Internet Archive x Gray Area: Trillionth Webpage Net.Art Commissions Date: Saturday, November 1 Time: 5:00 to 8:00pm Location: Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco Admission: Free REGISTER NOW!
The Internet Archive has reached an extraordinary milestone: one trillion web pages archived. This civilization-scale achievement marks decades of dedication to preserving the ephemeral nature of digital culture and ensuring universal access to human knowledge.
To commemorate this historic moment, San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area has partnered with the Internet Archive to commission a series of original net.art works that engage with the vast holdings of the Internet Archive and explore what it means to create, preserve, and access culture online.
The commissioned artists have drawn from the Internet Archive’s expansive collections to create web-based artworks that reflect on themes of memory, digital archaeology, and the human stories embedded within preserved data. These works exist as both online experiences and physical installations at the Internet Archive, bridging the digital and material worlds in ways that honor the Archive’s dual nature as both a technological achievement and a profoundly human endeavor.
Curated by Amir Esfahani (Internet Archive) and Wade Wallerstein (Gray Area)
Rally for Internet Archive Day on the steps of SF City Hall, October 21, 2025.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has officially declared October 22, 2025, as Internet Archive Day in the City and County of San Francisco. Sponsored by Supervisor Connie Chan (District 1), the resolution passed unanimously in recognition of the Internet Archive’s extraordinary milestone—preserving 1 trillion web pages. The resolution celebrates the Archive’s enduring mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge” and our deep roots in the city where it was founded nearly three decades ago.
Before the Board meeting, supporters took to the steps of City Hall for a rally celebrating the resolution and achievement. Speakers included:
Supervisor Connie Chan, District 1
Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
Michael Lambert, City Librarian for the City and County of San Francisco
Swilk, artist in residence, Internet Archive
From our headquarters in the Richmond District, the Internet Archive has grown into a global library of digital culture, preserving not only the web, but also books, music, video, and software for generations to come. As the city marks Internet Archive Day, San Franciscans join a worldwide community in celebrating the power of preservation and the shared effort to ensure that the web we’ve built remains accessible to everyone.
Celebrate With the Internet Archive
To mark the occasion, the Internet Archive is hosting a street party and livestream celebration tonight at our Richmond District headquarters. Join us in person for live music, food, and festivities—or tune in online from anywhere in the world to be part of this milestone moment. Together, we’ll celebrate 1 trillion webpages archived and look ahead to the next trillion in our shared digital history.
In 1996, the World Wide Web was starting to catch on. Politicians were just beginning to explore how to use online communication to reach voters. And in a house in San Francisco, the fledgling Internet Archive was starting to archive pieces of the web before they disappeared.
That same year, a letter arrived from Washington, D.C., with the Smithsonian Institution’s iconic sunburst logo at the top. The Smithsonian had agreed to partner with the Internet Archive to preserve the digital record of the 1996 U.S. presidential election.
“It was a major milestone for us,” recalls Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “The big Smithsonian was working with this new little Internet Archive nonprofit library.”
Together, the two institutions launched Web Archive 96, one of the first web collections the Internet Archive ever created. It captured the early campaign webpages of candidates Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot — online brochures filled with policy positions, photos, and promises — along with news coverage of the race. It was a pioneering effort to preserve the political life of a nation as it moved onto the web. The collection is now a foundational part of our cultural history on the web, and is available for public access via the Wayback Machine.
Nearly thirty years later, that collaboration still stands out as visionary: two institutions, one old and one new, working together to recognize the internet as part of our shared cultural record.
Indeed, Smithsonian curators Larry Bird and Harry Rubenstein traveled to New Hampshire and Iowa every four years to collect buttons, signs and physical memorabilia from the campaign offices. Just as television changed the political landscape in the 1960s, they recognized the potential influence of the web in 1996. When they heard Kahle was archiving campaigns, Bird said they were “ecstatic” to collaborate.
“We were all over it,” said Bird, now a curator emeritus from the Smithsonian division of political history. “We were super glad that we could take this non-dimensional thing and for it to have a presence on the floor – even in this most rudimentary, stripped down way – limited to the candidates’ websites. It was an acknowledgement of where things were heading.”
Jeff Ubois, who forged the partnership in 1996, recalled “Why would anyone care about the ephemera of the web?” as the prevailing attitude at the time. “The Smithsonian helped change some of that.”
Once the Internet Archive partnered with the Smithsonian, “it wasn’t possible to dismiss web archiving as irrelevant, impossible, useless,” Ubois said.
