Directory Service
has good maps and visualizations of the networked world.
www.mids.org Peacock Maps has maps of Internet connectivity.
www.peacockmaps.com
Internet Statistics WebReference
has an Internet statistics page (publisher: Internet.com).
webreference.com/internet/statistics.html
Copyright The Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) copyright information page includes text of pertinent laws and pending legislation.
www.acm.org/usacm/copyright Tom W. Bell teaches intellectual property
and Internet law at Chapman University School of Law.
www.tomwbell.com
His site includes a graph showing the trend of the maximum US copyright term at www.tomwbell.com/writings/(C)_Term.html Cornell University posts the text of copyright
law at
www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/unframed/17/107.html
www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/unframed/17/108.html The Digital Future Coalition is a nonprofit
working on the issues of copyright in the digital age.
www.dfc.org The National Academy Press is the publishing
arm of the national academies.
"The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age"
http://www.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/
"LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress"
www.nap.edu/books/0309071445/html Pamela Samuelson is a professor in the School
of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley.
info.berkeley.edu/~pam Title 17 of US copyright code
www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/ US Government Copyright Office
www.loc.gov/copyright
Privacy and Free Speech The Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) free-speech information page includes the text of pertinent laws and pending legislation.
www.acm.org/usacm/speech The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) privacy
information page includes the text of congressional testimony and links to other resources.
www.acm.org/usacm/privacy The Benton Foundation Communications Policy and Practice
Program has the goal of infusing the emerging communications environment with public-interest values.
www.benton.org/cpphome.html The Center for Democracy and Technology
works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age.
www.cdt.org The Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference
has a site containing information on each annual conference held since 1991.
www.cfp.org The Electronic Frontier Foundation works
to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression in the arena of computers and the Internet.
www.eff.org The Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a project of the Fund for Constitutional Government, is a public-interest research center whose goal is to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect
privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
www.epic.org The Free Expression Policy Project is a
think tank on artistic and intellectual freedom at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. Through policy research and advocacy,
they explore freedom of expression issues including censorship, copyright law, media localism, and corporate media reform.
www.fepproject.org The Internet Free Expression Alliance is
an information and advocacy organization focused on free speech as it relates to the Internet.
www.ifea.net The Internet Privacy Coalition aims to protect
privacy on the Internet by promoting the widespread availability of strong encryption and the relaxation of export controls
on cryptography.
www.privacy.org/ipc The Privacy Page includes news, alerts,
and links to privacy-related resources. Related organizations include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Internet Privacy Coalition, and Privacy International.
www.privacy.org Privacy International is a London-based
human rights group formed as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations.
www.privacy.org/pi
Please suggest other pages that may be appropriate here. Storage and PreservationThe Archive has two practical considerations
in dealing with digital collections: How to store massive amounts of data
How to preserve the data for posterity
Storage Storing the Archive's collections involves
parsing, indexing, and physically encoding the data. With the Internet collections growing at exponential rates, this task
poses an ongoing challenge. Our hardware consists of PCs with
clusters of IDE hard drives. Data is stored on DLT tape and hard drives in various appropriate formats, depending on the collection. Web data is received and stored in archive format
of 100-megabyte ARC files made up of many individual files. Alexa Internet (currently the source of all crawls in our collections) is proposing ARC as a standard for archiving Internet objects. See
Alexa for the format specification. Preservation Preservation is the ongoing task of
permanently protecting stored resources from damage or destruction. The main issues are guarding against the consequences
of accidents and data degradation and maintaining the accessibility of data as formats become obsolete. Accidents: Any medium or site used to store data is potentially
vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters. Maintaining copies of the Archive�s
collections at multiple sites can help alleviate this risk. Part of the collection is already handled this way, and we are
proceeding as quickly as possible to do the same with the rest. Migration:
Over time, storage media can degrade to a point where the data becomes permanently irretrievable. Although DLT tape is rated to last 30 years, the industry rule of thumb is to migrate data every 10 years. We no longer use tapes for storage,
however. Please take a look at our page on our Petabox system for more information on our storage systems. Data
formats: As advances are made in software applications, many data formats become obsolete. We will be collecting
software and emulators that will aid future researchers, historians, and scholars in their research.
