The IA Client – The Swiss Army Knife of Internet Archive

As someone who’s uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to the Internet Archive’s stacks and who has probably done a few million transactions with the materials over the years, I just “know” about the Internet Archive python client, and if you’re someone who wants to interact with the site as a power user (or were looking for an excuse to), it’ll help you to know about it too. Started in 2012 and overseen primarily by Archive employee Jake Johnson, the internetarchive client (which is generally just called “ia”) is both a set of libraries and a command-line program for doing a wide range of activities and actions with the archive without having to come in through the website. In my case, here are some automated or semi-automated tasks I use the ia client command set to do, often daily:

For people who are using the Archive to simply play with and enjoy its many different materials, be they website histories, movies, music, and books – this tool is probably not what you need.

Source: blog.archive.org