Internet Memory Foundation
The Internet Memory Foundation (formerly the European Archive Foundation) was a non-profitable foundation whose purpose was archiving content of the World Wide Web. It supported projects and research that included the preservation and protection of digital media content in various forms to form a digital library of cultural content. As of August 2018, it is defunct.
Company type
Non-profit foundation
Web archiving and preservation
- 2004 as European Archive
- 2010 as Internet Memory
August 2018
History[edit]
The non-profit institution European Archive Foundation was incorporated in 2004 in Amsterdam.[1]
An announcement at the opening of the Cross Media Week in Amsterdam during September 2006 included a quote from Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive.[2]
Julien Masanès was its first director.[3]
Operating from Amsterdam and Paris, it said it would make freely accessible public domain collections and web archives.
Masanès, previously at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, edited a book on Web archiving in 2007.[4]
The Paris organization is called Internet Memory Research, which operates a service known as ArchiveTheNet.[5]
In December 2010, the Foundation changed its name to Internet Memory Foundation to express its goal of preserving internet content for current and future generations.[6]
The foundation had many partners, including cultural institutions and research institutions who collaborated on its web archiving projects. These partners included UK National Archives,[7] the Max Planck Institute, Technische Universität Berlin, University of Southampton, and the Institut Mines-Télécom. The foundation was also a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.[8]
The foundation was involved in research projects to improve technologies of web crawling, data extraction, text mining, and preservation to support the growth and use of web archives. Their projects were funded by the European Commission through the Seventh Research Framework Program.
Collections[edit]
Audio and video[edit]
Before focusing on web archiving, the European Archive Foundation had collected one of the largest online free classical music collections (more than 800 pieces, from Mozart to Dvorak) and Public Information Films from the British Government, made in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the UK National Archives.
Selective web collection[edit]
The foundation archived a snapshot of the EU Institutions websites, made in collaboration with the Historical Archives of the European Union located in Italy, an archive of political websites of the 25 EU member states,[18] captured during the European constitutional debate, and archives (among others):
The Web crawler used by the project was Heritrix version 3. Heritrix generates resources stored in a standardised archiving "container" format, the ARC file (.arc). The ARC file was extended to the Web ARChive file format (.warc), which was approved as an international standard in June 2009 (current edition ISO 28500:2017).[20]