Find out How to get free access to the Archive's Internet collections
About our announcement and discussion lists on Internet libraries and movie archives
How to make a Monetary Donation to the Archvive About our announcement and discussion lists on Internet libraries and movie archives as well as our user forums Future Libraries - How People Envision Using Internet LibrariesFrom
ephemera to artifact: Internet libraries can change the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts
of our political and cultural lives. "I believe
historians need every possible piece of paper and archived byte of digital data they can muster. The Smithsonian Institution
sees the value, and has affiliated with the Archive to preserve the 1996 campaign Web sites, official and unofficial."
Dan
Gillmor, computing editor, San Jose Mercury News, 1 September 1996 Protecting our right to know: Most states have pre-Internet sunshine laws that require
public access to government documents. Yet while the Internet has generally increased public access to information, states
have just begun to amend those laws to reflect today's Internet environment. According to Bill Chamberlin, director of
the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, such laws are being enacted "piecemeal,
one state at a time," and cover information that varies widely in nature - everything from "all public records"
to specialized information such as education reports and the licensing status of medical practitioners. In the meantime, while
public officials are posting more information on the Internet than their state legislatures require, there's little regulatory
control over exactly what is posted, when it's taken off, or how often it's updated. This leaves a gap that online
libraries can help to fill. Exercising our "right
to remember": Without paper libraries, it would be hard to exercise our "right to remember" our political
history or hold government accountable. With much of the public's business now moving from paper to digital media, Internet
libraries are certain to become essential in maintaining that right. Imagine, for instance, how news coverage of an election
campaign might suffer if journalists had only limited access to previous statements that candidates had made in the media. "The Internet Archive is a service so essential that its founding is bound
to be looked back on with the fondness and respect that people now have for the public libraries seeded by Andrew Carnegie
a century ago.... Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is
the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice
the problem properly. The Internet Archive is the beginning of a cure - the beginning of complete, detailed, accessible, searchable
memory for society, and not just scholars this time, but everyone."
Establishing Internet centers internationally:
What is a country without a memory of its cultural heritage? Internet libraries are the place to preserve the aspect of a
country's heritage that exists on the Internet. Tracing
the way our language changes: During the late 19th century, James Murray, a professor at Oxford University, built
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary by sending copies of selected books to "men of letters"
who volunteered to search them for the first occurrences of words and to trace the migration of their various meanings. Internet
libraries could allow linguists to automate much of this extremely labor-intensive process. Tracking the Web's evolution: Historians, sociologists, and journalists
could use Internet libraries to hold up a mirror to society. For example, they might ask when different ethnic groups or special
interests or certain businesses became a presence on the Internet. "We don't know where this Internet is going, and once we get there it will be very instructive
to look back."
Reviving dead links: A few services
- such as UC Berkeley's Digital Library Project, the Online Computer Library Center, and Alexa Internet are starting to offer access to archived versions of Web pages when those pages have been removed from the Web. This means
that if you get a "404 - Page Not Found" error, you'll still be able to find a version of the page. Understanding the economy: Economists could use Archive data
such as link structures - what and how many links a site contains - to investigate how the Web affects commerce. Finding out what the Web tells us about ourselves: Researchers
could use data on links and traffic to better understand human behavior and communication. "Researchers could use the Archive's Web snapshots in combination with
usage statistics to compare how people in different countries use the Web over long periods of time.... Political scientists
and sociologists could use the data to study how public opinion gets formed. For example, suppose a device for increasing
privacy became available: Would it change usage patterns?"
"The Internet Archive has created
a kind of test tube that allows a broad range of researchers to analyze the Web in ways that have never been possible before.
What makes this type of research unique is that it often requires the fusion of traditional tools and techniques with new
methods, and it results in the development of new theories, techniques, and metrics."
