This describes the resources that make up the official Archive.org API v1.
The Internet Archive (the “Archive”) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to Universal Access of Knowledge. The Archive runs several services including the Archive.org search engine, OpenLibrary, and the Wayback Machine. In alignment with its mission, the Archive encourages developers to add media to archive.org, as well as to consume and re-purpose media and its metadata, for the great good of our community and beyond.
Archive.org
Archive.org, the flagship service of the Internet Archive, is a public digital archive which makes tens of millions of items (texts and books, public domain movies, television shows, live concerts, and more) accessible to the public, free of charge.
Archive.org has a variety of official APIs and experimental Labs APIs for accessing item metadata, downloading and uploading content, and performing item search and fulltext search.
Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a web service which crawls the world wide web and saves webpages at different points in time so their contents can be referenced in the future. This is especially important since approximately 1 out of every 3 websites doesn't survive past 2 years. The Wayback Machine offers a website (https://web.archive.org) which allows users to explore the histories of the websites and pages it captures.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine supports a number of different APIs to make it easier for developers to retrieve information about Wayback capture data.
Archive-It.org
Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Through our user friendly web application Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use as well as their patrons. Content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.
Books: OpenLibrary, Book Reader, Lending, IIIF & APIs
Books are central to the Internet Archive's goal of preserving the world's knowledge and making it universally accessible. The Internet Archive and Open Library offers over 10,000,000 fully accessible books and texts. There is also a collection of 300,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed or downloaded by the print-disabled at OpenLibrary.org.
Both Archive.org and OpenLibrary.org provide APIs for accessing book metadata, fulltext, and more (where available) which you can learn about under this Books section.
Support
You can view the documentation for each service using the navigation sidebar to the left.
Join our Developer Mailing List to keep up to date on API releases.