US Senate Designates Internet Archive as Federal Depository Library

The U.S. Senate has tapped the Internet Archive to join the Federal Depository Library Program, inserting the San-Francisco nonprofit into a 1,100-member network that preserves and distributes government documents. The designation, conveyed this week in a letter from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) to the Government Publishing Office, gives the 28-year-old digital library direct, routine feeds of congressional reports, agency budgets, regulatory filings and other federal publications that are all in the public domain.

A Digital-First Depository

Unlike most depository libraries—which still juggle pallets of paper and microfiche—the Internet Archive’s collection lives almost entirely online. Founder Brewster Kahle said the new status “gets us closer to the source,” allowing the Archive to ingest files straight from GPO pipelines instead of waiting for partner libraries to ship boxes or upload scans. Users will see many records appear on Archive.org the same day they hit Capitol Hill’s document servers, searchable alongside the group’s Wayback Machine snapshots of now-deleted .gov pages.

Why It Matters Now

The upgrade lands as researchers and journalists scramble to track policy shifts under the Trump administration’s second term, which has already removed diversity and climate data from several federal sites. “A modern depository that’s web-native gives the public an insurance policy against vanishing records,” said James Jacobs, a government-information librarian who advises Free Government Information, a watchdog group. Padilla framed the move as a way to “eliminate barriers” for communities without easy access to brick-and-mortar collections.

Legal Clouds Still Loom

The depository badge does not shield the Archive from escalating copyright fights. In September 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling that its controlled digital-lending program infringes publishers’ rights, forcing the site to remove more than 500,000 e-books and putting potential damages above $600 million. A separate lawsuit from major record labels over the “Great 78 Project” could push liabilities past $700 million. Kahle has vowed to continue appealing but conceded in a recent blog post that the organization is “lawyering on multiple fronts while still trying to serve readers and historians.”  

For now, the federal imprimatur underscores Congress’s reliance on the very platform publishers are suing. As Padilla wrote, the Archive has already logged nearly one trillion archived web pages. “That’s not just a testament to what libraries can do,” Kahle added in a statement to KQED, “but to what open governments can share with an educated populace”.