The Internet Memory Foundation (formerly the European Archive Foundation) was a non-profit foundation whose purpose was archiving content of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. It hosted projects and research that included the preservation and protection of

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

content in various forms to form a

digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...

of cultural content. As of August 2018, it is defunct.

History

The non-profit institution European Archive Foundation was incorporated in 2004 in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

. 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 The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

. Julien Masanès was its first director. Operating from Amsterdam and

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

, it said it would make freely accessible

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

collections and web archives. Masanès, previously at the

Bibliothèque nationale de France The (; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites, ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including bo ...

, edited a book on Web archiving in 2007. The Paris organization is called Internet Memory Research, which operates a service known as ArchiveTheNet. 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. The foundation had many partners, including cultural institutions and research institutions who collaborated on its web archiving projects. These partners included UK National Archives, the Max Planck Institute, Technische Universität Berlin,

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

, and the Institut Mines-Télécom. The foundation was also a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

Research

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 The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

through the Seventh Research Framework Program. * Scalable Preservation Environments (SCAPE, Project No. 270137) ran from February 2011 through July 2014. It was developing an open source, scalable preservation platform. * Large-scale, Cross-lingual Trend Mining and Summarization of Real-time Media Streams (TrendMiner, Project No. 287863) ran from November 2011 through October 2014. It aimed to develop tools to mine social media, especially across multiple languages. * Collect-All ARchives to COmmunity MEMories (ARCOMEM, Project No. 270239) ran from January 2011 through December 2013. It studied the preservation of ephemeral web information, such as that used in

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

sites. * Web Archiving in Europe survey ran in December 2010. It assessed the state of web archiving projects across different European institutions. * Longitudinal Analytics of Web Archive data (LAWA, Project No. 258105) ran from September 2010 through August 2013. The project experimented with large-scale data analytics for use in the Future Internet Research and Experimentation project. * LivingKnowledge (Project No. 231126) ran from February 2009 through January 2012. The goal was to improve navigation and search in large multimodal datasets. * Living Web Archives (LiWA, Project No. 216267) ran from February 2008 through January 2011. LiWA developed web archiving methods and tools that aimed to capture a more accurate, "living" archive of the web.

Collections

Audio and video

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

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, captured during the European constitutional debate, and archives (among others): *

The National Archives (United Kingdom) The National Archives (TNA; ) is a non-ministerial government department, non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. Its parent department is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom, United K ...

* National Library of Ireland *

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

, Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (Switzerland) *

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, and may also legislate for the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace ...

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is situated in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is a division within the Engaged Communities Group of the Department for Communities (DfC). The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is dist ...

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 The WARC (Web ARChive) archive format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archive file together with related information. These combined resources are saved as a WARC computer file, file which can be rep ...

file format (.warc), which was approved as an international standard in June 2009 (current edition ISO 28500:2017).

References

External links

* * EC-funded research projects: :
Living Knowledge
:
LAWA
Longitudinal Analytics of Web Archive Data :
ARCOMEM
European Archives, Museums and Libraries in the Age of the Social Web :
SCAPE
Scalable Preservation Environments :
LiWA
Living Web Archives {{Authority control Information technology organizations based in Europe Non-profit organisations based in the Netherlands Web archiving Web archiving initiatives European Union and science and technology