Early in the morning of November 6, a fire struck the building in San Francisco that houses the Internet Archive's scanning center. The nonprofit group is responsible for maintaining the insanely awesome Wayback Machine, which lets you dig back through the archaeology of the Web and peer at its distant past.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle revealed in a blog post that the fire did not damage the Internet Archive's main building, and even if it had, the group's data is backed up to multiple locations. But although no archived data was lost, the fire did destroy some physical materials waiting to be archived.

More gravely, though, the fire damaged what the Internet Archive estimates to be "about $600,000 worth of high end digitization equipment"—primarily tools used to convert physical books, microfilm, and movies into digital form for storage.

Although the Wayback Machine is the most widely used service offered by the Internet Archive, the Web is only one of many different things that the group preserves. It also offers a huge collection of preserved media of all kinds—video, audio, and text. In fact, those collections are exactly what the scanning center's equipment supported. The group isn't able to simply purchase replacement equipment, so it is seeking community donations to help rebuild the scanning capabilities in the wake of the fire.

The Internet Archive is working to produce a full assessment of the damaged and destroyed materials; meanwhile, it is continuing its scanning efforts at an alternate location. In addition to assistance in the form of donations, the group is also asking for more materials to be donated for scanning in order to keep the scanning employees affected by the fire working.