Skip to main content
Dataerai can pull items from the Internet Archive — the public, non-profit digital library of texts, audio, video, software, and archived web pages — into one of your projects as metadata-first assets. The item’s metadata — title, creators, year, media type, license — is copied into Dataerai so it’s searchable and shareable alongside your own data. The files are not copied: clicking Download on an imported asset takes you straight to the item’s data on archive.org’s servers.
Imported assets are metadata-first: they describe and link to data that lives on the Internet Archive. Nothing is stored in your Dataerai allocation, so importing doesn’t consume your quota.
One Internet Archive item (an identifier such as alicesadventures19002gut) imports as one asset. Because an Archive item can hold anything from a single file to many thousands (an original plus machine-generated PDF/EPUB/OCR derivatives, or a whole web capture), the asset’s Download opens the item’s anonymous data directory on archive.org (https://archive.org/download/<identifier>/), where you browse and download the individual files directly from the Internet Archive.

​
Search the Internet Archive

Open the Import from Internet Archive page and enter a search term, then Search.
  • The search is free text and matches item titles and metadata — try a book title, a band name, or a topic.
  • Results show Title, Type (the item’s media type — texts, audio, movies, software, web, …), and the item identifier and year under each title.
  • Use Per page to trade clicks for a longer page; the page count reflects the full result set.

​
Select and import

1

Select items

Tick the items you want — click a row, or press Space or Enter on it, to toggle its checkbox. The header checkbox selects or clears everything on the current page; your selection is kept as you page through results.
2

Choose the destination project

Paste the UUID of the project that should own the new assets into the Import into project field.
3

Import

Click Import. A single Import result panel summarizes how many items were imported (and assets created), plus any that failed and why.
Download opens the item’s data directory on archive.org rather than streaming a single file — pick the specific files you need there. The files download anonymously over HTTPS directly from the Internet Archive.
Because imported assets point at the Internet Archive rather than your own storage, their data is only available while the Archive item is. Licensing varies item by item — check each item’s license on archive.org before reusing its files. If you need a durable copy under your control, download the files and upload them as regular assets instead.

​
Next steps

Metadata-first assets

How assets that describe data elsewhere work in Dataerai.

Import from Zenodo

Pull public records from Zenodo the same metadata-first way.

Organize into collections

Group imported items alongside your own data.

Search & discover

Find imported items by title, type, and metadata.