For a little over a year I’ve been a monthly supporter of the Internet Archive. I’m doing this because the Internet Archive is a very useful resource to me. Both to find back things I’ve linked to in the past, since taken offline but preserved in the Archive, and as a neutral way of providing proof something was said somewhere online at some point. You may have noticed that Wikipedia increasingly routes all their internal links through the Archive, because it preserves the linked site as it was referenced, thus maintaining the integrity and the verifiability of that reference.

This month I received a thank you mail from the Internet Archive, and in part it said….

Wait, what? They have only 4000 monthly contributors? For a global service like that? There must be more people out there able to make a monthly donation, that can help build a solid fundament underneath the Internet Archive. Especially if you use the Archive regularly as a tool, it is worth considering if you would like to make a recurring donation.

I see my own donation as a subscription rather, part of rearranging where I spent my money and changing some spending habits. In the past months I stopped spending money with Amazon if I can help it. Part of that flows to independent book sellers, part of it flows to independent online services I use, such as the Internet Archive. More deliberately ‘voting with my spending’ of sorts.