The Internet Archive, probably best known for The Wayback Machine is much more than this essential database. The IA offers a number of archives. From recorded concerts to text to film/video.

This week, the Archive-It service from the IA released the “Tragedy at Virginia Tech” collection.

This collection captures Virginia Government Web sites related to the shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday, April 16, 2007. This collection includes audio excerpts from press confrences held on Tuesday, April 17, audio excerpts from the Convocation ceremony held on Tuesday, April 17, and a video stream of the entire Convocation. Also included is a list of the victims.

The Archive-It service is being utilized by a growing number of users (governments, academia, etc.) to easily build permanent special collections of web-based content. As time moves forward these archives as well as The Wayback Machine will become essential resources for historians. At the moment the Archive-It service is home to 134,131,276 URLs in 272 public collections!

Source: Archive-It, The Internet Archive

Here’s a list of some other recently added collections to the Archive-It service.

See Also: Heritrix is the Internet Archive’s open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.