Early on Wednesday morning, a fire broke out at a scanning center at San Francisco's Internet Archive, destroying about $600,000 worth of high-end digitization equipment.
The fire occurred at around 3:30 a.m. local time, when the building was empty, so no one was hurt, and the Internet Archive said that no data was lost.
"Some physical materials were in the scanning center because they were being digitized, but most were in a separate locked room or in our physical archive and were not lost," the group said in a statement. "Of those materials we did unfortunately lose, about half had already been digitized. We are working with our library partners now to assess."
The main building was not affected except for damage to the electrical run, which cut power to some servers for a time. But scanning equipment was damaged, and the group will have to repair or rebuild the scanning building. As a result, the Internet Archive is asking for any donations people might be able to provide, as well as assistance with scanning as it recovers.
"This episode has reminded us that digitizing and making copies are good strategies for both access and preservation," the group said. "We have copies of the data in the Internet Archive in multiple locations, so even if our main building had been involved in the fire we still would not have lost the amazing content we have all worked so hard to collect."
The Internet Archive thanked the San Francisco Fire Department for being "fast and great," as well as its city supervisor and a representative of the mayor's office, who "have come by to check up on us."
The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, describes itself as an Internet library. As PCMag noted in 2008, the site's showcase is the Wayback Machine, which hosts snapshots of websites throughout time.
Last year, the organization said it would make more than 1 million pieces of archived Internet content available via BitTorrent. A month later, it launched an information database called TV News Search & Borrow.
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