Internet Archive Honored as Microsoft Education Award Winner at 2006 Tech Museum Awards
The San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation awarded Internet Archive, the 10 year-old non-profit committed to the preservation and open accessibility of all knowledge, with the Microsoft Education Award and $50,000 cash prize. The Archive now holds billions of historical web pages, digital audio files, public domain movie archives, broadcast TV footage, and close to 100,000 public domain books available freely to anyone in the world. (http://www. archive. org)
San Jose, CA (PRWEB) November 29, 2006
The San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation recently awarded Internet Archive, the 10 year-old non-profit committed to the preservation and open accessibility of all knowledge, with the Microsoft Education Award and $50,000 cash prize. The Internet Archive was honored for the technological advancements it has made in building an open public-access 'Internet library.' The Archive now holds billions of historical web pages, digital audio files, public domain movie archives, broadcast TV footage, and close to 100,000 public domain books available freely to anyone in the world. http://www. archive. org (http://www. archive. org)
"With growing public awareness surrounding the importance of knowledge preservation and technological advancement, the goal of free and permanent access to information for all is within our global community's grasp," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and Founder of Internet Archive. "We are deeply honored to accept this award and are grateful for the support to further our efforts in the preservation of human knowledge."
The awards gala, attended on November 16 by over 1,500 global technology leaders, philanthropists and guests, recognized 25 Laureates and awarded a cash prize in each of 5 categories including environment, economic development, education, equality and health. The Laureates traveled to Silicon Valley from nine countries for a week of meetings with potential sponsors and partners, various speaking engagements, and the black-tie event itself highlighted by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates' keynote speech.
Tech Museum President Peter Friess commented, "The Tech Laureates who have come here in the last five years are perfect examples of how rewarding it is to think about inventing something that helps to improve living and working conditions in the world and to save the environment for future generations."
This year, more than 950 nominations were received representing 98 countries. The 25 Laureates come from Brazil, Canada, Eritrea, Ghana, India, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States. Selected Laureates were honored for their innovative technologies impacting people throughout the world.
About Internet Archive:
Internet Archive is a 501(c) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, with virtual offices in Amsterdam and Alexandria, Egypt. It was founded in 1996 with a mission to build an "Internet library" providing permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital form. Built on open source software developed by Internet Archive and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Internet Archive itself is the largest publicly available web archive in existence. It currently archives 65 billion pages from 50 million websites worldwide, including texts, audio, moving images and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.
Media and Analyst Contact:
Tien Teng for Internet Archive
415-977-1925
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