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Thu, 25 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0200 https://follow.it/
<![CDATA[Saving Modernist Houses with the Help of the Internet Archive]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0oBdS2geLzcVKCY3L745TL_

George Smart is on a mission to save mid-century modern houses. He believes the structures are works of art that people should respect—if they only realized their significance and knew how to preserve them.

George Smart, founder and chief executive officer of USModernist

Smart relies on the Internet Archive to maintain his open digital collection of modernist residential homes along with back issues of architectural magazines. He uses the Wayback Machine to find architectural firm websites and search for vintage publications.

“I find the Internet Archive is great…curated in a certain way and very organized,” Smart said. “They are trying to innovate all the time and figure out ways to archive different kinds of materials.”

About 10 years ago, Smart launched USModernist Archives, a nonprofit dedicated to chronicling the work of notable architects and educating the public about their masterpieces built roughly from 1945 to 1969. Its Architect and House Archives includes the life work of 150 architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and John Lautner, and details of 21,000 houses, including photos, address and renovation histories.

1954 Catalano House, Raleigh NC. Designed by Eduardo Catalano.

The USModernist’s Architecture Magazine Library features nearly 5 million scanned, searchable, and downloadable pages from Architectural Forum, Progressive Architecture, and others. Smart said digital access to these legacy publications is critical for those researching how to preserve Modernist houses. Beyond the articles, the ads for doors, windows, tile and even door knobs provide clues for homeowners trying to renovate.

To get the word out, Smart also has a podcast, USModernist Radio, that has featured 650 guests from all over the world on more than 350 shows.

Smart, who is founder and chief executive officer of USModernist, said he uses Internet Archive several times a week in his research. He said he appreciates the ease of access and marvels at the wide range of information available.

“The internet is vast and the Internet Archive is archiving it frequently over the course of a year,” he said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

Because the Internet Archive has been so useful to building USModernist, Smart said he wanted to support the library as a donor. Joining the Monthly Giving Circle, he said, is convenient and ensures his continued support.

The Bunker House, Concord MA. Designed by Walter Gropius.

By combining his organization’s resources and those of the Internet Archive, Smart said he’s able to discover and document materials useful for historic preservation. “For me, it’s a thrill. We’re finding houses that have been off the radar for sometimes as many as 70 years,” he said. “The Internet Archive is helping us find the missing pieces.”

Smart’s vision? “To have a complete record of the mid-century modernist movement with profiles of the houses and architects—and everything that was ever published about these houses.”


The Monthly Giving Circle reflects our commitment and collective drive to defend Universal Access to All Knowledge. In addition to sustaining our work, Monthly Giving Circle members enjoy exclusive events, benefits, and discounts! Join George Smart and over 16,000 members by making a recurring monthly donation to the Internet Archive today.

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Wed, 17 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0oBdS2geLzcVKCY3L745TL_
<![CDATA[New Ways to Search Archived Music News]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qRWzanoW5nCHn9ye8UNv30
First crawl of CMT News on January 10, 2002.

When MTVNews.com went offline in late June, Internet users were quick to discover that some (but sadly, not all) of the site had been archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While you can no longer browse MTV News directly on the web, the archived pages are available via the Wayback Machine, starting with the first crawl of the site on July 5, 1997.

The same is true for CMT (Country Music Television) News, which was first crawled by the Internet Archive on January 10, 2002.

In response to patron requests, our engineers have created new search indexes for each site:

Why provide search indexes to music news? Because, as Michael Alex, founding editor of MTV News Digital, wrote in an op-ed for Variety, “the archives of MTV News and countless other news and entertainment organizations have a similar value: They’re a living record of entertainment history as it happened.”

It’s important to remember that these collections were captured as a routine part of the daily work conducted by more than one thousand libraries and archives collaborating with the Internet Archive to archive the web. For centuries, libraries have been the trusted repositories of culture and knowledge. As our news and information sources move increasingly digital, the role of libraries like the Internet Archive and our partners has changed to meet these new demands. This is why libraries like ours exist, and why web archiving is critical for preserving our shared digital culture.

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Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:43:55 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qRWzanoW5nCHn9ye8UNv30
<![CDATA[Using DLARC, Amateur Radio Operators are Resurrecting Technical Ideas from the Past, Using 21st Century Tech]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qZEDRoQyxLoaCY3L745TL_

A Thank You to Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications
by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

In 2021, I was a member of the committee that recommended approval of asignificant grantfromAmateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC)to Internet Archive to create theDigital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC). I could foresee the potential of DLARC then… but I couldn’t then imagine the scale of what DLARC would become, nor how useful DLARC would prove to be for the entirety of the Amateur (Ham) Radio community worldwide.

In my newsletterZero Retries, I write about interesting developments in Ham Radio to folks like me whose primary interest in Ham Radio is experimenting with the more advanced technological possibilities of Ham Radio. Such developments include communicating with data modes locally and worldwide (Packet Radio), usingHam Radio satellitesandcommunicating with Ham Radio astronautson the International Space Station, and developingM17, a new two way radio technology based entirely on open source (to mention just a few).

One of my favorite ways to use the DLARC (nearly 120,000 items now, and still growing) is to re-explore ideas that were proposed or attempted in Ham Radio, but for various reasons, didn’t quite become mainstream. Typically, the technology of earlier eras simply wasn’t up to some proposed ideas. But, with the technology of the 2020s such as cheap, powerful computers and software defined radio technology, many old ideas can be reexamined with perhaps succeed in becoming mainstream now. The problem has been that much of the source material for such “reimagining” has been languishing in file cabinets or bookcases of Ham Radio Operators like me, with nowhere to go. With the grant, IA could hire a dedicated archivist and began receiving, scanning, hosting, and aggregating electronic versions of old Ham Radio material.

One of my favorite examples ofmaybe we should try this again?is a one page flyer for a radio unit designed for data – theNW Digital Radio UDRX-440. That radio was a leading-edge idea in 2013, but didn’t become a product. One reason for that fate was that it required a small but powerful computer that NW Digital Radio was forced to develop itself, which was expensive. More than a decade later, the computer that NW Digital Radio required,with a quad-core, 1.8 GHZ processor and 1 GB of RAMis available off-the-shelf –for $35. Perhaps it’s time for an innovative Ham Radio manufacturer to try creating something like the UDRX-440 again. Being able to provide a link to illustrate such a concept, and prove that one manufacturer got as far as the design stage, can be inspirational.

