The Internet Archive (archive.org) is a nonprofit library with 40+ million media objects and billions of archived web pages, so it can be daunting to navigate. This introduction video provides a quick introduction to the major collections in the library and provides pointers on how to find books, movies, music, images, and software more efficiently.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCBy9z3f9Mw
**https://300.ya.ru/
retelling of the video
00:00:00 Introduction to the Wayback Machine
- Demonstration of the source code of a page from 2002.
- Mention of the 2002 Easter issue.
- Recommendation to use My Web Archive for saving pages.
00:00:54 Keyword Searches
- Explaining the differences between keyword searches in Google and the Wayback Machine.
- The Wayback Machine searches URLs, titles, and meta tags, rather than every word on a page.
- Example of a search for «kazoo.»
00:01:51 Saving Pages
- The importance of saving current pages for academic papers and research.
- The «Save Page Now» feature for saving URLs.
- Example of saving the alexisrossi.com page.
00:02:37 Searching the Wayback Archive
- Using the search box in the upper right corner to search the entire site.
- Search saved sites using the «Search Saved Sites» button.
00:03:36 Media Navigation
- Overview of media navigation: books, videos, audio, software.
- Collections of popular and recommended materials.
00:04:30 Book Search
- Example of a book search on the topics «birds» and «winter.»
- Books can be borrowed for an hour or 14 days.
00:05:49 Searching by Metadata and Text Content
- The difference between searching by metadata and text content.
- Example of a search for the name «Mary Mathis.»
00:08:30 Using Open Library
- A recommendation to use Open Library for searching books.
- Open Library contains descriptions of millions of books, some of which are available in electronic format.
00:09:27 Movie Search
- Search for old Lego commercials.
- Filter results by date and creator.
- Sort results chronologically.
00:10:40 Working with Videos
- Download video files.
- Share videos on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other platforms.
- Embed videos on third-party sites.
- Add videos to favorites.
00:11:33 TV News Archive
- The collection contains over 2 million news broadcasts since 2009.
- Search by subtitles and text content.
- Example search for mentions of Hurricane Irma.
00:13:51 Radio Broadcasts
- Search radio transcripts using automatic speech recognition.
- Dolly Parton is mentioned 55 times.
- Search for other words, such as «bluegrass.»
00:14:44 Audio
- Archive of live music recordings and radio broadcasts.
- Search by genre, artist, and song title.
- Example search for the genre «yodel.»
00:16:54 Software
- Emulate older systems in a browser to run software.
- Example of MS-DOS emulation for the Oregon Trail game.
- New Flash archive due to support ending at the end of 2020.
00:18:33 Images
- Large collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
- NASA archive with images of Jupiter and Earth.
00:19:03 Personal Account
- Upload files and forum posts.
- Reviews and collections, including «Favorites.»
- Loans and web archive.
00:21:09 Help
- Request assistance on help.com or through the menu.
- Email for feedback: info@archive.org.
In this video
Introduction
0:04
hi
0:04
my name is alexis rossi i’m a librarian
0:07
and also the director of collections at
0:09
the internet archive
0:11
the internet archive is a non-profit
0:13
library
0:14
that was founded to bring all of human
0:16
knowledge online
0:17
and make it accessible for free to
0:19
everyone the internet archive was
About the Internet Archive
0:21
founded
0:22
in 1996 and our original mission was to
0:25
archive the internet
Wayback Machine
0:27
so the first collection i’m going to
0:28
show you today is the wayback machine
0:30
the wayback contains more than 500
0:32
billion archived web pages
0:35
spanning 24 years of internet history
0:38
and it is searchable either from our
0:40
front page right here
0:42
or if you go into the media nav down up
0:45
here
0:47
and open the web section it is
0:49
searchable
0:50
right here for the moment let’s actually
0:54
go to the front page of the wayback
0:55
machine and we can do that by clicking
0:57
on the logo
0:58
now there’s a whole lot of information
1:00
on this page but the main thing you’re
1:02
probably going to want to do while
1:03
you’re here is search
1:04
there’s two ways to search either by url
1:07
or by keyword
1:08
keyword searching is not exactly like it
1:10
is on google we’ll talk about that in a
1:12
minute
1:13
uh but first let’s say i know what url
1:16
i’m looking for
1:17
in this case i’ll just look for my own
1:19
personal webpage
1:20
the calendar page shows you how many
1:22
