The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars,
the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 25+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 750+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.
As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:
588 billion web pages
28 million books and texts
14 million audio recordings (including 220,000 live concerts)
6 million videos (including 2 million Television News programs)
3.5 million images
580,000 software programs
CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses,
used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online.
CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
Anticipating a future with widespread access to large digital libraries of video, a great deal of research is currently focused on many areas related to digital video. Research in these
areas requires that each investigator acquire and digitize video for their studies since the multimedia information retrieval community does not yet have a standard collection of video to be used for research purposes.
The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.
This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.
The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. They are not selected as the "best" American films
of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture. They reflect who we are as a people and as a nation. The Librarian of Congress makes the annual selections to the Registry after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public and conferring with Library film curators and the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board.
This digital collection presents a variety of Registry titles including the World War II documentary Memphis Belle (1944), Master Hands (1936), a beautiful mechanical ballet shot on a General Motors automotive assembly line, and a plea for racial tolerance from Frank Sinatra in The House I Live In (1945).
The majority of movies in Selections from the National Film Registry are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV downloads.
Selections from the National Film Registry is a project of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The goal of this digital collection is to present to the widest audience possible movies named to the Registry, offering a broad range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.
These selections are presented as part of the record of the past. They are historical documents which reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in these movies, which may contain content offensive to users.
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts
as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on the project scope pages.
Wikimedia Commons uses the same wiki-technology as Wikipedia and everyone can edit it. Unlike media files uploaded to other projects, files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons can be embedded on pages of all Wikimedia projects without the need to separately upload them there.
Launched on 7 September 2004, Wikimedia Commons hit the 1,000,000 uploaded media file milestone on 30 November 2006 and currently contains 78,682,482 files and 76,483,639 media collections. More background information about the Wikimedia Commons project itself can be found in the General disclaimer, at the Wikipedia page about Wikimedia Commons and its page in Meta-wiki.
Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page. The Wikimedia Commons database itself and the texts in it are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. More information on re-use can be found at Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia and Commons:First steps/Reuse.
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.