Another examplemaybe we should try this again?is thePACSATsystem, a data-communications protocol and hardware specification for Ham Radio satellites that combined multiple receivers with a single high speed transmitter for more efficient throughput of data. In the 1990s, PACSAT was proposed and several satellites were actually built and put into orbit. But then, PACSAT required dedicated, expensive, specialized hardware suitable only for a satellite. In the 2020s, a PACSAT system could replace a Ham Radio repeater with a software defined receiver (can now listen to multiple frequencies) and a few other off-the-shelf parts. The difference that DLARC makes is thatall the original reference materialfor PACSATcan easily be found in DLARC. If some graduate student were to email me looking for a project, I can suggest that they create a “PACSAT 2025” – and point them toall of the PACSAT materialin DLARC.

Many new Ham Radio Operators live in “restricted” living arrangements such as apartments, condominiums, or communities that don’t allow external antennas. Thus, to operate on the Ham Radio “High Frequency – HF” bands (shortwave) bands, some “creativity” is required – a stealthy antenna. One of my favorite collections within DLARC is 73 Magazine which was published monthly for 43 years, with many, many antenna construction articles such as the “compressed W3EDP” HF antenna that would fit into an attic. Unlike current Ham Radio magazines, all 516 issues of 73 Magazine can be browsed, and downloaded, and because Internet Archive does optical character recognition (OCR), every word of every issue is keyword searchable.That, is powerful and ample “food for the imagination” of Ham Radio Operators looking to the past for some interesting projects to tackle.

Those are just afewexamples of the utility of DLARC from my perspective. Ham Radio has existed for more than a century, but prior to DLARC, there was no comprehensive online archive of Ham Radio material. There were some personal archives, some Ham Radio clubs and organizations had their newsletters online, but there was nocomprehensiveonline archive of Ham Radio material. DLARC is now the archive that Ham Radio has been missing. Most significantly, unlike some Ham Radio organizations, material in DLARC isfree for public access(though some material is subject to Controlled Digital Lending). DLARC includes club newsletters (from all over the world), Ham Radio books and magazines (some from very early in the 20th century), audio recordings, video recordings, conference proceedings… literally a treasure trove of knowledge and ideas and inspiration.

Thank you Internet Archive and Archivist Kay Savetz K6KJNfor all the hard work in creating and growing Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications – wereallyappreciate it (and I use it nearly every day).

Steve Stroh
Amateur Radio Operator N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA

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Wed, 10 Jul 2024 21:36:47 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qZEDRoQyxLoaCY3L745TL_
<![CDATA[LISTEN: The End of Libraries as We Know Them?]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0rT6zHQU2qCVl1cWWor9YPv
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
"We're now having the judiciary starting to judge against libraries in ways that we haven't seen in 100 years." - Brewster Kahle

The publishers’ lawsuit against our library is featured in the latest episode of “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.

Listen in as Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian, talks with Chris Hayes about the future of libraries, and what the publishers’ lawsuit means for libraries & their patrons in the digital age. Chris & Brewster are joined by librarian and lawyer, Kyle K. Courtney.

Streaming now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & TuneIn.

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Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:44:19 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0rT6zHQU2qCVl1cWWor9YPv
<![CDATA[What happened last Friday in Hachette v. Internet Archive?]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0o60EMkj-s09ps0ohxaO6Yr

Last Friday, the Internet Archive was in court, fighting for the digital rights of libraries. Our appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, was heard in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Here are some resources to help you understand what happened in court:

🔊 Listen to the oral argument. The full 90+ minute proceedings are available to listen to online.

🗞 Read the analysis of the oral argument from Authors Alliance. Executive Director Dave Hansen offered a rapid analysis of the oral argument in a thorough Substack post.

📚 Read coverage of the post-argument discussion at the American Library Association Annual Conference. Following oral argument, the legal team representing the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive, remotely joined the eBook Interest Group discussion during ALA’s Annual Conference in San Diego. The conversation offered Brewster and the legal team a chance to explain what happened in the courtroom, and to answer questions from librarians and members of the press who gathered for the session. Ars Technica covered the discussion in an excellent post, “Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers.”

Take action

Rafael studying

Tell the publishers: Let Readers Read! We have an open letter to the publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000+ books they’ve removed from our lending library as a result of their lawsuit. Sign the open letter today!

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Mon, 01 Jul 2024 17:49:08 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0o60EMkj-s09ps0ohxaO6Yr
<![CDATA[Author Explores ‘The Secret Lives of Elizabethans’ with Help from Internet Archive]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0r2j_YAe2DRXJVjH6qdYdAk

After 34 years as a successful commercial real estate attorney, Dorothea Dickerman is spending her second act writing about the Elizabethan era. She’s long been fascinated with the English literary renaissance—the politics of the time and the whole cast of characters, including William Shakespeare.

Author Dorothea Dickerman

As she works from her home office, Dickerman often relies on the Internet Archive. While she enjoys paging through rare books at the Folger Shakespeare Library or Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Dickerman said it’s more convenient to go online. Also, the digitized materials allow her to enter keywords to refine her search and save time.

“I regard Internet Archive as an ever ready and highly patient librarian who is there for me,” Dickerman said. “I can go back as many times as I want, and it is open 24 hours a day.’

Many of the books she wants are out-of-print and hard to find in their original version. When text has been updated through the lens of an editor, she said, the language is sometimes changed to be more relevant to contemporary readers. Dickerman is often searching for historical primary sources – sometimes materials from the 1500s (letters, court records, diplomatic reports) that have been preserved by the Archive. “For that purpose, the Internet Archive is amazing,” she said.

Since retiring in 2017, Dickerman has been immersing herself in the Elizabethan era and sharing what she’s learned. She recently created a website (Dorothea Dickerman.com), writes a blog, Secret Lives of Elizabethans, and is active on Instagram. Dickerman is a guest lecturer, sometimes giving talks about places where Shakespeare set a play, such as Italy. She also speaks at conferences as a Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. On the monthly podcast, the Blue Boar Tavern, she is a panelist discussing all things Shakespeare, which appears on YouTube. 