times this website has been captured
1:25
over the years whichever year is
1:27
highlighted up here in this case 2020
1:30
will be displayed below let’s actually
1:33
go
1:33
back to 2002 so that it’s really
1:36
embarrassing
1:38
let’s choose one of those yes just as
1:42
embarrassing as i thought
1:43
okay so you can scroll through time up
1:46
here
1:47
um you can also find out what date
1:49
you’re on by looking here
1:52
let’s see if i have any photos so this
1:54
isn’t just an image this is actually the
1:56
code of the page that was captured at
1:58
the time in 2002
2:00
so you can see easter 2002 is present
2:04
uh whatever was in march of 2002 right
2:07
here we just didn’t capture it
2:08
at the time assuming this is something i
2:10
might want to look at again later
2:12
i would recommend using the my web
2:16
archive
2:17
icon right up here now there’s a whole
2:19
lot of stuff going on here there’s
2:20
ways to find out more you can share etc
2:23
but for my purposes i am going to click
2:26
share via my web archive and i got a
2:29
little success here
2:31
and i’m going to show you where that
2:33
ends up
2:34
later on it ends up in your account page
2:37
for the moment let’s go back to the
2:39
wayback machine front page just click
2:41
the logo
2:42
and i mentioned there was a second way
2:44
to search now keyword searching on
Keyword Searching
2:46
google means that you’re
2:47
searching every word on every page
2:50
across their entire index
2:52
because the way back machine is so big
2:54
we’ve had to
2:55
narrow that down a little bit so when
2:57
you search by keyword here you’re
2:58
actually searching
3:00
the page url the title the meta tags
3:04
some things like that but not every word
3:07
on every page
3:08
so if i search for something like kazoos
3:13
oops i have to spell that right first
3:16
kazoos um if i search for something like
3:19
kazoos i’m going to get websites
3:21
about kazoos i’m not going to find the
3:24
one article on the new york times that
3:26
mentioned a kazoo five years ago
3:28
that is not going to happen but if i
3:30
wanted websites about kazoos boy am i in
3:33
luck
3:34
and one more thing about the wayback
3:36
machine that you might find interesting
3:38
let’s go back to the front page again
Saving Websites
3:41
if there’s something on the web that is
3:43
live right now
3:44
that you want to capture for example a
3:46
lot of people use the web to do research
3:48
these days
3:49
and if you put a website in your
3:51
citations for a paper for example
3:54
it may not continue to be live so
3:58
at some point your your citations may
3:59
just go poof um what we recommend
4:02
is if you’re citing something or you’re
4:04
using something for research
4:05
that you put it into the wayback machine
4:08
you can do that
4:09
using save page now save page now lives
4:12
right here
4:14
and you can just add the url that you
4:17
want to save we’ll save the current day
4:18
version of alexisrossi.com
4:21
and you can save it in your web archive
4:24
again i’ll show you where that is in
4:26
your account later
4:28
i’m going to go ahead and click that so
4:30
you’ll see a dialog
4:31
down here that is saving the page
4:35
and there we go you get the done message
4:37
up here
4:38
this is where you can find the version
4:40
of the page that you just saved
4:42
and of course it will be in your web
4:44
archive
4:45
later because we chose that checkbox
4:49
you can search the way back from
4:51
anywhere on the website
4:52
there’s a search box up here in the top
4:54
right that allows you to search the
4:57
entire site
4:58
if you clicked search archived websites
5:01
right here
5:02
and put in alexisrossi.com you would be
5:04
searching for websites instead of
5:06
searching for books or
5:07
anything like that but speaking of books
5:10
we’re going to move on
5:12
in our media nav up here we just looked
5:15
at the web
5:16
and now let’s talk about books in the
5:18
book media nav
5:19
as well as video audio software etc
5:23
you will find some featured collections
5:26
some top collections basically these are
5:29
things that we think you might
5:30
be particularly interested in they do
5:33
not represent
5:34
everything that is available for books
5:37
but they can be good places to start
5:40
so let’s just very quickly look at books
5:42
to borrow
5:45
these are more modern books that you can
5:46
check out just like if you’re in a
5:48
physical library for example
5:52
i might be interested in um birds
5:55
like winter birds i can go ahead and
5:58
search
5:59
and you notice i searched down here
6:03
on the left not up here on the right
6:06
this search box in the nav
6:10
it searches the entire website if you’re
6:12
in a collection
6:13
and you see a search box down here it
6:16
allows you to search just within that
