The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a digital library, founded in 1996 with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive's collections includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.

To fulfill its mission, the Archive works with national libraries, museums, universities, and the general public to collect and offer free access to materials in digital format. The Archive has collected snapshots of all public web pages, except those that have opted not to be archived, every two months for the last ten years. In addition, the Archive has digitized archival and educational movies since 1999. The Archive also accepts donated materials from individual patrons.

Over the years, the Archive's collection has proved valuable to various federal government agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency. Many U.S. Attorneys and other law enforcement officials find the Archive a critical resource, and the Archive has regularly received requests for information about its collections, including information stored in the Wayback Machine, a historical archive of websites.

The Archive is very protective of its patrons' privacy. The only identifying information the Archive collects is the unverified email address supplied by the patron. The Archive does not collect the IP addresses used to submit files to the collections; nor does it collect the IP addresses of those reading, listening or watching its collection.

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