Her long-term project is a series of historical novels looking at the lives of women at the time, without whom there would be no Shakespeare. Dickerman said she likes examining the layers of Shakespeare’s stories, including the political satire and underlying messages that she finds through details such as pseudonyms and book dedications. Dickerman said she searches for lost and hidden stories of the era to weave into her novels. Rather than inventing tales about the Elizabethan court, she wants her stories to be firmly grounded in fact.

“I regard Internet Archive as an ever ready and highly patient librarian who is there for me. I can go back as many times as I want, and it is open 24 hours a day.”

Author Dorothea Dickerman

Although she is not a trained scholar, Dickerman said she uses her legal research skills and curiosity to look for direct or circumstantial evidence to confirm information. When she makes a discovery or identifies a pattern in a document: “It’s a thrill!” Reading an historical account of a feast in 1575, for instance, provides her with rich details for her to write an accurate scene in her novel. Many of those ah-ha moments are thanks to the Internet Archive.

“Almost anything I am looking for is there [in the collection]. That’s what’s so terrific about the Internet Archive,” Dickerman said. “The world has gone on to the web and everyone from children to serious scholars need to be able to find the material and read it for themselves to make their own decisions.”

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Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0r2j_YAe2DRXJVjH6qdYdAk
<![CDATA[Disabled Patron Asks Publishers: ‘Let us read, let us learn.’]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pytdpGzqtFgqCY3L745TL_

Editorial note: The following message came into our patron services team this week. We are posting here in full with the patron’s permission as it explains the full scope of the challenges our readers are facing following the publishers’ decision to remove more than 500,000 books from our lending library.

Here is Maureen, in her own words:

“I use the Internet Archive for many reasons and the book removals have impacted my ability to do so! Despite my good fortune to live in a community which provides a great library with plenty of physical books and a decent digital selection via Libby, the Archive still meets needs which my local library cannot fulfill.

I’m disabled: it causes fatigue, executive dysfunction, and more. I also am at high risk for Long Covid complications, so I try to limit my time in crowded public areas.

Additionally I live in an area with extreme weather that runs the gamut from whiteout blizzards, river floods making roads impassable, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and on and on!

This means that actually GETTING to the library can be a challenge at times, especially as I work, which further reduces the hours available.

While I do have a decent selection of typical contemporary ebooks via my community library’s Libby app, many topics of importance to me aren’t represented well or at all.

These include:

* LGBT, feminist, and disability studies books (many of which are long out of print, had small print runs or cost exorbitant academic prices, and were published long before ebooks existed or only in other areas of the world).

* retro/vintage/historical children’s picture books as well as vintage scifi and fantasy books, for many of the reasons listed above.

* Niche topics in anthropology, archaeology, and world religions. (Again for the aforementioned reasons).

It also really infuriates me that the lawsuit claims that use of the Archive’s library is just “recreational”.

* Just because I’m no longer in college or grad school doesn’t mean I’ve stopped learning, or privately researching, or somehow lost my desire for knowledge!

* (Plus, full-time and part-time independent scholars EXIST OUTSIDE OF THE ACADEMY and it’s so disheartening to see their contributions ignored/denied.)

* All children’s books are BY DEFINITION educational! They’re teaching kids to read!!!!!

* So are all nonfiction & biography books! They convey important information that help people make sense of the world.

* Vintage/retro genre books (romance, mystery, scifi etc) are in fact subjects of scholarship, through Fandom Studies, Leisure Studies, History, Literature etc. The Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University is a perfect example!

* And yes, contemporary genre books are subjects of scholarship too. And while many non-academics read vintage and/or contemporary genre books for solely for fun, many of us also like to chart changes in genre over time.

* For example, I am a Trekkie (Star Trek fan) and comparing very early Trek novels with recent ones is illuminating on a fandom history level AND a sociological level.

***Education and scholarship also mean private self-study. Publishers need to stop locking knowledge in the academic ivory tower!!!!!!!!***

In short- the Internet Archive is very important to me and millions of other readers. The books need to be restored to circulation. Let us read, let us learn.”

Maureen L., Iowa City, Iowa

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Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:14:26 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pytdpGzqtFgqCY3L745TL_
<![CDATA[We’re Fighting for Library Rights in Court This Friday – Join Us!]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0odXM7QRDco28b1naedg1wr

Friday is our day in court. After four long years of legal action, we will be in New York for the appellate oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library.

A quick recap: After the lower court sided with the publishers last March, we committed to appeal the decision. The appeal process kicked off last fall, with our opening brief filed in December, followed by amicus briefs in support of our library and library lending two weeks later. On Friday, we’ll appear in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, continuing our fight for library digital rights.

What’s at stake? The lawsuit is about the longstanding and widespread library practice of controlled digital lending, which is how we lend the books we own to our patrons. As a result of the publishers’ lawsuit, more than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library. The impacts on our patrons have been devastating:

Show Your Support!

Throughout this process, our patrons and supporters have asked how to help in this fight. Here are actions you can take to stand with the Internet Archive:

1. Watch the oral argument on Friday, June 28. The proceedings will be livestreamed starting at 10am ET. Join via https://ww2.ca2.uscourts.gov/court.html,;Courtroom 1505.

2. Tell the publishers: Let readers read! We’ve created an open letter to the publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000 books they’ve removed from our library. Add your signature today!

3. Stay connected. Sign up for the;Empowering Libraries newsletter;for ongoing updates about the lawsuit and our library.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2024 03:45:59 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0odXM7QRDco28b1naedg1wr
<![CDATA[From Brewster Kahle—I Set Out to Build the Next Library of Alexandria. Now I Wonder: Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years?]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Ips0ohxaO6Yr

Editorial note: This op-ed first ran in Time Magazine in 2021. We are reposting it here with permission as we head into oral argument for our appeal in the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, scheduled for next Friday, June 28, 2024.

When I started the Internet Archive 25 years ago, I focused our non-profit library on digital collections: preserving web pages, archiving television news, and digitizing books. The Internet Archive was seen as innovative and unusual. Now all libraries are increasingly electronic, and necessarily so. To fight disinformation, to serve readers during the pandemic, and to be relevant to 21st-century learners, libraries must become digital.