Looking back: With a "way-back
machine" - a device that displayed the Web as it looked on a given date - historians and others would literally have
a window on the past. How would you use an Internet library? Related Projects and ResearchInternet libraries raise many issues
in a range of areas, including archiving technology, copyright, privacy and free speech, trademark, trade secrets, import/export
issues, stolen property, pornography, the question of who will have access to the libraries, and more. Below are links to projects, resources, and institutions related to Internet libraries. Internet Libraries and Librarianship
Archiving Technology
Internet Mapping
Internet Statistics
Copyright
Privacy and Free Speech
Internet Libraries and Librarianship Alexa
Internet has catalogued Web sites and provides this information in a free service.
www.alexa.com The American Library Association is a major
trade association of American libraries.
www.ala.org The Australian National Library collects
material including organizational Web sites.
pandora.nla.gov.au/documents.html The Council on Library and Information Resources
works to ensure the well-being of the scholarly communication system.
www.clir.org
See its publication Why Digitize? at
www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80.html The Digital Library Forum (D-Lib) publishes
an online magazine and other resources for building digital libraries.
www.dlib.org Attorney I. Trotter Hardy explains copyright
law and examines its implications for digital materials in his paper Internet Archives and Copyright.
copyright_TH.php The Internet Public Library site has many
links to online resources for the general public.
www.ipl.org Brewster Kahle is a founder of WAIS Inc.
and Alexa Internet and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive. See his paper The Ethics of Digital Librarianship
at
ethics_BK.php Michael Lesk of the National Science Foundation
has written extensively on digital archiving and digital libraries.
www.purl.net/NET/lesk The Library of Congress is the national
library of the United States.
www.loc.gov The Museum Digital Library plans to help
digitize collections and provide access to them.
www.digitalmuseums.org The National Archives and Records Administration
oversees the management of all US federal records. It also archives federal Web sites including the Clinton White House site.
www.nara.gov The National Science Foundation Digital Library Program
has funded academic research on digital libraries.
www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/dli/start.htm National Technical Information Service (NTIS),
U.S. Department of Commerce, Technology Administration. NTIS is an archive and distributor of scientific, technical, engineering
and business related information developed by and for the federal government.
www.ntis.gov Network Wizards has been tracking Internet
growth for many years.
www.nw.com Project Gutenberg is making ASCII versions
of classic literature openly available. www.gutenberg.org The Radio and Television Archive has many
links to related resources.
www.rtvf.unt.edu/links/histsites.htm Revival of the Library of Alexandria is
a project to revive the ancient library in Egypt.
www.bibalex.org The Society of American Archivists is a
professional association focused on ensuring the identification, preservation, and use of records of historical value.
www.archivists.org The Royal Institute of Technology Library in Sweden
is creating a system of quality-assessed information resources on the Internet for academic use.
www.lib.kth.se/main/eng The United States Government Printing
Office produces and distributes information published by the US government.
www.access.gpo.gov The University of Virginia is building a
catalog of digital library activities.
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/
Archiving Technology The Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) computing and public policy page includes papers and news on pending legislation on
issues including universal access, copyright and intellectual property, free speech and the Internet, and privacy.
www.acm.org/serving The Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Digital
Video Library Project is studying how multimedia digital libraries can be established and used.
www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu The Intermemory Project aims to develop
highly survivable and available storage systems.
www.intermemory.org The National Film Preservation Board, established
by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, works with the Library of Congress to study and implement plans for film and
television preservation. The site's research page includes links to the board's 1993 film preservation study, a 1994 film preservation plan, and a 1997 television and video study. All the documents warn of the dire state of film and television preservation in the United States.
lcweb.loc.gov/film/filmpres.html The National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) posts IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in data processing
and data transmission.
www.physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) encourages
research in information retrieval from large text collections.
trec.nist.gov
Internet Mapping An Atlas of
Cyberspaces has maps and dynamic tools for visualizing Web browsing.
www.cybergeography.com/atlas/surf.html The Internet Mapping Project is a long-term
project by a scientist at Bell Labs to collect routing data on the Internet.
www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map The Matrix Information Directory Service
has good maps and visualizations of the networked world.
www.mids.org Peacock Maps has maps of Internet connectivity.
www.peacockmaps.com
Internet Statistics WebReference
has an Internet statistics page (publisher: Internet.com).
webreference.com/internet/statistics.html
Copyright The Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) copyright information page includes text of pertinent laws and pending legislation.
www.acm.org/usacm/copyright Tom W. Bell teaches intellectual property
and Internet law at Chapman University School of Law.
www.tomwbell.com
His site includes a graph showing the trend of the maximum US copyright term at www.tomwbell.com/writings/(C)_Term.html Cornell University posts the text of copyright
law at
www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/unframed/17/107.html
www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/unframed/17/108.html The Digital Future Coalition is a nonprofit
working on the issues of copyright in the digital age.
www.dfc.org The National Academy Press is the publishing
arm of the national academies.