6:17
collection
6:19
so in this case i searched for
6:22
birds and winter and i’ve got a whole
6:25
bunch of books here that
6:26
actually look really great uh let’s see
6:29
backyard birds of winter let’s look at
6:31
that
6:33
books are borrowable for either one hour
6:36
or 14 days depending on how many copies
6:38
we have of the book
6:40
if it says one hour it’s only available
6:43
for one hour
6:44
let’s go ahead and borrow this book
6:46
which anyone with a free account can do
6:51
i can go ahead and flip through
6:57
i can even look at more pages at once so
7:01
i can scroll through the book
7:04
it’s awfully pretty
7:09
but let’s say i was looking for
7:10
something very specific i’m not just
7:12
looking for
7:13
backyard birds if i was doing
7:15
genealogical research for example
7:17
i might want to look in the books nav to
7:20
see if there was anything good up there
7:22
there does happen to be a genealogy
7:24
collection
7:26
but even if something isn’t in a
7:27
genealogical collection it might still
7:29
be of interest to me
7:30
so if i was looking for a family member
7:33
for example
7:34
i might want to look for their name now
7:37
if i just search here
7:39
first i’m only searching in genealogy
7:41
not all of the books
7:42
but also i would only be searching
7:44
metadata
Searching
7:46
metadata is things like title creator
7:49
date publisher it’s it’s information
7:52
about the book it’s not
7:54
the information in the book if i want to
7:56
look at the information
7:58
inside of a book i can do that because
8:00
these are ebooks
8:01
i can do that by searching text contents
8:04
if i
8:04
only want to search in genealogy and the
8:07
text contents
8:08
i i would do that here in this box if i
8:11
want to search for my family member
8:13
across all of the texts in the entire
8:16
archive
8:17
i can also do that using the site search
8:20
box up here
8:22
you’ll notice there’s a pull down i can
8:24
search metadata i can also search
8:26
the text contents
8:30
in this case i’m going to look for mary
8:33
mathis
8:38
and that name appears in 426
8:41
books in the archive you can see the
8:44
number of results right there
8:46
and as we scroll through you’ll see that
8:48
underneath each of these books
8:50
there are clips
8:54
that show where mary mathis was
8:56
mentioned and what the context was
8:58
so hopefully that will allow us to find
9:01
the mary mathis that we’re actually
9:03
interested in
9:06
for example this looks like it might be
9:08
a yearbook let’s try that
9:14
now we’re inside the book
9:18
we can flip through
9:22
our result is shown right here
9:25
we can skip straight to that page
9:28
and it’s a little bit hard to see
9:30
because it’s small but it’s actually
9:31
highlighted right there so let me zoom
9:34
in
9:36
there’s mary mathis right there
9:39
if i wanted to find other things in this
9:42
same book
9:43
and only search within one book i can do
9:45
that right here
9:46
using the search icon
9:50
let’s say i know
9:54
mary had a friend named doris
9:58
we have a doris jenkins we have a doris
10:01
starling
10:03
here’s another picture of doris starling
Open Library
10:06
if you’re having any trouble finding a
10:08
book that you’re looking for i recommend
10:10
going to
10:11
openlibrary.org you can find
10:14
open library as well in the book media
10:16
nav
10:17
linked right here open library has
10:19
records for millions of books
10:21
some of which we have an e-book format
10:23
and some of which we don’t
10:24
but if we don’t have the e-book open
10:26
library will give you pointers on where
10:28
to find it
10:29
with that let’s move on next we’re going
10:32
to take a look at
10:33
movies in this case i don’t really know
10:37
where i’m going i just know i’m looking
10:40
for something
10:41
that happens to be a movie so i’m going
10:43
to go into
10:44
all videos
10:47
and what i really want to find is some
10:49
old lego commercials
10:51
so let’s go and we’re going to search
10:54
within movies
10:56
so we’re not going to search up here
10:58
which is the entire website we’re going
11:00
to search just within movies here
11:02
for legos
11:07
2 700 things is an awful lot and i
11:10
just want to point out here we do have a
11:13
lot of ways to help you
11:15
narrow stuff down and sort things in
11:17
ways that might be more helpful for you
11:19
so if you wanted to sort by dates or
11:22
creators you can do that up here
11:24
if you wanted to narrow
11:27
your search you do that right here
11:30
in this case i know i’m looking for
11:32
older stuff so i’m going to try
11:34
using year as a way of doing that
11:38
i don’t see old enough dates here so let
11:41
me click on more
11:43
great okay so these are in chronological
11:46
order so i’m going to go