But just as the Web increased people’s access to information exponentially, an opposite trend has evolved. Global media corporations—emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading devices—are exerting absolute control over digital information. These two conflicting forces—towards unfettered availability and completely walled access to information—have defined the last 25 years of the Internet. How we handle this ongoing clash will define our civic discourse in the next 25 years. If we fail to forge the right path, publishers’ business models could eliminate one of the great tools for democratizing society: our independent libraries.

These are not small mom-and-pop publishers: a handful of publishers dominate all books sales and distribution including trade books, ebooks, and text books. Right now, these corporate publishers are squeezing libraries in ways that may render it impossible for any library to own digital texts in five years, let alone 25. Soon, librarians will be reduced to customer service reps for a Netflix-like rental catalog of bestsellers. If that comes to pass, you might as well replace your library card with a credit card. That’s what these billion-dollar-publishers are pushing.

The libraries I grew up with would buy books, preserve them, and lend them for free to their patrons. If my library did not have a particular book, then it would borrow a copy from another library for me. In the shift from print to digital, many commercial publishers are declaring each of these activities illegal: they refuse libraries the right to buy ebooks, preserve ebooks, or lend ebooks. They demand that libraries license ebooks for a limited time or for limited uses at exorbitant prices, and some publishers refuse to license audiobooks or ebooks to libraries at all, making those digital works unavailable to hundreds of millions of library patrons.

Although we’re best known for the;Wayback Machine, a historical archive of the World Wide Web, the Internet Archive also buys ebooks from the few independent publishers that will sell,;really sell, ebooks to us. With these ebooks, we lend them to one reader at a time, protected with the same technologies that publishers use to protect their ebooks. The Internet Archive also digitizes print books that were purchased or donated. Similarly, we lend them to one reader at a time, following a practice employed by hundreds of libraries over the last decade called “controlled digital lending.”

Last year,* four of the biggest commercial publishers in the world;sued the Internet Archive;to stop this longstanding library practice of controlled lending of scanned books. The;publishers filed their lawsuit;early in the pandemic, when public and school libraries were closed. In March 2020, more than one hundred shuttered libraries signed a statement of support asking that the Internet Archive do something to meet the extraordinary circumstances of the moment. We responded as any library would: making our digitized books available, without waitlists, to help teachers, parents, and students stranded without books. This emergency measure ended two weeks before the intended 14-week period.

The;lawsuit demands;that the Internet Archive destroy 1.4 million digitized books, books we legally acquired and scanned in cooperation with dozens of library partners. If the publishers win this lawsuit, then every instance of online reading would require the permission and license of a publisher. It would give publishers unprecedented control over what we can read and when, as well as troves of data about our reading habits.

Publishers’ bullying tactics have stirred lawmakers in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island to draft laws requiring that publishers treat libraries fairly. Maryland’s legislature passed the law unanimously. In those states, if an ebook is licensed to consumers, publishers will be required by law to license it to libraries on reasonable terms. But lobbyists for the publishing industry claim even these laws are unconstitutional. This is a dangerous state of affairs. Libraries should be free to buy, preserve, and lend all books regardless of the format.

Suing libraries is not a new tactic for these billion-dollar corporations and their surrogates: Georgia State University’s law library battled a copyright lawsuit for 12 years;;HathiTrust Digital Library;battled the Author’s Guild for five years. In each case, the library organization won, but it took millions of dollars that libraries can ill-afford.

Libraries spend billions of dollars on publishers’ products, supporting authors, illustrators, and designers. If libraries become mere customer service departments for publisher’s pre-packaged product lines, the role that librarians play in highlighting marginalized voices, providing information to the disadvantaged, and preserving cultural memory independent of those in power will be lost.

As we shift from print to digital, we can and must support institutions and practices that were refined over hundreds of years starting with selling ebooks to readers and libraries.

So if we all handle this next phase of the Internet well, I believe the answer is, yes, there will be libraries in 25 years, many libraries—and many publishers, many booksellers, millions of compensated authors, and a society in which everyone will read good books.

*Editorial note: This op-ed was first published in 2021.

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Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:24:46 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Ips0ohxaO6Yr
<![CDATA[TV Historian Relies on Internet Archive for Teaching and TikTok]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Il1cWWor9YPv

Whether Taylor Cole Miller is assigning a project for his communication studies classes or putting together a video for TikTok (@tvdoc), this TV historian says he appreciates tapping into vintage video and audio material from the Internet Archive.

The vast collection of old radio and television shows available at archive.org has allowed his students to analyze the early days of broadcasting and inform their work, says Miller, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. While the wide variety of materials help students understand the breadth of media history, one item in particular has become an indispensable part of Miller’s curriculum: On September 21, 1939, CBS affiliate WJSV was asked by the National Archive to record an entire day of radio programming — a gem now for students to get a glimpse at 19 hours of news, soap operas, and commercials that aired.

Listen to Complete Broadcast Day (1939) at the Internet Archive

“What you get is basically everyday radio, which you wouldn’t normally have access to,” Miller said of the resource available through the Internet Archive. “It’s a real opportunity for my students to listen and get a sense of what broadcasting was like.”

What his students hear that day is Franklin Roosevelt addressing the U.S. Congress about the proposed revision to the country’s Neutrality Act in WWII. Students are exposed to racism in the dramas, and ways advertisers were influencing people to buy products from Alka-Seltzer to Mounds candy bars.;

At the time, federal regulations mandated and enforced balanced coverage of news — rules like the Mayflower Doctrine and its predecessor the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan eliminated in 1987. This provides an important lesson in navigating today’s media landscape. “Getting them to experience what news was, in order to understand what news is, is also broadly useful,” said Miller, who is director of the university’s Communication and Media Lab.;

Just as an English professor needs books to teach, Miller said, he relies on the artifacts at the Internet Archive to show his students different samples of media over time. Miller’s students review episodes of The Shadow and listen to War of the Worlds to discuss media literacy as the supposed panic from the fictional radio show about a Martian invasion was more likely newspapers perpetuating a myth to delegitimize radio news.

Miller also teaches digital media production, where students make their own podcasts, and the historic audio can demonstrate techniques of storytelling, the power of sound effects, and the influence of advertising on the process. Students choose events to research and make their own radio dramas or TikToks.

