The Internet Archive Is a Library

A lawsuit against the Internet Archive threatens the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades, say a group of current and former university librarians.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in San Francisco, has grown into one of the most important cultural institutions of the modern age. What began in 1996 as an audacious attempt to archive and preserve the World Wide Web has grown into a vast library of books, musical recordings and television shows, all digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

Right now, we are at a pivotal stage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, still pending, brought by four of the biggest for-profit publishers in the world, who have been trying to shut down core programs of the archive since the start of the pandemic. For the sake of libraries and library users everywhere, let’s hope they don’t succeed.

You’ve probably heard of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives billions of webpages from across the globe. Fewer are familiar with its other extraordinary collections, which include 41 million digitized books and texts, with more than three million books available to borrow. To make this possible, Internet Archive uses a practice known as “controlled digital lending,” “whereby a library owns a book, digitizes it, and loans either the physical book or the digital copy to one user at a time.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2023/03/17/librarians-should-stand-internet-archive-opinion