People contact the Smithsonian often, Bird said, and the Internet Archive outreach was unexpected, but welcome. “We were constantly looking at the way things were shifting in politics, which always takes what’s popular and successful in the real world and bends it into its own political world or reality,” he said. “And this just seemed to be yet, the latest iteration of that as a cultural phenomenon….To have [the Internet Archive] assemble it wasn’t anything that any of us could have done at the time.”
‘Collection of Record for the Web’
Bird said the Internet Archive is a “remarkable resource” that he and other researchers have relied on for years.
“The museum is the collection of record for material things, objects, and dimensional things. And the Internet Archive is the collection of record for the web and all that implies,” Bird said. “There’s hardly anything that it doesn’t touch anymore. It didn’t start out that way, but it’s become that. It’s the collection of record that people use and cite and compare. It’s a tremendous historical resource.”
Preserving the evolution of political campaigns is important to anyone trying to do research or understand political trends over time, said David Almacy, president and chief executive officer of Far Post Media, a digital public affairs firm in Virginia and former White House E-Communications Director for President George W. Bush. In 1996, campaign websites were primarily online brochures – just text and photos without much customization. Today, websites are more advanced with video, digitally integrated with interactive elements that can be tailored to the user.
“The value is to provide an archive and a record of what was said, and basically a snapshot in time politically,” Almacy said. “It actually becomes fascinating to go back and look at the issues that were facing the country that would be deemed priorities in 1996 and how that compares to today. I assume a lot are the same – the economy, education, immigration, national security, global peace – but they’ve evolved in different ways. Many are very important to Americans, just as they were back then.”
The Internet Archive has released a new resource guide to help libraries join in commemorating a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived by the Internet Archive and available for use via the Wayback Machine. This historic achievement represents a collective effort to preserve our shared digital history, and libraries have been at the heart of that work from the beginning. The resource guide provides background on why this milestone matters to libraries, highlights their role in safeguarding online knowledge, and offers ready-to-use materials to help libraries celebrate with their communities.
Within the resource guide, libraries will find social media templates, visuals, event ideas, and impact stories showcasing how institutions across the world are preserving local digital heritage. From creating “Then/Now” displays using Wayback Machine captures to hosting talks on web preservation, the resource guide offers fun, flexible ways for libraries to engage. As the Internet Archive reaches the 1 trillion milestone, libraries everywhere are invited to celebrate their connection to the web’s memory, and to the global mission of preserving knowledge for generations to come.
This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine will reach an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion webpages preserved.
Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been capturing the web—saving the voices, creativity, and communities that make up our shared digital history. Nearly one trillion pages later, we’re still archiving, so that future generations can look back and understand the world as we lived it online.
Now we want to invite you to share your story with us!
Record a video answering the question: “Why is the Wayback Machine important to you?”
Guidelines:
Keep it to about 1 minute, record in vertical/portrait format, and leave a second of silence at the start and end so nothing gets cut off.
Use any device you like: your phone, webcam, etc.
Share your video so we can find it:
Post it on your preferred social media platform with the hashtag #Wayback1T
As the Internet Archive celebrates 1 trillion web pages archived, it’s worth revisiting what founder Brewster Kahle imagined back in 1996—when the web was still young and the Wayback Machine was years away from its public debut.
Nearly three decades ago, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle sketched out a bold vision for preserving the web before it could slip away—warning that without action, the digital age might echo the cultural losses of Alexandria’s library or early film reels.
Today, in 2025, many of the ideas he laid out in “Preserving the Internet,” published in the March 1997 issue of Scientific American, have come to life: a global digital library, tools that fight link rot, and researchers mining web history to understand our present. Other challenges he foresaw—like obsolete formats, legal battles, and questions of digital memory—remain pressing, but his optimism still holds: by building archives together, we can create a more reliable, enduring memory for the internet age.
Preserving the Internet Brewster Kahle Internet Archive 11/4/96 Bold efforts to record the entire Internet are expected to lead to new services. Submitted to Scientific American for March 1997 Issue
The early manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria were burned, much of early printing was not saved, and many early films were recycled for their silver content. While the Internet’s World Wide Web is unprecedented in spreading the popular voice of millions that would never have been published before, no one recorded these documents and images from 1 year ago. The history of early materials of each medium is one of loss and eventual partial reconstruction through fragments. A group of entrepreneurs and engineers have determined to not let this happen to the early Internet.
