Researched
Web Archives & Mass Digitization
The Internet Archive (1996) and Google Books (2004) save web pages and scan books at scale: the Wayback Machine passed one trillion pages in October 2025, and Google had scanned over 40 million titles by 2019.
Open in the interactive tree →Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive in May 1996 and the Wayback Machine opened to the public in 2001. Google announced its Library Project with Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford's Bodleian and the New York Public Library in December 2004; US courts found the scanning to be fair use (2013-2015) and the HathiTrust repository of scanned books followed in 2008. The Wayback Machine reached one trillion archived pages in October 2025, and its collection now includes more than 47 million texts.
Prerequisites
- Ancient Libraries~650 BCLibraries are the model and, for Google Books, the partners and sources.
- Hard Disk Drive1956Cheap disk storage makes saving billions of pages affordable.
- World Wide Web1991The web is what the archive copies.
Unlocks
- Avoiding a Digital Dark AgeopenWeb archives are the main existing defence against losing web content.