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.

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 An example of a historical document available at the Internet Archive is the Canadian Income Tax Act, 1917 which can be read online or downloaded as a PDF.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.)

Finding digital archives using the Wayback Machine

With the Wayback Machine, researchers can browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start using the Wayback Machine, type in the URL address of a website (such as http://www.cica.ca/) or webpage and press “enter”. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting webpages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.