The internet Archive

The logo of the organization

Located in an old Christian Scientist church in San Francisco’s Richmond district, lies one of the most indispensable and yet often overlooked and underappreciated projects/resources of the modern age: The non-profit Internet Archive. Strangely enough, the location itself was chosen for the project as the building resembles the logo for the organization. 

A picture of the building taken from their site.

Perhaps most famously, they are the ones who operate and curate the famous Wayback Machine that seeks to catalog and archive all websites on the internet, including defunct ones. Starting in 1996, it is offered as a free service to all for finding old sites that no longer exist, seeing how changes were made to sites over time, or (my favorite use) to see how blowhards and politicians have walked back or reversed their claims or statements over time. This in itself is a monumental project, but it isn't the only thing that they do there. 

They consider themselves an open library to all and also offer a project in which they are digitizing books, have an archive of TV news broadcasts, audio recordings of live concerts, as well as archiving free software, and projects to digitize a variety of other physical media among many other projects. It's near impossible to detail it all here, but you can go directly to their site to find out more: https://archive.org/about/

As an added bit of interesting trivia about the location is that the church's chapel is still intact and has more than 120 ceramic sculptures of the Internet Archive’s current and former employees situated among the pews that were created by a local artist. Another interesting tidbit is the fact that the massive amount of data servers needed for the project are so vast, that they serve as the building's heat source! Pretty neat eh?