In a landmark move for both digital preservation and public access, the U.S. Senate has officially inducted the Internet Archive into the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), the government’s 212‑year‑old initiative to make federal publications freely available to the American public. The designation, formalized in a July 24th letter from California Senator Alex Padilla to the Government Publishing Office (GPO), cements the Archive’s role alongside more than 1,100 physical libraries in distributing bills, regulations, presidential documents, economic reports, census data and more—now in a truly digital-first setting.

Established by Congress in 1813, the FDLP was born out of the belief that an informed citizenry is the bedrock of democracy. Historically centered on paper volumes shipped to libraries across the country, the program has evolved over two centuries to embrace electronic dissemination. Today, the GPO offers thousands of federal publications via its GovInfo portal, but the Archive’s inclusion marks a first: a nonprofit, internet‑native library formally recognized as a federal depository.

“The Archive’s digital-first approach makes it the perfect fit for a modern federal depository library, expanding access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape,” Senator Padilla wrote in his letter to the GPO director.

With this status, the Archive gains reliable, direct feeds of official government content, reducing its current reliance on bulk downloads and web crawling. In theory, that means fresher, more complete versions of everything from the Code of Federal Regulations to the Congressional Record—automatically, as soon as they’re published.

Since launching in 1996, the Internet Archive has built one of the world’s largest digital libraries: over 30 petabytes of data, including an astounding trillion web pages archived in the Wayback Machine, texts, audio recordings, videos, software and more.

“In October, the Internet Archive will hit a milestone of one trillion pages,” founder Brewster Kahle noted. “And that one trillion is not just a testament to what libraries are able to do, but actually the sharing that people and governments have to try and create an educated populace.”

Kahle sees FDLP status as a natural next step: “By being part of the program itself, it just gets us closer to the source of where the materials are coming from, so that it’s more reliably delivered to the Internet Archive, to then be made available to the patrons of the Internet Archive or partner libraries.” This direct pipeline should streamline digital preservation workflows and serve as a model for other institutions moving from analog to digital collections.

The timing couldn’t be better for the Archive’s public-relations profile, but FDLP status won’t resolve its ongoing copyright conflicts. In 2023, the Archive was ordered to remove over half a million digitized books after a lawsuit by major publishers challenged its emergency “Controlled Digital Lending” program during the COVID‑19 pandemic. More recently, several record labels sued over the Great 78 Project, which digitizes early 20th‑century 78 RPM records; a loss there could expose the Archive to over $700 million in damages and even threaten its continued operation.

Legal experts caution that depository status doesn’t confer immunity: FDLP libraries must still respect copyright law and ensure that any non‑public‑domain content is distributed in compliance with licensing and fair‑use principles. Nevertheless, the designation does underscore the Archive’s public-service mission and may shift the political calculus around future litigation.

The Archive’s entry into the FDLP reflects a wider trend: government agencies and advocacy groups pushing for open data, from Parliament’s example in the U.K. to OpenGov initiatives in cities worldwide. By embedding digital repositories into the official depository network, the U.S. signals that the paper era is giving way to an always‑online architecture for transparency.

Looking ahead, the Archive plans to experiment with richer metadata, interactive tools and partnerships that leverage FDLP materials for teaching, research and civic engagement. “This isn’t just about hosting PDFs,” says Kahle. “It’s about building the ecosystems—APIs, visualizations, integrations with Wikipedia—that let anyone not only read but use and remix government information.”

Whether you’re tracking new federal regulations, studying historical census data or simply satisfyingly clicking through archived pages of your hometown’s website circa 1998, this change means one thing: more reliable, timely and user‑friendly access to the government’s own records. And because the Internet Archive operates under a nonprofit charter, all of this remains free to anyone with an internet connection—no library card required.

In a time when trust in institutions is fractured and information ecosystems feel increasingly gated or monetized, the addition of the Internet Archive to the FDLP stands as a powerful affirmation: government documents are public goods, and the Internet is their natural home.