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.
