Review: The Internet Archive

Abstract

The Internet Archive https://archive.org What would it mean for an archive to be complete? Could an archive ever offer “universal access to all knowledge”? This Borgesian aspiration is both the slogan and the objective of the Internet Archive, an openly accessible electronic repository of public domain and free-license cultural materials launched in 1996 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. Starting as an automated archive of web pages, it later expanded to include other digital content such as books, television recordings, and software. Based in San Francisco, the project has multiple data centers in California and backup centers worldwide. Visitors can access the archive through its home page (https://archive.org), where they can explore its collections and contribute new material using straightforward keyword search and category-based browsing tools. The site is particularly helpful for those seeking pre-twentieth-century architectural texts; often, a search by author or title leads almost immediately to the full digitized text, ready for reference or download. The archive is unquestionably colossal. Its current holdings include some 286 billion web pages, 12 million texts, and more than 3 million videos. Indeed, it is dwarfed only by its inverse, the fictional set of all the content it excludes. Between these two sets, we can imagine a kind of perimeter line delineating inclusion. While the problems of inclusion and scope haunt all archives, they are especially pernicious in the case of online archives, where physical accommodations in the form of computer servers with seemingly endless capacity for storage and processing impose few organizational constraints and draw indistinct boundaries. This was not the case with earlier open-archive initiatives. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971, contended with bandwidth and storage limitations that were severe by today's standards, and thus restricted its contents to texts that were carefully selected by editors and manually input. In contrast, later initiatives such as …