ReadWriteWeb

The Internet Archive's entire collection of digital videos will now be available in HTML5 as well as Flash, the organization announced today.

The Internet Archive will be using Kaltura's open source video platform in order to deliver the 500,000 some odd digital video assets housed at the Internet Archive. Kaltura's video player identifies whether a device and browser supports Flash or HTML5 and will deliver the content accordingly.

The Internet Archive is arguably one of the most important projects on the Web, with its mission to preserve the Internet and make available to the public the rich collection of all the digitized material therein: websites, music, videos, as well as public domain books.

It's the latter - the ongoing efforts to digitize books, something that many libraries, archives, and private companies are currently undertaking, that has prompted the Internet Archive to recognize the importance of not just preserving electronic copies, but physical copies of materials as well.

The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.

The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. "As readers go digital, so are our libraries," says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

That invaluable Internet spelunker's friend, the Wayback Machine, which allows users access to websites that have long since passed their sell-by date, has undergone a gamma-ray powered transmogrification. Well, they redesigned it and it's now in open beta.

The new version is two-fold; first, it's a wholesale migration of the site from a proprietary software to an open source platform, which should make the whole thing faster; second, there are interface changes that make it easier to be more precise in your digital time traveling.

The Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive, has just launched a new version of its online e-book reader, featuring an improved user interface as well as other new tools. You can use it to read the more than 2 million books available via The Open Library and the Internet Archive.

As you search for books to read on the site, you'll now find a link to "read the item online." This will launch the redesigned reader, although you'll still have the options to download the books, read in other formats, or send to your Kindle.

The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

The Internet Archive has just unveiled their ambitious project called BookServer, which will allow users to find, buy, or borrow digital books from sources all across the web. The system, built on an open architecture and using open book formats, promises that the books housed there will work on any device whether that's a laptop, PC, smartphone, game console, or one of the myriad of e-Readers like Amazon's Kindle.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.