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 web pages since 1996 until today; 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/

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.

 Term of use

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