Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the
archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving
copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital
heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has
expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital
history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community,
group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped
ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention
destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by
duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as
the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have
ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a
small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire
terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to
the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing
and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet
Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the
Wayback Machine, providing a path back to
lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of
data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections,
the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into
the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant
websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in
danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard
drive crashes or server failures.