11:47
back and i’m interested in stuff from
11:50
the 70s
11:52
early mid 80s that kind of era
11:55
so let’s apply those filters
12:00
okay and now that’s a much more
12:02
reasonable number of things to look at
12:04
right seven things is not so bad
12:07
these first two actually do look like
12:09
they might be commercials
12:11
so let’s take a look play
12:19
yes okay this is exactly what i was
12:21
looking
12:23
i can do different things with this if
12:25
it’s available to download
12:27
i can download files right here
12:32
i can share it
12:35
put it on twitter facebook reddit etc
12:39
i can also embed the video into external
12:42
websites
12:43
or if i’m just trying to collect a bunch
12:45
of things that i might be interested in
12:47
i can also favorite it right here
12:54
just like we discussed with the my web
12:56
archive stuff earlier in the wayback
12:58
machine
12:59
these things are going to be available
13:00
in your account
13:02
of course there are lots of interesting
13:03
things in the movies collection
13:06
one of the things i would like to point
13:08
out is the television news archive which
13:10
you’ll find right here
TV News Archive
13:15
the television news archive contains
13:17
content going back to 2009
13:20
it has more than two million shows it is
13:22
focused on
13:24
news so you’re not going to find uh old
13:26
reruns of friends in here or anything
13:28
like that
13:30
when you search this collection you’re
13:31
actually searching the captioning
13:34
that comes along if i can spell
13:37
hurricane irma
13:38
you’re searching the captioning that
13:39
comes along with the news program let’s
13:42
go ahead and do that search
13:44
i would like to point out you don’t have
13:46
to go to the front page of the tv
13:48
news archive to do this in the site
13:50
search
13:52
in the upper right corner you can search
13:54
metadata text contents which we just did
13:56
and tv news captions right there which
13:59
will get you to this exact kind of page
14:02
so we’ve searched through two million
14:04
programs to find all of the references
14:06
to hurricane irma
14:08
and just like with books you see
14:09
snippets here that give you the context
14:14
we’ll click into one so this looks a
14:17
little different
14:18
than the the movie that we just looked
14:20
at the lego commercial
14:21
um these are one minute segments
14:25
on a timeline so 506 507
14:30
wherever hurricane irma is mentioned
14:32
it’ll be highlighted
14:34
um you can go into different segments
14:37
good morning good morning we just have
14:39
the new advisory out 5 a.m and it does
14:41
show
14:42
thankfully enough that irma continues to
14:44
weaken but
14:45
okay as with other things on the archive
14:48
you can
14:49
share it you can use the url to cite it
14:52
in a paper etc
14:54
if you’re interested in current events
14:57
this goes back to 2009 but we also have
15:00
radio
15:01
that goes back to 2016. now you’ll find
15:05
that again search the whole site but
15:08
search radio transcripts
15:12
in this case let’s look for something a
15:14
little bit more fun than a hurricane
15:16
dolly parton
15:21
so we just searched the radio
15:23
transcripts for millions of radio
15:26
programs these transcripts are created
15:28
through automatic speech recognition
15:31
they have snippets down here again to
15:33
give you the context
15:34
let’s choose one of these
15:38
and here you see dolly parton 55 times
15:41
it allows you to scroll through
15:45
you can click
15:49
to play the program
15:53
you can search for other things within
15:54
the in the program
15:58
like let’s look for blue grass it looks
15:59
like that’s in there four times
16:03
um bluegrass musicians she did that song
16:06
in many other songs
16:08
and she did and this sort of brings us
16:11
into talking about
16:12
other audio items as well so
16:15
one of the things that you might be
16:17
interested in is music
16:19
let’s go up to the media nav bar
16:23
and go into the audio section
16:26
there’s some great stuff to explore in
16:28
here the live music archive
16:30
has live shows from thousands of bands
16:33
the old time radio collection has a lot
16:36
of
16:37
great old episodes of gun smoke and the
16:40
shadow nose and
16:41
and all of those kinds of things i’m
16:44
particularly interested in
16:46
music from the early 1900s so i’m going
16:49
to go look at the 78s
16:52
78s are what came before lps
16:56
and i can do a search for an artist a
16:59
song title
17:00
in my case i’m going to search for a
17:03
genre let’s try yodeling
17:06
oh well that’s more yodeling than i
17:08
expected
17:10
um there’s oh
17:14
okay this has to be great right the
17:15
yodel cha-cha has to be great
17:20
[Music]
17:30
okay that i was right that is great um i