Even though the documents on the Internet are the easy documents to collect and archive, the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone. While the changing nature of the Internet brings a freshness and vitality, it also creates problems for historians and users alike. A visiting professor at MIT, Carl Malamud, wanted to write a book citing some documents that were only available on the Internet’s World Wide Web system, but was concerned that future readers would get a familiar error message “404 Document not found” by the time the book was published. He asked if the Internet was “too unreliable” for scholarly citation.
Where libraries serve this role for books and periodicals that are no longer sold or easily accessible, no such equivalent yet exists for digital information. With the rise of the importance of digital information to the running of our society and culture, accompanied by the drop in costs for digital storage and access, these new digital libraries will soon take shape.
The Internet Archive is such a new organization that is collecting the public materials on the Internet to construct a digital library. The first step is to preserve the contents of this new medium. This collection will include all publicly accessible World Wide Web pages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews bulletin board system, and downloadable software.
If the example of paper libraries is a guide, this new resource will offer insights into human endeavor and lead to the creation of new services. Never before has this rich a cultural artifact been so easily available for research. Where historians have scattered club newsletters and fliers, physical diaries and letters, from past epochs, the World Wide Web offers a substantial collection that is easy to gather, store, and sift through when compared to its paper antecedents. Furthermore, as the Internet becomes a serious publishing system, then these archives and similar ones will also be available to serve documents that are no longer “in print”.
Apart from historical and scholarly research uses, these digital archives might be able to help with some common infrastructure complaints:
– Internet seems unreliable: “Document not found” – Information lacks context: “Where am I? Can I trust this information?” – Navigation: “Where should I go next?”
When working with books, libraries help with some of these issues, with “the stacks” of books, links to other libraries and librarians to help patrons.
Preservation of our Digital History
Where we can read the 400 year-old books printed by Gutenberg, it is often difficult to read a 15 year-old computer disk. The Commission for Preservation and Access in Washington DC has been researching the thorny problems faced trying to ensure the usability of the digital data over a period of decades. Where the Internet Archive will move the data to new media and new operating systems every 10 years, this only addresses part of the problem of preservation.
Using the saved files in the future may require conversion to new file formats. Text, images, audio, and video are undergoing changes at different rates. Since the World Wide Web currently has most of its textual and image content in only a few formats, we hope that it will be worth translating in the future, whereas we expect that the short lived or seldom used formats not be worth the future investment. Saving the software to read discarded formats often poses problems of preserving or simulating the machines that they ran on.
The physical security of the data must also be considered. Natural and political forces can destroy the data collected. Political ideologies change over time making what was once legal becomes illegal. We are looking for partners in other geographic and national locations to provide a robust archive system over time. To give some level of security from commercial forces that might want exclusive access to this archive, the data is donated to a special non-profit trust for long-term care taking. This non-profit organization is endowed with enough money to perform the necessary maintenance on the storage media over the years.
Packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) is necessary to inform future users. Since we do not know what future researchers will be interested in, we are documenting the methods of collection and attempt to be complete in those collections. As researchers start to use these data, the methods and data recorded can be refined.
Technical Issues of Gathering Data
Building the Internet Archive involves gathering, storing, and serving the terabytes of information that at some point were publicly accessible on the Internet.
Gathering these distributed files requires computers to constantly probe the servers looking for new or updated files. The Internet has several different subsystems to make information available such as the World Wide Web (WWW), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Gopher, and Netnews. New systems for three-dimensional environments, chat facilities, and distributed software require new efforts to gather these files. Each of these systems requires special programs to probe and download appropriate files. Estimating the current size, turnover, and growth of the public Internet has proven tricky because of the dynamic nature of the systems being probed.
The World Wide Web is vast, growing rapidly, and filled with transient information. Estimated at 50 million pages with the average page online for only 75 days, the turnover is considerable. Furthermore, the number of pages is reported to be doubling every year. Using the average web page size of 30 kilobytes (including graphics) brings the current size of the Web to 1.5 terabytes (or million megabytes).
To gather the World Wide Web requires computers specifically programmed to “crawl” the net by downloading a web page, then finding the links to graphics and other pages on it, and then downloading those and continuing the process. This is the technique that the search engines, such as Altavista, use to create their indices to the World Wide Web. The Internet Archive currently holds 600GB of information of all types. In 1997 we will have collected a snapshot of the documents and images.
The information collected by these “crawlers” is not, unfortunately, all the information that can be seen on the Internet. Much of the data is restricted by the publisher, or stored in databases that are accessible through the World Wide Web but are not available to the simple crawlers. Other documents might have been inappropriate to collect in the first place, so authors can mark files or sites to indicate that crawlers are not welcome. Thus the collected Web will be able to give a feel of what the web looked like at a particular time, but will not simulate the full online environment.
