Archive.org

About Archive.org

Archive.org is the flagship service of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It is a public digital archive providing free access to tens of millions of items, including texts and books, public domain movies, television shows, and live concerts.

The Internet Archive operates several related services accessible through its API v1. The Wayback Machine crawls and saves webpages over time, allowing users to reference historical versions of websites through web.archive.org. Archive-It.org is a subscription web archiving service that helps organizations harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content, with content hosted at Internet Archive data centers. OpenLibrary provides access to over 10,000,000 books and texts, including a collection of 300,000 modern eBooks available for lending or download by the print-disabled.

APIs are available for item metadata, bulk upload and download, item search, fulltext search, Wayback snapshot retrieval and creation, book metadata and page retrieval, and IIIF image and presentation services. A Python client library is available for both Archive.org and OpenLibrary. The documentation is aimed at developers building tools that consume or contribute to these archives.

Key features

• Item metadata, search, and bulk download/upload APIs for Archive.org content
• Wayback Machine APIs for retrieving and creating web page snapshots (CDX Server, Memento API)
• OpenLibrary and Archive.org book APIs for metadata, full-text search-inside, and cover images
• IIIF-compliant image and presentation APIs for book pages and images
• Archive-It subscription service for organizations to harvest and preserve web collections
• Official Python client libraries for Archive.org and OpenLibrary

Frequently asked questions