Miller said he finds students invest more time in the research and production of assignments that are posted for the public since they know they will be seen by a wider and more critical audience.

That reach is also why Miller himself has been active on TikTok since 2021. As @tvdoc, Miller regularly creates 3–6 minute videos about everything from coverage of the O.J. Simpson car chase to behind-the-scenes tales from the classic sitcom, Bewitched. Miller said he likes to introduce viewers to publicly available resources so they can discover more about TV history on their own.

“The Internet Archive provides opportunities for amateur researchers to make a difference in our understanding of media history — and that is so critically important, particularly for local or syndicated television,” Miller said.

Miller’s TikTok audience includes other academics, fans of early TV, and the public at large.

“I think of it as an extension of my teaching,” Miller said. “I’m providing an opportunity to show the nuance of media history as it relates to American cultural history.”

Miller hopes his efforts bring needed attention to the role of preserving and analyzing media history. He was recently asked by the U.S. Library of Congress and its National Radio Preservation Task Force to promote the work of scholars in this field.

“Teaching the public is not only rewarding, personally, but it’s important for helping expand media literacy,” Miller said.

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Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Il1cWWor9YPv
<![CDATA[Let Readers Read]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Inn9ye8UNv30

Ask publishers to restore access to the 500,000 books they’ve caused to be removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library.

Sign the Open Letter


I’m Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive. The lawsuit against our library—Hachette v. Internet Archive—is fast approaching the oral argument stage of its appeal on June 28. I’ve been reflecting on our ongoing, four-year experience with this litigation and on the outcome we’re hoping for. Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library.;

We purchase and acquire books—yes, physical, paper books—and make them available for one person at a time to check out and read online. This work is important for readers and authors alike, as many younger and low-income readers can only read if books are free to borrow, and many authors’ books will only be discovered or preserved through the work of librarians. We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers.

But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing.;;

Impact

The legal decision and resulting injunction against our library have already had a profoundly negative impact on our patrons. They have inundated us with so many inquiries that our patron services team needed to prepare a Help Document explaining why our collection has been shrinking so rapidly.;

We asked our patrons to share their stories of what losing access to these 500,000 books has meant to them. What’s clear from the hundreds of testimonials we’ve received is the ability to access our books remains an absolute necessity for the many people around the world who depend on our library for their educational and professional development:;

  • Mark, a researcher from New York, said that as an independent scholar without an institutional affiliation, he often struggles to gain access to books he needs for his research. He says that The Internet Archive has been a lifeline for him.
  • We heard from Lucero, an educator from Mexico City, who said that without our library, he wouldn’t have been able to complete his research on Mexican Sign Langauge.
  • Perhaps Mrittika said it best. She’s from a rural region in India and doesn’t have access to rare books. She asks the publishers, “If you are going to ban online availability of these resources, what about us?”

Take Action

In appealing the district court’s decision, our goal is simply to let these readers continue on their journey. We envision a world in which Wikipedians can verify facts by following citations to information contained only in our printed history; where libraries can serve their communities online with collections financed through public investment; and above all, where library patrons are free to read without fear of corporate or government surveillance.

Sign the Open Letter

Please help spread the word across social media: Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, TikTok, Twitter/X

The potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive. This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries, and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society. We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form. Doing so upholds the principle that knowledge should be equally and equitably accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or where they learn.;

As we head into this appeal, our message remains clear and unwavering: Let readers read.

Lend your voice to this message by signing the open letter to publishers, asking them to restore access to the books they have removed from our library.

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Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:13:40 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8Inn9ye8UNv30
<![CDATA[Patrons Speak Out: The Impact of Losing Access to More Than 500,000 Books]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8IuT5HJgy6HUf

Earlier this week, we asked readers across social media to tell us the impact of losing access to more than 500,000 books removed from our library as a result of the publishers’ lawsuit.

The response was overwhelming, and the stories shared were powerful and heartfelt. It wasn’t just titles that disappeared—it was countless memories, research materials, and sources of inspiration for readers around the world. Below, we share some of the most impactful testimonials, highlighting the profound effect these removals have had on readers and researchers everywhere.

If you’d haven’t already done so, please share your story!


Tran D. A., Ha Tinh, Vietnam: It hampers my ability to look up data sources. Books in Vietnam are significantly less accessible and my economic background doesn’t allow me to afford these things.

R.F., Surrey, Canada: As a Wikipedia editor, the Internet Archive is one of the most useful tools to find citations and verify facts. By removing books from the Internet Archive, it hinders the ability to find sources for an open encyclopedia.

Meilan S., Washington, DC, USA: As the online history editor at a national magazine, I use the Internet Archive on an almost daily basis. It’s an invaluable tool for accessing books cited by my writers, conducting research for articles I’m writing, and fact-checking quotes and other information. I regularly link to the Internet Archive in our published content, as I believe we should be as transparent as possible regarding sourcing, in addition to offering readers links to sites where they can learn more about a given topic. It has been disheartening to find the majority of books I need to access for work now listed as “removed.” The removal of this content makes it more difficult for me to include diverse, in-depth and reliable sources in my writing and editing.

Tamia T., Montreal, Canada: Internet Archive gives me access to scholarly information that is not afforded to those outside of the post-secondary education system. The Internet Archive helps bridge the gap when it comes to literacy, comprehension of history, and the discovery of new works that are otherwise gate-kept from the average person.

Olga A., Moscow, Russia: I can’t proceed with my research on bioanthropology, regarding both the current state of this science and the history of this field. None of the books I’m looking for are available for purchase in my country, even if I, by some miracle, managed to find them in second-hand bookshops abroad and had great amounts of money to buy them.

Jason V. M., Tucson, AZ, USA: The Internet Archive has allowed me and my family to access books quickly, conveniently and safely. I’m afraid that without the Archive, access to teaching material for my daughter and studying material for myself has now become significantly limited at my income level and in my area.

Poppy, Indonesia: Most of literature I’ve been using from IA are ones I couldn’t find in my city’s library, either public or academic. Without IA, my academic progress would be halted.

Lyria V.W., Middle River, MD, USA: My school in the past wanted me to read books that were considered banned (like The Great Gatsby and To Kill A Mockingbird) to learn about the culture and history at the time. I did not always have physical access to these books.

Zachary C., PA, USA: Without archive.org’s availability, I would have not been able to further my education on historical architecture and fashion.

