About the Community Video Archive

The Internet Archive contains a section on Moving Images which is called “Community Video.” It was originally named “Open Source Video.” At present, this archive contains 149,895 items. Everyone is invited to view or upload videos to the Community collection.

Contributed by Archive users and community members, these videos are available for free download. Users can browse by title, author, collection, subject/keywords, language, date and creator. An RSS feed is also available. For a sample, see the “Earth Time Lapse View from Space” (5 minutes) which is also embeded below for ease of access.

Toronto Transit Archives

The Transit Toronto Archives contain scanned and other electronic images, including maps, old brochures, news clippings, annual reports, schedules, sound files and a photo gallery. The materials were produced by the Toronto Transit Commission and other transit agencies in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) over the past century. While not a complete list, this material is useful for understanding how public transportation in Toronto has grown and developed since its beginnings in the mid 19th century.  The TTC’s Previous Websites can be accessed courtesy the Internet Archive. More maps and photographs are available online at Mike’s Transit Stop.

Archive-It web archiving and preservation

Archive-It, a web archiving and preservation service, allows institutions to build and preserve collections of digital content. It is used by a number of Canadian universities, such as the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. Through a user-friendly web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage and browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are accessible to the public with full-text search.

About the Internet Archive and Canadian Libraries

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, it provides free access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Internet Archive has a historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 150 billion web pages, about 240,000 movies, more than 500,000 audio items (including over 70,000 live concerts), 1,800,000 texts, and 30,000 software items. A blog called What’s New at the Internet Archive is also being maintained. An example of a historical document available at the Internet Archive is the Canadian Income Tax Act, 1917 which can be read online or downloaded as a PDF. (Learn more about Canadian Libraries and Internet Archive Canada online.)