17:33
am going to go ahead and favorite that
17:35
because i definitely want to find that
17:37
again later but i’m also going to leave
17:40
a review so down here at the end you’ll
17:43
see reviews from other people
17:46
you can add your own
17:51
when you’re done click details page to
17:53
go back and there we are we’re back on
17:56
the record
17:57
as always there are lots of other audio
18:00
things to explore in here
18:01
i love these these free audio books
18:04
they’re volunteers reading public domain
18:06
books
18:07
but we should probably move on to yet
18:10
another media type
18:11
let’s check out software
18:14
if there’s something in particular
18:16
you’re interested in like arcade games
18:18
or console games there are some featured
18:22
things up here that you might be
18:23
particularly interested in
18:25
i’m going to go ahead and look at all
18:26
software and i’m going to search for
18:28
something that i know is very popular on
18:30
here
18:31
which is the oregon trail
18:34
oh 75 versions of the oregon trail
18:38
um okay so what i’m going to do here is
18:40
i’m going to sort by views
18:43
and what this is going to do is it’s
18:44
going to show me the most popular
18:46
version of oregon trail first
18:49
it looks like it’s this one and it has
18:52
been played 7.6 million
18:55
times amazingly so let’s go take a look
18:58
when old systems go put the software
19:01
that was
19:02
written especially for those systems can
19:04
also
19:05
be lost so what we’ve done is we’ve
19:08
worked with volunteers to find a way
19:10
to emulate old systems in your browser
19:13
so that we can load the old software
19:14
into it and the items are still playable
19:17
so when i go to play the oregon trail
19:20
here
19:20
it is launching an emulator that
19:22
pretends to be ms-dos and then it loads
19:26
the software
19:29
and then i can play the game just like
19:31
i’m in ms-dos in the 1990s
19:34
and obviously i should be a carpenter
19:36
right
19:38
there are loads of things in the
19:40
software collection everything from
19:42
games to word
19:43
processing software we have a new flash
19:46
archive that’s out because flash
19:48
is dying at the end of 2020.
19:53
lots more stuff to go explore in
19:55
software
19:56
and finally let’s take a quick look at
19:58
images
19:59
we do have some biggies like the
20:01
metropolitan museum of art
20:02
and the brooklyn museum my favorite
20:05
personally is
20:06
nasa and again you can search for
20:09
anything you’d like in here
20:14
see images of jupiter
20:19
or images of the earth
Library
20:23
so we’ve ranged far and wide over the
20:24
website today
20:26
uh we saved web pages we borrowed a book
20:29
we left a review we favorited stuff
20:31
um and all of that activity
20:34
can be saved in your account so let’s go
20:38
up to the account drop down right here
20:41
where you see your name
20:43
and you can go straight to your web
20:45
archive or your favorites
20:46
but i’m going to go to my library
20:51
and that has all of them the first page
20:53
we see is our uploads
20:55
you can upload you can upload from
20:56
anywhere on the site just by clicking
20:58
upload
20:59
here next to the search you can also
21:01
upload straight from here
21:03
so if you have old family photos the
21:06
video you took of zoom karaoke last week
21:09
whatever you have
21:11
you can go ahead and upload that here
21:15
any posts you’ve made in forums live
21:17
right here
21:18
here are the items that we’ve left
21:20
reviews on including the yodel cha-cha
21:22
that we just found
21:27
this is where any collections i own live
21:29
including
21:30
my favorites so if we go into my
21:33
favorites collection
21:35
there’s the yodel cha-cha there’s the
21:37
legos that we favorited
21:40
along with anything else i’ve looked at
21:42
in the past and as with any collection i
21:44
can go ahead
21:45
and facet i can search within i can sort
21:51
let’s go back into our account here are
21:53
my loans
21:55
oh my loan must have expired because it
21:57
was only a one hour
21:59
so let’s look at my history of loans
22:04
and yeah here we go here’s my backyard
22:06
birds that i just borrowed
22:08
just in case i’d like to look at it
22:10
again
22:12
and finally here are my web archives
22:15
so we spent a lot of time on
22:16
alexisrossi.com
22:20
and as always we can get back to the
22:21
front page
22:23
or continue to explore
22:29
well that was a whole lot of information
22:31
so if you have questions you can go to
22:34
help.archive.org
22:36
or you can click the help link up in the
22:38
nav hopefully i’ve given you a good
22:41
springboard
22:42
for hopping off into your own research
22:45
and let us know if we can be of any
22:47
assistance
22:47
at info archive.org