Help:Using the Internet Archive

My name is Shawn Douglas, and I'm the curator and a senior editor here at LIMSwiki. One of the major tasks we undertake with the wiki is academic/historic research and writing of articles related to laboratory informatics, with the goal of providing useful information to those interested in the field. Traditionally, academic and historic research used to entail digging through physical stacks and archives in libraries and store rooms. Books, magazines, newspapers, journals, brochures, and other grey literature have long played an important role of not only learning more about specific topics but reconstructing fragments of history into a coherent whole.

The advent of the Internet and improved computing and storage technology, however, has brought with it new ways to create, publish, and archive. Books, film, music, news, and more have become staples of the Internet and other computer networks around the world, their popularity spurred by cheaper, more readily available digital publishing tools. Yet just as readily as new material is being uploaded and published to the Internet in large quantities, an alarming amount of digitally published material is either replaced or removed forever. This rapid and voluminous creation and destruction of mundane and creative cultural material is forcing researchers, historians, and data preservationists of all sorts to further examine what should be archived and how it should be done. One of many important tools to evolve from this examination is the Internet Archive.

What is the Internet Archive and why is it important?

The Internet Archive is a non-profit entity with the goal of building an Internet-based library. The non-profit describes why it's doing this as such^[1]:

Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it's essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.
Many early movies were recycled to recover the silver in the film. The Library of Alexandria — an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world — was eventually burned to the ground. Even now, at the turn of the 21st century, no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist.
But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. And paradoxically, with the explosion of the Internet, we live in what [Applied Minds' Chief Technology Officer] Danny Hillis has referred to as our "digital dark age."
The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

The Internet Archive's digital library includes more than seven million texts, two million audio recordings, and nearly two million videos that have fallen or intentionally been published to the public domain. The non-profit also has another important tool: the Wayback Machine. This tool functions as "a three-dimensional index that allows browsing of web documents over multiple time periods,"^[2] and contains nearly two petabytes of archived web data. The Wayback Machine gives researchers the ability to see past iterations of a website as long as the web address is known. For example, the now defunct X-Files website can still be viewed in its various forms dating back to 1996. (It also includes a bit of history for X-Files buffs: the original owner of the domain allegedly received legal threats from Fox in September 1997 concerning the domain.^[3]) And that previous fact in the parentheses? I was able to add a citation to that statement all thanks to the Internet Archive!

So why is the Internet Archive important? Well, hopefully the previous example of The X-Files mildly illustrates the importance of the service. From someone who's researching the history of the television series to an editor working on The X-Files Wikipedia entry, having access to content that was originally published at the associated web domain — via the Wayback Machine — is particularly useful, not only for finding facts but also citing them. LIMSwiki editors also make good use of the Wayback Machine in their research of laboratory informatics vendors and open-source software projects: many companies and projects either alter their web content or disappear from the Internet completely, with only the Internet Archive to provide clues. Finally, cultural anthropologists, data preservationists, and historians aren't the only ones discovering cultural records on the site; people from all walks of life are tapping into both "born-digital" and digitized physical materials, some of which date back multiple centuries. From a 1929 recording of Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra's "Ain't Misbehavin'" to an English dictionary published in 1720, the Internet Archive gives people from all walks of life a chance to revisit a cultural past old and recent.