A Thousand Years of Memory, and a New Chapter
On May 5th, 2026, Internet Archive Switzerland celebrates its launch at the exhibition hall of the Abbey Archives of St. Gallen, one of the oldest continuously active archives in the world.
We are grateful to Peter Erhart and the Abbey Archives of St. Gallen for hosting us: two institutions, one a millennium old and one born in the digital age, sharing the same conviction that memory matters.
We chose this date, this city, this building on purpose. Where you begin says something about where you mean to go. That choice is our first statement of purpose.
What We Are
Internet Archive Switzerland is an independent non-profit foundation, established under Swiss law and based in St. Gallen. We are part of the global Internet Archive mission-aligned organisations, alongside Internet Archive Canada and Internet Archive Europe, and we share the founding vision of Brewster Kahle, who launched the Internet Archive in San Francisco thirty years ago: Universal Access to All Knowledge.
The Internet Archive is one of the largest and most important digital archives ever created. Its Wayback Machine holds over one billion snapshots of web pages, the oldest dating to 1996. Its collections include 50 million books and texts, 13 million audio recordings, 10 million videos, 5 million images, and 1 million software programmes, all freely accessible to researchers, journalists, educators, historians, and the general public. More than 200 million people visit archive.org every month.
Internet Archive Switzerland carries that mission forward, and takes it further.
Why St. Gallen
St. Gallen is home to one of Europe's great archival traditions. The Abbey Library and its archives stretch back over a thousand years. This is a city that understands, in its bones, that preserving the record is a form of civic responsibility.
It is a fitting home for this new chapter.
St. Gallen is also home to the University of St. Gallen — one of Europe's leading universities in business, law, and increasingly, computer science. The School of Computer Science, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Damian Borth, brings world-class research expertise in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bear on questions that matter well beyond the academy. For an initiative that sits at the frontier of digital preservation and artificial intelligence, St. Gallen offers not just a symbolic home, but an intellectual one.
What We Are Building
Beyond participating in the Internet Archive's global repository, Internet Archive Switzerland will take on a preservation challenge unlike any in the Archive's thirty-year history.
In partnership with the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Gallen, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Damian Borth, we are working to archive all available and future AI models. This is new territory. The Wayback Machine preserves web pages. Libraries preserve books. But AI models, the systems that increasingly shape how we write, decide, create, and govern, have no established preservation infrastructure. They are trained, deployed, updated, deprecated, and in many cases simply lost, with no public record of what they were or how they behaved. Losing them is not a technical inconvenience but a gap in the historical record. The Gen AI Archive is our answer to that gap.
This is new territory. The Wayback Machine preserves web pages. Libraries preserve books. But artificial intelligence models, the systems that increasingly shape how we write, decide, create, and govern, have no established preservation infrastructure. They are trained, deployed, updated, deprecated, and in many cases simply lost, with no public record of what they were or how they behaved.
The second challenge is older in kind, if not in form. Cultural heritage and historical records worldwide are disappearing, through conflict, disaster, institutional collapse, and deliberate suppression. In many cases, the window to act is short. Once an archive is gone, it is gone.
Our Endangered Archives initiative is designed to change that. Working with partners including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), we aim to build a secure digital haven for vulnerable collections, using Switzerland's neutrality, stability, and legal framework as a foundation. A UNESCO conference planned for November 2026 in Paris marks an early concrete step in that direction. We reject the concept of dark archives. History should not be hidden, only protected.
We are at the beginning of this effort, and we are under no illusion that it is simple. But the same was true of web archiving in 1996. Someone had to start.
An Open Question
The Internet Archive's mission is also a question, one that belongs to all of us.
At a time when information disappears, gets rewritten, or retreats behind paywalls, what does it mean to insist on open, permanent access to knowledge? Who gets to decide what is preserved and what is forgotten? And what is lost when the record is lost?
Every archive we save, every model we preserve, every collection we protect is our answer.
We look forward to the work ahead.