Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a complete snapshot of all
web pages on every website since 1996 till today. The purpose of
the Internet Archive is to include the main part of the World Wide
Web collection. Since the web changes rapidly—the average lifetime
of a page on the Internet is 100 days—this snapshot is retaken
every two months. The resulting collection is 10 billion pages.
In April 2003, the Internet Archive in San Francisco donated a copy
of the Internet Archive to Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The archive
at Bibliotheca Alexandrina includes 10 billion web pages from 1996-2001;
2000 hours of Egyptian and US television broadcast and 1000 archival
films. It represents 100 terabytes of data stored on 200 computers.
More broadly, there is a plan for disseminating
the Internet Archive centers around the world. Where the first center
is located in California in the United States of America, the second
one will be located at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and there will
be a third center in Europe and a fourth one in Asia. The Bibliotheca
Alexandrina and the Internet Archive are committed to the goal of
the universal digital library: preserving the heritage of humanity
and ensuring access to all this heritage.
To achieve these goals Bibliotheca Alexandrina needs
to keep a mirror site of the Internet Archive. The scope of the
project will involve:
- Maintaining an up-to-date copy of the web archive from 1996
until today
- Enabling worldwide access to the collection through the web
- Building special collections that reflect the interests of the
patrons of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It is believed that this
historic collection is invaluable to scholars trying to understand
the interactions between people and events. Similar to the special
collections built by the Library of Congress for “US Election
2000” and “September 11th”, building special collections reflecting
topics of the Arabic region will be a great asset to the users
of the Internet Archive in the Arab world.
- Inviting researchers to work on the data (computer engineers,
linguists, etc)
- Laying the foundations for developing specialized web harvesting
techniques
Available in the Library of Alexandria and over the Internet at:
http://archive.bibalex.org
http://www.archive.org/
Donated by the Internet Archive, April 23, 2002
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The Internet Archive as
seen in BA and the Web and TV broadcast |
Term of use:
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is working in partnership
with the Internet Archive. The users of these archives are bound
by the terms of the Internet Archive.
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