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.
