Preserving the Web one group at a time

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit out to archive all the pages on the Web, has introduced subscription-based software that allows institutions and historic societies to create and search their own digital catalogs of information or multimedia. The software, called Archive-It 1.5, has been in lab testing for most of the year, but it's now available commercially for a $10,000 annual subscription.

Subscribers can develop digital collections of their own based on up to 300 "seed" Web sites designated by the institution. The annual service lets subscribers create and manage up to three collections, with as many as 10,000,000 URLs. Those collections can then feed into the Internet Archive's "Internet library" project.