SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean? | KQED
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The Internet Archive, thanks to its designation by California Sen. Alex Padilla, joins a network of over 1,100 libraries that make government documents accessible to the public.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that while the nonprofit organization has always functioned as a library, this new designation makes it easier to work with the other federal depository libraries. That, he said, is a service to everyone.

“ 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,” 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.”

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    2·
    10 hours ago

    He… does not at all. This is barely a ceremonial denomination meaning that they are a designated mirror of official US documentation. This has even less of an impact than their basic clasification as a library, it’s unilaterally decided by just the one senator and is mostly PR. They could have stored the same documents without the designation, even.

    This is all a search or wikipedia visit away. People really operate on the basis of seeing a headline, not even bothering to click through and just… making up what it means in their heads. We really need to get better at this, it’s been decades of Internet and centuries of newspapers.