While the current sizes are large, the Internet is continuing to grow rapidly. When it is common to connect one’s home camcorder to the upcoming high bandwidth Internet, it will not be practical to archive it all. At some point we will have to become more select what data will be of the most value in the future, but currently we can be afford to gather it all.
Storing Terabytes of Data Cost Effectively
Crucial to archiving the Internet, and digital libraries in general, is the cost effective storage of terabytes of data while still allowing timely access. Since the costs of storage has been dropping rapidly, the archiving cost is dropping. The flip side, of course, is that people are making more information available.
To stay ahead of this onslaught of text, images, and soon video information we believe we have to store the information for much less money than the original producers paid for their storage. It would be impractical to spend as much on our storage as everyone else combined.
Storage Technologies Cost per GigaByte Random access time
Memory (RAM) $12,000/GB 70nanoSeconds
Hard Disk $200/GB 15miliSeconds
Optical Disk Jukebox $140/GB 10seconds
Tape Jukebox $20/GB 4minutes
Tapes on shelf $2/GB human assistance required
(1 GigaByte = 1000 MegaBytes, 1TeraByte = 1000GigaBytes. A GigaByte is roughly enough to store 1000 books or 1 hour of compressed video)
With these prices, we chose hard disk storage for a small amount of the frequently accessed data combined with tape jukeboxes. In most applications we expect a small amount of information to be accessed much more frequently than the rest, leveraging the use of the faster disk technology rather than the tape jukebox.
Providing Access and New Services
After gathering and storing the public contents of the Internet, what services would then be of greatest value with such a repository? While it is impossible to be certain, digital versions of paper services might prove useful.
For instance, we can provide a “reliability service” for documents that are no longer available from the original publisher. This is similar to one of the roles of a library. In this way, one document can refer, through a hypertext link, to a document on another server and a reader will be able to follow that link even if the original is gone. We see this as an important piece of infrastructure if the global hypertext system is to become a medium for scholarly publishing.
Another application for a central archive would be to store an “official copy of record” of public information. These records are often of legal interest, helping to determine what was said or known at a particular time.
Historians have already found the material useful. David Allison of the Smithsonian Institution has used the materials for an exhibit on Presidential Election websites, which he thinks might be the equivalent to saving videotapes of early TV campaign advertisements. David Eddy Spicer of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has used the materials for their “case studies” in much the same way they collect old newspapers articles to capture a point in time.
With copies of the Internet over time and cross correlation of data from multiple sources, new services might help users understand what they are reading, when it was created, and what other people thought of it. With these services, people might be able to give a context to the information they are seeing and therefore know if they can trust it. Furthermore, the coordination of this meta-information and usage data can help build services for navigating the sea of data that is available.
Companies are also interested in saving similar information and building similar services based on their internal information to help employees effectively learn from the experiences of others.
The technologies and the services that will grow out of building digital archives and digital libraries could lead towards building a reliable system of information interchange based on electrons rather than paper. Using the “library” might be done many times a day to use documents that are no longer available on the Internet.
Legal and Social Issues
Creating an archive of informal and personal information has many difficult legal and social issues even if the material was intended to be publicly accessible at some point. Such a collection treads into the murky area intellectual property in the digital era. What can be done with the digital works that are collected gets into the area of copyright, privacy, import/export restrictions, and possession of stolen property.
To give a few examples: what if a college student made a web page that had pictures of her then-current boyfriend, but later wanted to take it down and “tear it up”, yet it lived on in digital archives (whether accessible or not). Should she have the right to remove that document? Should a candidate for political office be able to go back 15 years to erase his postings to public bulletin boards that have been saved in the Archive? What if a software program that is legal to publish in Denmark, but illegal in the United States is collected by an archive: should this program be removed and hidden even from historians and scholars? The legal and social issues raised by the construction of the Archive are not easily resolved.
By allowing authors to exclude their information from the Archive we hope to avoid some of the immediate issues, and allow enough time to pass to understand the larger issues at hand.
The Internet Archive might be able to help resolve some of these issues by publicly drawing the issues out and by participating in the debates. While many of these questions will take years to resolve, we feel it is important to proceed with the collection of the material since it can never be recovered in the future.
Where does it go from here?
The new technologies and services currently being created might be useful in all digital libraries and help make the Internet more robust and useful.
Through an archive of what millions of people are interested in making public, we might be able to detect new trends and patterns. Since these materials are in computer readable form, searching them, analyzing them, and distributing them has never been easier. A variety of services built on top of large data sets will allow us to connect people and ideas in new ways.
