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The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet ‹ a new medium with major historical significance ‹ and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

A display at the Smithsonian Institution shows how presidential candidates and parties first used the Web. The display includes 1996 campaign pages for five political parties — as well as pages such as the "Steve Forbes Official Home Page" and the "Official Internet Headquarters of the [Pat] Buchanan Brigade," which were captured before some candidates dropped out of the race and scaled back or shut down their sites.

The display also includes pages from the Federal Election Commission site with financial information about candidates, parties, and political action committees.

What would a snapshot of the Web look like? Visitors passing through the lobby of the Library of Congress get the picture when they see a sculpture — a stack of computer screens and tapes housing a snapshot of the Web in early 1997 — by Alan Rath. The Internet Archive is proud to have part of its collections in the Library of Congress.

Data gift of Alexa Internet

Watch a demo of the sculpture(if you have an DSL or faster connection)

"It Grows on Its Own Like an Ecosystem"

Research on this scale and of this complexity makes new thinking possible in a whole range of fields, from graph theory to sociology. Pitkow compares what’s happening to the Einstein-era thrust past the limitations of Newtonian physics into quantum mechanics: "The Web," he says, "requires a whole new form of understanding."