The internet archive and the wayback machine

A library that archives the internet…

The Internet Archive (IA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this archive includes “snapshots of the World Wide Web” (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings. To ensure the stability and endurance of the archive, IA is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the only library in the world with a mirror. The IA makes the collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.

The Internet Archive building

The Wayback Machine archives web pages across “three dimensional index” i.e.archived versions of webpages across time.Snapshots become available 6 to 12 months after they are archived. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all updates to tracked web sites are recorded, and intervals of several weeks sometimes occur.

Screenshot of the internet archive site