The Internet Archive; Digitized Books; Dissemination of Knowledge

About The Internet Archive

https://archive.org/about/

11 million books and texts - "Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 1,000 books per day in 28 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1923 are available for download".

Building Libraries Together

"The Internet Archive is one of the world's largest public digital libraries, with an extensive collection of human culture: 2 million books, 430 billion Web pages, 3 million hours of television and more. However, the archive's users upload only a small percentage of these materials and to preserve the world's knowledge the public should be encouraged to contribute. The archive is embarking on a project to make the archive.org site more community-driven by improving the tools that allow people to upload, describe and organize items. With these new tools, the Internet Archive hopes to democratize knowledge by giving global communities the ability to save, manage and share their cultural treasures for free. What Wikimedia did for encyclopedia articles, the Internet Archive hopes to do for collections of media: give people the tools to build library collections together and make them accessible to everyone".

A tremendous service!