For instance, Firefly Inc. is using the individual tastes in music and movies to help suggest other CD’s and videos based on finding “similar” people. They have even found that people are interested in communicating with the other “similar” people directly thus forming communities based on similar interests. This kind of computer matchmaking which is based on detailed portraits of people’s preferences suggests similar services based on reading habits.
Trends in academic fields might be able to be detected more easily by studying gross statistics of the communications in the field. The hypertext links of the World Wide Web form an informal citation system similar to the footnote system already in use. Studying the topography of these links and their evolution might provide insights into what any given community thought was important.
If archiving cultural and personal histories become useful commercially, then the efforts can be expanded to record radio and video broadcasts. These systems might allow us to study these effects and influences on our lives.
Current terabyte technologies (storage hardware and management software) are relatively rare and specialized because of their costs, but as the costs drop we might see new applications that have traditionally used non-computer media. For instance,
– A video store holds about 5,000 video titles, or about 7 terabytes of compressed data. – A music radio station holds about 10,000 LP’s and CD’s or about 5 terabytes of uncompressed data. – The Library of Congress contain about 20 million volumes, or about 20 terabytes text if typed into a computer. – A semester of classroom lectures of a small college is about 18 terabytes of compressed data.
Therefore the continued reduction in price of data storage, and also data transmission, could lead to interesting applications as all the text of a library, music of a radio station, and video of a video store become cost effective to store and later transmitted in digital form.
In the end, our goal is to help people answer hard questions. Not “what is my bank balance?”, or “where can I buy the cheapest shoes”, or “where is my friend Bill?” – these will be answered by smaller commercial services. Rather, answer the hard questions like: “Should I go back to graduate school?” or “How should I raise my children?” or “What book should I read next?”. Questions such as these can be informed by the experiences of others. Can machines and digital libraries really help in answering such questions? In the long term, we believe yes, but perhaps in new ways which would have importance in education and day-to-day life.
Further Reading:
Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs and Challenges, December 1995 presentation at 2nd NPO conference on Multimedia Preservation, Brisbane, Australia.
The Vanished Library, Luciano Canfora. University of Berkeley Press, 1990.
Biography:
Brewster Kahle is a founder of the Internet Archive in April 1996. Before that, he was the inventor of the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) system in 1989 and founded WAIS Inc in 1992. WAIS helped bring commercial and government agencies onto the Internet by selling Internet publishing tools and production services to companies such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, New York Times, and the Government Printing Office.
Schooled at MIT (BSEE ’82), Brewster designed super computers in the 80’s at Thinking Machines Corporation.
Every day, people around the world use the Internet Archive to learn, research, and discover. Aadarsh Pathak, a scholar in India, called the Internet Archive “a guardian of our collective digital heritage” in a recent note. His words inspire us—and we’d love to hear yours as we celebrate 1 trillion web pages archived.
Aadarsh Pathak, Research Scholar, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University
I am writing to you as a research scholar to express my profound gratitude for your visionary creation, the Internet Archive. It is not merely a digital library; for academics like myself, it is an indispensable and unparalleled resource.
Your incredible project has preserved countless historical documents, books, and web materials that would have otherwise been lost to time. The ability to access primary sources, trace the evolution of ideas through archived web pages, and find rare texts has been absolutely critical to the depth and authenticity of my research. The Wayback Machine, in particular, has often been my last resort for retrieving crucial online information that has disappeared from the live web.
The Internet Archive is more than just a tool it is a guardian of our collective digital heritage and a powerful democratizing force for knowledge. Your contribution to education, research, and the open access movement is truly monumental and an inspiration to us all.
Thank you for your unwavering commitment to preserving our history and for building a foundation upon which so much future discovery will depend.
With deepest appreciation,
Aadarsh Pathak
Research Scholar
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That’s one trillion memories, moments, and movements—preserved for the public, forever.
We’ll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event: a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it’s a tribute to what we’ve built together: a free and open digital library of the web.
Join us in marking this incredible milestone. Together, we’ve built the largest archive of web history ever assembled. Let’s celebrate this achievement—in San Francisco and around the world—on October 22.
Here’s how you can take part:
1. RSVP Sign up now to be the first to know when registration opens for our in-person event and livestream. RSVP now
2. Support the Internet Archive Help us continue preserving the web for generations to come. Donate today!
3. Share Your Story What does the web mean to you? How has the Wayback Machine helped you remember, research, or recover something important? Submit your story
Let’s work together toward October 22—a day to look back, share stories, and celebrate the web we’ve built and preserved together.
