The Internet Archive has become an official U.S. federal depository library, providing online users with access to archived congressional bills, laws, regulations, presidential documents, and other U.S. government documents.
U.S. Senator Alex Padilla designated it as such in a July 24 letter to the Superintendent of Documents at the Government Publishing Office, which oversees the Federal Depository Library Program that coordinates a network of over 1,150 such libraries.
“Through its Democracy’s Library collection, the Internet Archive has already taken steps to provide the public with free access to government publications from around the world. As a federal depository library, the Archive will help the Government Publishing Office advance its mission to digitize and make federal government publications accessible,” Padilla said.
” I believe that the library will be able to meet the public service goals of the Federal Depository Library Program for some time to come. I am therefore pleased to designate the Internet Archive as a federal depository library.”
Earlier this month, the free and open digital library also announced that it had reached a significant milestone after archiving 1 trillion web pages.
“I think there is a great deal of excitement to have an organization such as the Internet Archive, which has physical collections of materials, but is really known mostly for being accessible as part of the internet,” Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle said.
“And helping integrate these materials into things like Wikipedia, so that the whole internet ecosystem gets stronger as digital learners get closer access into the government materials.”
The Internet Archive experienced several breaches last year. In early October, an alleged pro-Palestinian group named SN_BlackMeta took down its servers in a DDoS attack, and a different threat actor stole the user data for 31 million users after breaching its authentication database using an exposed GitLab auth token.
Weeks later, threat actors also breached the Internet Archive’s Zendesk email support platform after the digital library failed to correctly rotate authentication tokens stolen in the previous attack.
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