Dokumenty polskojęzyczne w kolekcji eBooks and Texts serwisu Internet Archive

Abstract

Internet Archive, an ambitious project by Brewster Kahle, seems to be one of the more interesting bottom-up initiatives, not connected directly with government financing. Although this multi-format archive is known in Poland mainly through archiving old versions of websites from all over the world, one must not forget that its mission is also to gather ebooks and other written texts, sound and visual files, as well as old software versions for various platforms. Among petabytes of archived data there are over 11 million various texts in digital version (in comparison, the Digital Libraries Federation library comprises over 4 million digital objects), of which over 10 million is free to access. The archive resources include mainly texts written in English (over 8.6 million), but there are also examples of texts in most known languages. Texts in Polish comprise a group of almost six thousand. The article aims at propagating the idea of spreading knowledge within the Internet Archive project. It describes documents in Polish from the eBooks and Texts collection, as well as the Open Library service, together with the Bookserver platform, thanks to which it is possible to rent digital copies of copyrighted texts.