The Internet Archive is building an Internet library offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. Much of this store of human knowledge is available for creative reuse. The Internet Archive Salon hosted by Gray Area Foundation For The Arts will discuss the resources available at the Internet Archive, how artists and creative people can access and contribute to the Archive, and our Open Library and BookServer projects.

The Internet Archive contains more than 100,000 hours of television, 200,000 moving images, 400,000 audio recordings, 1,800,000 books and 150,000,000,000 web pages (through the Wayback Machine). In addition to providing access to these materials the Archive can be a resource for storage and bandwidth for appropriate publicly-accessible projects (for example the Electric Sheep distributed computing artwork and Creative Commons licensed feature film Sita Sings The Blues). The Open Library aims to have comprehensive information about every book ever published. It is wiki-editable and provides a data API that can be used to retrieve information about books and authors. The BookServer initiative aims to create an open ecosystem for vending and lending digital books.

We hope that you will join us in our mission of Universal Access To All Knowledge. Perhaps your project can help others access the resources of the Internet Archive and even help build it.

When – Wednesday, March 3, 2010, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Where – Gray Area Foundation for the Arts @ 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 (Map)
Please RSVP to RSVP@gaffta.org

Petabox Storage Cluster

Electric Sheep by user brood