Samson W., Omaha, NE, USA: It has made it more difficult to find quotes, to read quotes in full context, and to research language.

Nathan W., Portland, OR, USA: I purchase dozens of books every year, and check out even more from my local library — Internet Archive is an invaluable resource to explore books I’m interested in and quickly search for remembered passages or quotes from books I have already read.

Jefferson C., Managua, Nicaragua: Internet Archive had everything I needed to go through college, whilst not having ANY library available in my home country and with college books costing hundreds of dollars on top of import fee and taxes (which alone could be the salary of a person here).

Marina K., Minneapolis, MN, USA: I am an award-winning artist and writer for video games. I often need to research many diverse topics as an independent artist without institutional backing or studio resources. The Internet Archive is a valuable resource that allows me to create work that interacts more deeply with the world.

Harry S., UK: I’m a student studying Ancient History and having 500,000 books removed will undoubtedly remove my access to some sources I can’t get my hands on otherwise.

Carlos R., Aguascalientes, Mexico: I was reading Story : substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting (1997) and I no longer have access to it.

Alicia P., MD, USA: I organize Wikipedia editing events to improve Wikipedia articles about historical topics. We rely heavily on Internet Archive books as sources, since they are publicly available. This is essential for transparency in Wikipedia articles: every factual claim has a footnote, and the reader can click the hyperlink in the footnote to go directly to the source of the information in an Internet Archive book (often an older academic book that is no longer in print or at public libraries anyway).

Renard, Osasco, Brazil: The Internet Archive allowed me to expand my boundaries and access materials that do NOT exist here, or would be incredibly expensive to import, much of the price going to shipping and a reseller’s pockets.

Ethan S., Ottawa, Canada: I have been working on a project to document the history of social democratic governments in Canadian provinces and territories. These governments (by the NDP and CCF) are not well researched and the resources that are available at public libraries don’t always include older books, often written by members of cabinet or caucus. The Internet Archive has had some of the relevant books removed due to the lawsuit.

Berry J., Boston, MA, USA: I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material.

Chloe, London, UK: Internet Archive allows me to search a large number of books by keyword/name and it triggered my buying a lot of hard copies of books I would have never even known existed. I am so distressed that this has been taken away from me, as I research the history of lesbianism and it is already an extremely difficult niche field to research.

Camila N., Mexico City, Mexico: Cultural heritage, including documentary heritage, is essential for forging identities, offering knowledge, telling human history and promoting the progress of societies accompanied by cultural development.

Mary S., Rochester, NY, USA: It’s an access issue. It’s substantially harder to find the books I’m interested in reading. Heck, even for more common books, the libraries in my area are not practical to get to except by car, and I have a lot of friends who don’t have easy access to a car.

Robin L., Sydney, Australia: Having decreased access to books such as books on collage artists during certain parts of history affects my research, since I have limited to no access to such books in Australian libraries or bookshops both physical or digitally.

Samuel R., Chicago, IL, USA: In many cases there are not physical lending copies of titles i am looking for within 200 miles of my location, and no legal methods available to purchase e-versions. The Internet Archive is far and away the best solution for reading and preserving niche books across a variety of genres.

Zulma P., Covina, CA, USA: The Internet Archive has lots of books my local library doesn’t own and books that are very hard to find.

Thomas R., Manningham, Australia: These books being available on archive.org is a vital resource for me and many like me. A large amount of the Archive was never released in my corner of the globe, meaning I have few if any options for reading on niche subjects.

Juan V., Medellin, Colombia: I am a dance artist and require a big selection of options for my artistic research. Some of the books that I was using on my research are no longer available.

Sage L., Grand Rapids, MI, USA: I am an illustrator and character designer with a passion for science fiction. I use the Internet Archive to research projects that I don’t have enough background knowledge on. I frequently find that books I need are missing.

Oguz Alp K., Antalya, Turkey: In one word I can say: “devastation”. It is very difficult for people like me who live and do research in third world countries to access the books and documents in your archive.

Zachary B., Lockport, NY, USA: As someone who is working to understand the evolution of society through literature, reduced access to many classic works makes gathering information much more difficult.

Andrea T., Canada: I did not go to a university with a giant archive in the library for medieval texts, so to research these topics, free resources like Internet Archive really came into play. Not everyone will have an opportunity to read these books available at libraries. Not everyone can even afford to attend university, where many of these now removed texts are available for free in libraries and archives. Why should other students, and other people interested in these topics, be deprived of this free resource? Going into my Master’s degree, I have now lost a resource I relied on heavily through my post secondary education up until this point, hindering what sort of research I will be able to accomplish as I enter higher education.

Isa B., Lelystad, Netherlands: I was working on several papers for my education and I had to change sources because the literature was inaccessible despite it being of great importance to my research.

Mrittika D. S., Kolkata, India: Resources I had previously found on the Internet Archive site were all of a sudden no longer available when I searched for them. Hence, I faced a huge problem in completing my papers, as I had already formed a plan on what sources I wanted to refer to, and my plan was completely disrupted.

Schuyler V., Troy, NY, USA: While I am lucky to be near many physical libraries, none are as convenient and complete as the Internet Archive. Nearly all the books I’ve purchased in the last decade were ones I saw on the Internet Archive first.

Samantha F., Providence, RI, USA: Honestly? Without these books, my job becomes that much harder. Publishers aren’t going to put out a new run of, say, a 40-year-old book on specific aspects of animation history, because it’s not profitable. So, to remove them limits the number of folks like me, who are trying to tell a cohesive and factual story, who can actually work to do so as these materials get rarer and more expensive.

Kerry L., Boston, MA, USA: I had used copies of books a few months back when doing research for my master’s thesis—when I came back to them in April and May, I was surprised to find many of my more crucial secondary sources were gone. These books specifically are not as prevalent in public libraries, being older and region-specific. I was fortunate that I had taken detailed notes and quotes, but I was unable to check my references for books that were physically located miles and miles away from me.

Nicolas T., Paris, France: This gray zone of books still under copyright but that have disappeared from bookstores and libraries can be so useful… and the DRM on digital copies was very clever and fair.

