rchive is a non-profit
organization that has built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format
for researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web
is stored every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet
Archive started to include more collections of archived
webpages on specific topics. It also became an online digital
library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In
October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet
Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to
surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month.
There were 65 billion pages (from 50 million websites) in 2006
and 85 million pages in 2008. The Internet Archive now defines
itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing
universal access to human knowledge."

In October 2005, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) with other contributors as a collective effort
for "building a digital archive of global content for universal
access" (subtitle of the OCA home page) that would be a
permanent repository of multilingual text and multimedia
content.

As explained on its website in 2007, the OCA "is a
collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology,
nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world
that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized
text and multimedia material. An archive of contributed
material is available on the Internet Archive website and
through Yahoo! and other search engines and sites. The OCA
encourages access to and reuse of collections in the archive,
while respecting the content owners and contributors."

The project aims at digitizing public domain books around the
world and make them searchable through any web search engine
and downloadable for free. Unlike Google Books, the OCA scans
and digitizes only public domain books, except when the
copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first
contributors to the OCA were the University of California, the
University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National
Archives in United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media and Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the
Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. 100,000 ebooks
were publicly available in December 2006 (with 12,000 new
ebooks added per month), 200,000 eboo