Internet Archive Scraper - Books, Audio, Film & Web

Search archive.org for books, audio, film, software and more, and get the results as rows: the identifier, the title, the creator, the year, the download count, the subject tags, a description and the link. Filter to one media type, and sort by downloads, by date or by what was added most recently.

The metadata is written by whoever uploaded the item, so it is uneven. Plenty of items have no creator, no year and no description, and that is the archive rather than a gap here.

Input	Search keywords, or an archive.org Lucene query
Output	One row per archive.org item: identifier, title, creator, year and date, media type, downloads, subjects, description, date added, link
Ceiling	10,000 items per run
Account needed	None, and no API key
Price	$2.00 per 1,000 items on the Free plan, a little less on paid plans. The free plan's $5 a month covers about 2,500

🔍 What Internet Archive Scraper does

Plain keywords work. So does the archive's own query syntax, which is worth knowing if you are doing anything precise: title:(grateful dead) AND year:[1977 TO 1980] does what it looks like it does.

Pick a media type to stay inside books, audio, film, software, images, archived web pages, datasets or collections, or leave it empty and get everything. Sorting is by downloads, by the item's own date, by when it was added to the archive, or by the archive's relevance ranking.

The run pages a hundred at a time until it has the number of unique items you asked for or the result set runs out.

📋 What data you get from each archive.org item

What you get	Field
The archive's permanent key for the item, and its page	identifier, url
Title and creator	title, creator
The item's own year and date	year, date
What kind of item it is	mediaType
How often it has been downloaded	downloads
The uploader's subject tags	subjects
The start of the uploader's description	description
When it was added to archive.org	publicdate

▶️ How to scrape the Internet Archive

1. Open Internet Archive Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Type keywords into Search query, or paste an archive.org query if you have one.
3. Pick a Media type unless you want everything.
4. Set Max items, choose a Sort by, then click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost to scrape the Internet Archive?

$2.00 per 1,000 items on the Free plan. Paid plans pay a little less: $1.98 on Starter, $1.96 on Scale and $1.94 on Business. On the free plan, the $5 Apify gives you each month covers about 2,500 items.

You pay per item delivered. Items that appear twice across pages are dropped before they are counted, diagnostic rows are not charged, and a search that matches nothing is not charged. Set a maximum cost on the run and it stops when it gets there.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "title:(apollo 11) AND year:[1969 TO 1972]",
  "mediaType": "movies",
  "sort": "downloads",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Field	Default	What it is
query	none, the form starts with nasa apollo	Keywords, or an archive.org Lucene query. Required.
mediaType	any	texts, audio, movies, software, image, web, data or collection. Empty means any.
sort	downloads	downloads, date for the item's own date, publicdate for recently added, or relevance.
maxItems	100	How many unique items to return, up to 10,000.
notionConnector	none	Optional. Writes each item into your Notion once the run finishes.
notionParentId	none	Optional. The Notion data source to write into.
proxyConfiguration	off	Optional network settings. Off by default, and a normal run does not need it.

An OR covers your whole query. When you pick a media type, a query with an OR in it is bracketed before the type is added, so jazz OR blues with audio returns jazz and blues recordings, all of them audio.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a run on 2 October 2026, for nasa apollo sorted by downloads, with the description cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "identifier": "Apollo1116mmOnboardFilm",
  "title": "APOLLO 11 16MM ONBOARD FILM",
  "creator": "NASA/Johnson Space Center",
  "year": "1969",
  "date": "1969-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "mediaType": "movies",
  "downloads": 301031,
  "subjects": ["What -- Apollo 11", "space", "nasa", "Apollo 11", "16MM"],
  "description": "Film taken includes scenes taken out Lunar Module (LM) window documenting lunar surface Extravehicular Activity (EVA) and LM ascent ...",
  "publicdate": "2009-05-30T00:41:55Z",
  "url": "https://archive.org/details/Apollo1116mmOnboardFilm"
}

Three of the four rows above it in that same run were collections such as apolloaudiocollection, with creator, year, date, subjects and description all empty. That is what the archive's shelves usually look like.