"The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age"
http://www.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/
"LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress"
www.nap.edu/books/0309071445/html Pamela Samuelson is a professor in the School
of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley.
info.berkeley.edu/~pam Title 17 of US copyright code
www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/ US Government Copyright Office
www.loc.gov/copyright
Privacy and Free Speech The Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) free-speech information page includes the text of pertinent laws and pending legislation.
www.acm.org/usacm/speech The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) privacy
information page includes the text of congressional testimony and links to other resources.
www.acm.org/usacm/privacy The Benton Foundation Communications Policy and Practice
Program has the goal of infusing the emerging communications environment with public-interest values.
www.benton.org/cpphome.html The Center for Democracy and Technology
works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age.
www.cdt.org The Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference
has a site containing information on each annual conference held since 1991.
www.cfp.org The Electronic Frontier Foundation works
to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression in the arena of computers and the Internet.
www.eff.org The Electronic Privacy Information Center,
a project of the Fund for Constitutional Government, is a public-interest research center whose goal is to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect
privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
www.epic.org The Free Expression Policy Project is a
think tank on artistic and intellectual freedom at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. Through policy research and advocacy,
they explore freedom of expression issues including censorship, copyright law, media localism, and corporate media reform.
www.fepproject.org The Internet Free Expression Alliance is
an information and advocacy organization focused on free speech as it relates to the Internet.
www.ifea.net The Internet Privacy Coalition aims to protect
privacy on the Internet by promoting the widespread availability of strong encryption and the relaxation of export controls
on cryptography.
www.privacy.org/ipc The Privacy Page includes news, alerts,
and links to privacy-related resources. Related organizations include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Internet Privacy Coalition, and Privacy International.
www.privacy.org Privacy International is a London-based
human rights group formed as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations.
www.privacy.org/pi
Please suggest other pages that may be appropriate here. Storage and PreservationThe Archive has two practical considerations
in dealing with digital collections: How to store massive amounts of data
How to preserve the data for posterity
Storage Storing the Archive's collections involves
parsing, indexing, and physically encoding the data. With the Internet collections growing at exponential rates, this task
poses an ongoing challenge. Our hardware consists of PCs with
clusters of IDE hard drives. Data is stored on DLT tape and hard drives in various appropriate formats, depending on the collection. Web data is received and stored in archive format
of 100-megabyte ARC files made up of many individual files. Alexa Internet (currently the source of all crawls in our collections) is proposing ARC as a standard for archiving Internet objects. See
Alexa for the format specification. Preservation Preservation is the ongoing task of
permanently protecting stored resources from damage or destruction. The main issues are guarding against the consequences
of accidents and data degradation and maintaining the accessibility of data as formats become obsolete. Accidents: Any medium or site used to store data is potentially
vulnerable to accidents and natural disasters. Maintaining copies of the Archive�s
collections at multiple sites can help alleviate this risk. Part of the collection is already handled this way, and we are
proceeding as quickly as possible to do the same with the rest. Migration:
Over time, storage media can degrade to a point where the data becomes permanently irretrievable. Although DLT tape is rated to last 30 years, the industry rule of thumb is to migrate data every 10 years. We no longer use tapes for storage,
however. Please take a look at our page on our Petabox system for more information on our storage systems. Data
formats: As advances are made in software applications, many data formats become obsolete. We will be collecting
software and emulators that will aid future researchers, historians, and scholars in their research.
Find out How to get free access to the Archive's Internet collections
About our announcement and discussion lists on Internet libraries and movie archives
|
