The Internet Archive is located at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118

Visiting the physical location of an online library isn’t that interesting, but I wanted to check out the internet archive anyway. The archive has been in the building of an old church for about nine months (since november 2009).

Here is a photo of a poster with an image of the san francisco datacenter. They have mirrors in amsterdam and alexandria, egypt.

The reading room is attached to the side of the church, and this is where the books and microfilm are being digitized. They operate 5 days a week with a night shift, digitizing about 1000 books per day.

None of the books that are donated to be digitized are destroyed. Right now they are kept in storage somewhere, and there are very many boxes with very many books.

And very many boxes filled with boxes of microfilm.

The row of computers in the middle are being used to digitize microfilm, and the black booths on the walls are photographing books and compiling pdfs and stuff to be uploaded to archive.org

There were a few handouts about the aim of the internet archive and also about how to digitize your own collections.