Field	How to read it
identifier	The archive's permanent key for the item, and the part of the URL that matters. Use it to dedupe and to fetch the item's files elsewhere.
creator, year, date	null whenever the uploader left them blank, which is often. year is text, as the archive stores it.
mediaType	Which kind of item it is. collection means a container of other items, not a single thing you can play or read.
downloads	The archive's count, and 0 when the field was missing altogether.
subjects	The uploader's tags, as an array. Frequently empty.
description	The first 500 characters as the uploader wrote it, HTML and all, so strip it before displaying it.
publicdate	When the item was added to archive.org, which is not the same as when it was made.

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset, and ok tells them apart.

Row	How to spot it	Billed
An item	ok: true and an identifier	yes
A diagnostic	ok: false and an errorCode	no

The overview table in the Apify Console shows the item columns only, so a diagnostic row looks blank there. Switch to the JSON or All fields view to read it.

Code	What it means
BAD_INPUT	No query, or a media type that is not one of the listed values.
NO_RESULTS	The search worked and nothing matched. The numFound field on the row shows the archive's own count.
RATE_LIMITED	archive.org asked for a slower pace than the run could keep. Try a smaller run.
SERVER_ERROR	archive.org answered with a server error. Usually passes.
NOT_SERVED	This request was not served this run. Re-run it later. Until 12 October 2026 this code was called BLOCKED.
NETWORK	archive.org was unreachable, or answered with something that was not the data it promised. The details field says which.
TIME_LIMIT	The run got close to its time limit and stopped on its own. The items delivered before that are complete and charged. Give the run more time, or ask for fewer items, to get the rest.

A run that ends on one of these rows still finishes as succeeded, except one: when the time limit stopped the run before any item came back, it ends as failed, with a TIME_LIMIT row saying so.

💡 What people use it for

• Finding the archived recordings of a band or a broadcaster, sorted by what people actually play.
• Building a reading list of public domain books on a subject, with the identifiers to fetch them.
• Tracking what a collection has gained recently, with sort on publicdate and a schedule.
• Handing a model a list of source material with links, rather than a page of search results.

🚧 What it does not do

• Metadata and a link, never the files. No books, audio, video or page captures are downloaded.
• It does not read Wayback Machine snapshots. Archived sites appear as items under the web media type, not as captures of a URL on a given date.
• Uploader metadata is patchy. Missing creators, years and descriptions are normal.
• downloads cannot tell you zero from missing. Both read 0.
• Collections are containers. A collection row is a shelf, not an item, and it shows up whenever you leave the media type empty.
• description keeps the uploader's HTML and stops at 500 characters, which can cut mid-tag.
• 10,000 items per run, and archive.org's own result set can end sooner.
• No file lists, sizes or formats. Take the identifier to the archive's item page for those.
• It is not an official tool of the Internet Archive. Dami's Studio is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Internet Archive, or by any other company named on this page.

🧭 Which reference scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Wikipedia search results or article text	Wikipedia Scraper
Wikidata Q-ids, aliases and claims, by name or by ID	Wikidata Scraper
Book metadata by keyword, title or ISBN	Books Scraper
Goodreads ratings and rating counts from a book search	Goodreads Books Scraper
Books, audio, film and software held on archive.org	This one
Papers with readable abstracts and citation counts	OpenAlex Scraper
Wikipedia, arXiv and OpenAlex searches as tools for an AI agent	Research MCP Server

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an archive.org account?

No. This reads the public search that anyone can use.

Can I download the books or the audio?

Not from this actor. Take the identifier from each row and fetch the item's files from archive.org directly.

Why do some rows have no creator or year?

Because nobody typed them in when the item was uploaded. The archive accepts what it is given.

Can I use the archive's advanced query syntax?

Yes, the query goes through as written. Field searches and date ranges both work.

Can I call it from code or connect it to an AI assistant?

Yes. The API tab has ready-made code for Python, JavaScript and the command line. For Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client, connect https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,dami_studio/internet-archive-scraper. Either way the run happens on your Apify account at the same price.

Is scraping the Internet Archive legal?

The search index is public. What you may then do with a given item depends on that item's own rights, which vary enormously across the archive. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the query you used. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.