Internet Archive Projects

Political TV Ad Archive

The Political TV Ad Archive is a project that provides a searchable, viewable, and shareable online archive of 2016 political TV ads, married with fact-checking and reporting citizens can trust. In partnership with trusted journalism organizations, the archive provides a free service for journalists, civic organizations

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 academics and the general public to track these ads in context. The first phase of the project, covering key 2016 primary elections, was funded by a $200,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

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. The Challenge was a collaboration joined by the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. The Democracy Fund also granted $49,634 to support joint trainings of journalists in key primary states in partnership with the American Press Institute. Additional support came from personal donations from Christopher Buck ($25,000) and Craig Newmark ($20,000). Project staff are gathering lessons learned, which will inform planning and fundraising for the second phase of the project: tracking political ads in key 2016 general election battleground states.

Building Libraries Together

The Internet Archive is one of the world's largest public digital libraries, with an extensive collection of human culture: 2 million books, 430 billion Web pages, 3 million hours of television and more. However, the archive's users upload only a small percentage of these materials and to preserve the world's knowledge the public should be encouraged to contribute.

 The archive is embarking on a project to make the archive.org site more community-driven by improving the tools that allow people to upload, describe and organize items. With these new tools, the Internet Archive hopes to democratize knowledge by giving global communities the ability to save, manage and share their cultural treasures for free. What Wikimedia did for encyclopedia articles, the Internet Archive hopes to do for collections of media: give people the tools to build library collections together and make them accessible to everyone. The project is supported by a $600,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.