The evening before the Digital Public Library of America West meeting, attendees had the opportunity to go on a tour of the Internet Archive facility in Richmond, CA. It s a large warehouse about 45 minutes outside of San Francisco in what is apparently the 6th most dangerous city in the country. (No bullets they assured us.) The scenery wasn't much to look at but inside the warehouse is a treasure chest for information geeks: piles and piles of books in various stages of being digitized, a sizable server farm, and thanks to the staff a lovely spread of pre-tour snacks. Here are a few pics from my visit.
Robert Miller, Director of Books at the Internet Archive, giving the group a tour of the facility via forklift. |
The Internet Archive has a number of special collections that have been donated by libraries- like a complete run of the London Times. |
The Richmond facility also includes the servers for the Wayback Machine, an archive of 150 billion web pages dating back to 1996. |