How do I make a physical donation to the Internet Archive?

Please help us preserve and make accessible everything ever published!  You can help by donating media that we do not already have in our library. We are most interested in archives or collections that will be of interest to researchers in the future.

Please consider us as a forever home for your media!

No collection is too large or too small. We have received donations as small as a few books or records, we have gone onsite to pack and ship whole libraries, and we have received collections of every size in between.

Please see our Media Types For Donations page for the full list of media types we are currently accepting. Please see our Does the Internet Archive Have My Media page for information on checking our library’s holdings against your collection.

If your donation is a few boxes or less and you have already confirmed we do not have your media already, please pack into sturdy boxes of a consistent size and ship your kind donation to:

Internet Archive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, California 94118
United States

If it is a large collection or one that needs special consideration then please fill out the donation form. The team will then contact you by email or phone to see how we can best assist.

Donation Form

Please only use the donation form for large donations or assistance requests. Most small donations have successfully shipped using local carriers like USPS Media Mail, UPS or FedEx. We empower you to ship your kind donations as it is convenient for you! But if you would like confirmation of receipt please send your shipment’s tracking information to donations@archive.org.

We will be very accepting of materials that you will pack, ship and de-dupe, and we are more selective when we have to pay and coordinate. But we can do this and we have done so for many many collections of items we do not have.  For full libraries our Away Team will travel to your location to pack and ship.

We have donation drop off locations in the US and in England (books only) so please use the form to get instructions and drop off hours.

We try to digitize materials and make them available publicly as funding allows– we make no guarantees as to if and when this might be. There are some media types we are not yet digitizing, but are happy to physically preserve until we are able to do so. 

If the donation is large enough it gets recorded as a donation item on the archive.org website with photos of the donor if desired

Items donated to the Internet Archive become the property of Internet Archive, and will be recorded as an unrestricted gift. Items are not returnable after donation. We can provide a donation receipt roughly describing the donation back that can be used for tax purposes– but we can not do an appraisal.

For materials that do not fit into our collections for any reason, they are often donated to other non-profits or worthy causes, but sometimes recycled. Rarely are materials sold.

Please donate physical materials to the Internet Archive!

To learn more about our physical item donation program and the donation process, check out our webinar here.