Lola, Poland: On a personal level, this has severely limited the potential for both me and my partner to read books, we don’t have the money or ability to purchase actual books or E books and while there is a library near by, they usually don’t have the books we are looking for, it has in turn likely limited us from reading so many books.

John P., Menlo Park, CA, USA: In 2016 a fire in my home office left my personal library (about 700 books) smoke damaged, but still readable. Rather than let all these books go to waste, I donated them to the Internet Archive, so books in my collection they hadn’t already scanned would be available to the rest of the world. I had hoped I would be able to refer to the collection there. Unfortunately, many of these books are no longer available due to the lawsuit restrictions.

Andrew M., Easton, CT, USA: Prior to the removal of books on the IA I was able to access works on niche topics like La Terra in Piazza (1984) to review and promote reading about all sorts of interesting things to a wider audience. Since the removal, I’ve already struggled to finance a project translating a book on the causes of the fall of Rome, which would not have happened if I’d had access to materials that had been on IA at an earlier date.

Stephano L., Peru: The links I used for citations in university works are now dead, so I will have to correct that in many papers I wrote.


Editorial note: Statements have been edited for clarity.

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Fri, 14 Jun 2024 18:11:47 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8IuT5HJgy6HUf
<![CDATA[Join Our Monthly Giving Circle and Support the Internet Archive!]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8IpVjH6qdYdAk

Monthly donors sustain our work and ensure that the Internet Archive will always be free for all.

Our supporters have joined us arm-in-arm for decades against corporate interests, censorship, and digital erasure. Your commitment to preserving information and cultural heritage fuels our mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. We want to celebrate you and thank you for being the foundation of our support system.;

Today, we invite you to join the Internet Archive Monthly Giving Circle.

Why Join?

Preservation and Accessibility are at the heart of who we are and what we do, so the following benefits are yours to enjoy when you begin your monthly donation at any level. By becoming a member of our Monthly Giving Circle, you unlock exclusive benefits designed just for you—such as:;

  • Exclusive Webcasts and Virtual Learning Opportunities: Dive deeper into topics you love with access to virtual events and learning sessions.;;
  • Giving Circle Discount at Better World Books: Enjoy special savings on your used book purchases with our literacy partner, Better World Books.
  • Access to the Monthly Giving Circle Newsletter: Read our curated monthly newsletter filled with interesting finds from the Archive, surveys to get your input, and information about donor perks.
  • Submit Priority Questions at Book Talks: Have burning questions for featured authors or event presenters? You can submit priority questions for consideration, even if you cannot attend the event live.
  • Celebrations and Thank-You’s: We believe in recognizing and celebrating our supporters. Expect special thank-yous and celebrations at your donation anniversaries.
  • Powering Preservation: The knowledge that your recurring contributions sustain our efforts in digitizing, preserving, and providing access to millions of books, web pages, videos, and more.
  • Additional Petabyte Donor Perk ($250 USD+): We have something special just for our most generous supporters with a monthly contribution of $250 or more. Each month, receive a handpicked book from our staff delivered straight to your doorstep. Enjoy a recommended read directly from our bookshelves to yours!

Joining our Monthly Giving Circle is simple:

  • Head over to our Donate page
    • Ensure you have selected “monthly” as your preferred donation frequency.
  • Enter the amount you wish to contribute each month.
  • Input your payment information and click Donate.

Already a monthly donor? Thank you for being an integral part of our mission! You do not have to take any action to enjoy Monthly Giving Circle benefits. Email donations@archive.org to ensure you receive the Monthly Giving Circle newsletter which shares upcoming events, the latest discount codes, and more.

Together, we can continue expanding access to knowledge for generations.

Gratefully,;
Tom Mayer
Development Coordinator

Have a question about our monthly giving circle? Reach us at donations@archive.org.

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Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pOFL455Uk8IpVjH6qdYdAk
<![CDATA[The Backrooms of the Internet Archive]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pNb-hcPKDcISlmFkX7M1Jw

Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it’s just a shot of nothing.

If the answer is that it’s a shot of nothing, let’s get you up to speed.

This image floated around message boards in the 2010s, posted with commentary or as a general use for a slightly off-putting photograph of a less-than-well-maintained location, and was, by most standards, rather indistinct. The internet, after all, is filled with odd images and weird drawings that cause a reaction, often after many different attempts to achieve the effect. Survivorship Bias for memes, one might say. So if one more image of an indistinct indoor landscape was out there, not much was going to happen of it.

That changed in 2019, when the image was given a legend and history, made up out of the air, that it was a rare photograph of The Backrooms. The phrasing of the original declaration speaks for itself:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

If this writing strikes you as some sort of odd, rather dramatic addition to the image of a room, then you’re being introduced to creepypasta, or as some might call them, urban legends and campfire stories. It’s part of the overwhelming need for humans to tell tales that excite and frighten, to compose meaning or horror out of the darkness, and even the mundane.

The concept of the “Backrooms” also touches on a very frequent theme of many different horror and science-fiction movies – that there are service tunnels and hard to access areas woven throughout life, known only to a special few. Movies such as The Matrix, The Adjustment Bureau, Us, Beyond the Walls, Dark City, The Cube, and many more have explored this theme – or used it as a jumping off point to tell another story.

The difference, here, is nobody really knew where that very first image came from. For a very long time.

This extended period of not finding the original source of the image left an unfinished tune, a half-written poem, about where it came from and what it meant. And the lack of information in the image as it showed up on these image boards seemed to ensure the mystery would never be found.

So people filled in the blanks.

A Subreddit called /r/backrooms, an extended web video series called Backrooms, and endless CGI models and creations meant to extend the legend and the origin story became years of effort by thousands to draw the missing pieces of a puzzle that was never a puzzle.

A constantly shifting set of games with titles based off The Backrooms were created and presented for a willing and happy audience; it’d be unfair to choose one or even a few to highlight – there are dozens.

All of them represent the efforts to bring you into a state of heightened fear or paranoia as you lurked through a series of dark hallways, overlit carpeted spaces, and a growing dread. There’s no question there was a huge audience for this, and it is sometimes thought that this entire legend brought mainstream attention to liminal spaces, a perception of the in-between geographies of less unsettling locations. It is now enjoying life as an aesthetic movement.

Supporting this explosion of creativity and storytelling was the continued fact that nobody knew where the photograph came from. This situation, of a core image having a completely shadowy and unexplained origin, is arguably the foundation of its power.

