Does the digital archive take away from the importance of the archive's 'place,' one of the traditional archive's key characteristics? The Internet Archive's building in San Francisco embodies the conventional definition of the archive as a secure building and place which houses unique artifacts and documents; The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build a virtual, Internet library. It self-defines its purposes as offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. In late 1999, the organization began including texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in their collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

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