Open Collections

Among the many different projects the Internet Archive is involved in, one is to provide free storage and distribution to anyone, anywhere, who wants to distribute any digital data (until/unless complaints about or unusually high usage of it come to the attention of IA staff, at which time further distribution of it may cease). The upload page includes a statement that requests only material that "you have the right to share" -- but what that means is left up the interpretation of the uploader.

The name for where this otherwise unsorted and unmonitored material is located is the Open Collections. They are divided by mediatype:


 * -- texts, named this way for historical reasons (it was the earliest)
 * -- data, somewhat confusingly named
 * -- data, somewhat confusingly named
 * -- data, somewhat confusingly named
 * -- data, somewhat confusingly named
 * -- data, somewhat confusingly named

The mention of "opensource" (or "open_source" in the case of the Community Software collection) in the identifiers is somewhat misleading -- while providing a copyright license that allows for free distribution of the material is encouraged, it is also permitted to leave the license unspecified.