That changed, recently.

This appears to be the origin of the Backrooms Photograph.

In March 2003, there was a former furniture store called Rohner’s Home Furnishings in Oshkosh, Wisconsin whose second floor was being renovated by the (somewhat) new tenants, HobbyTown.

Renovating the space from the sale of furniture to a new remote-controlled racing car track (among other aspects) meant pulling down partitions and ripping out carpet. This inspired taking photographs of the process, one of which, DSC001561.JPG, was the legendary “Back Rooms” image.

18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated with the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference. As the whole image was grabbed, reading the metadata of the original image reveals the date it was taken (June 12, 2002), and the camera used (a Sony Cyber-Shot model). The great unknown image, the unsettling photo of a mysterious place and time, was revealed.

However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.

Emerging, Blinking, Into the Light

Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged.

For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”. While we might argue about the relative worth of a given effort, the fact that it is possible for word to travel about a mystery to the point of being solved means that the world is a hair less intimidating and scary. Our shared efforts and cooperation can find the answer to a seemingly impossible-to-answer question. The fact that an image with basically no information and a blurry set of components could be tracked down and revealed is a miracle.

For others, the mystery being solved removes a little bit of magic and wonder from the world. It says that there’s no kayfabe, no holding of mystery in our hands without peeking further to tear out the secret. In this perspective, something special has been lost.

But there’s another lesson as well.

The Internet Archive’s crawlers moved through the pages of a hobby store multiple times over the years, capturing HTML, photographs, and time-stamping the process, with the equivalent care of an at-risk website, a politician on the national stage, or a legendary and obvious moment in history provided via a PDF file.

This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image, and a persistent, dependable URL to reference back to it, as thousands are doing at this very moment.

This is the mission of the Wayback Machine – be the dependable, accessible connection to web history, and therefore all history. Give the Internet its Memory, which would otherwise be lost.

If you mourn the loss of legend and mystery in our quest to keep the truth transparent, available and persistent, don’t worry – the process of internalizing and analyzing the image to give the Backrooms history its full and complete story has already begun:

Here’s to the next mystery, and the next unsettling information being brought into the light and presented for the education, research and entertainment of the Internet, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

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Sat, 01 Jun 2024 05:57:25 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0pNb-hcPKDcISlmFkX7M1Jw
<![CDATA[Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine under DDoS cyber-attack]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdJs0ohxaO6Yr

The Internet Archive, the nonprofit research library that’s home to millions of historical documents, preserved websites, and media content, is currently in its third day of warding off an intermittent DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) cyber-attack. According to library staff, the collections are safe, though service remains inconsistent. Access to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – which preserves the history of more than 866 billion web pages – has also been impacted.

Since the attacks began on Sunday, the DDoS intrusion has been launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. The source of the attack is unknown.

;“Thankfully the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days,” explained Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “With the support from others and the hard work of staff we are hardening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”

Cyber-attacks are increasingly frequent against libraries and other knowledge institutions, with the British Library, the Solano County Public Library (California), the Berlin Natural History Museum, and Ontario’s London Public Library all being recent victims.

In addition to a wave of recent cyber-attacks, the Internet Archive is also being sued by the US book publishing and US recording industries associations, which are claiming copyright infringement and demanding combined damages of hundreds of millions of  dollars and diminished services from all libraries. 

“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” added Kahle. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”

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Tue, 28 May 2024 20:50:36 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdJs0ohxaO6Yr
<![CDATA[Book Talk: Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdMb1naedg1wr

Join us for a VIRTUAL book talk with legal scholar BARBARA McQUADE on her New York Times bestseller, ATTACK FROM WITHIN, about disinformation’s impact on democracy. NYU professor and author CHARLTON McILWAIN will facilitate our discussion.

REGISTER NOW

“A comprehensive guide to the dynamics of disinformation and a necessary call to the ethical commitment to truth that all democracies require.”

Timothy Snyder, author of the New York Times bestseller On Tyranny

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It’s endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:

  • The;authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
  • Disinformation tactics—like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and why they work.
  • An explanation of;why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation;and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
  • Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation;and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2021 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country’s hard-won democracy.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

BARBARA McQUADE;is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches criminal law and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee.

Before her appointment as U.S. Attorney, McQuade served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit for 12 years, including service as Deputy Chief of the National Security Unit. In that role, she prosecuted cases involving terrorism financing, foreign agents, threats, and export violations. McQuade serves on a number of non-profit boards, and served on the Biden-Harris Transition Team in 2020-2021. She has been recognized by The Detroit News with the Michiganian of the Year Award, the Detroit Free Press with the Neal Shine Award for Exemplary Regional Leadership, Crain’s Detroit Business as a Newsmaker of the Year and one of Detroit’s Most Influential Women, and the Detroit Branch NAACP and Arab American Civil Rights League with their Tribute to Justice Award. McQuade is a graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school. She and her husband live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have four children.s an assistant professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods. He is the author of;American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse;(2020). His writing has appeared in the;New York Times, the;Washington Post, the;Los Angeles Review of Books,;The Rumpus,;Dissent, and other publications.

CHARLTON McILWAIN
Author of the recent book,;Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Pathways & Public Interest Technology at New York University, where he is also Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He is the author of the recent PolicyLink report;Algorithmic Discrimination: A Framework and Approach to Auditing & Measuring the Impact of Race-Targeted Digital Advertising. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate’s;Future Tense,;MIT Technology Review and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology. McIlwain is the founder of the;Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and is Board President at;Data & Society Research Institute. He leads;NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, is NYU’s Designee to the;Public Interest Technology University Network, and serves on the executive committee as co-chair of the ethics panel for the;International Panel on the Information Environment.

Book Talk: Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade
Thursday, June 6 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual event!

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Thu, 23 May 2024 22:48:12 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdMb1naedg1wr
<![CDATA[DWeb Fellows: Where Are They Now? (Part 1)]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdKCY3L745TL_

Guest blog by ngọc triệu from the DWeb Camp Core Organizing team.;

Since the program kicked off in 2019, the DWeb Fellowship has welcomed 62 fellows from more than 20 countries across five continents, spanning North America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania.;

Recently, I had the opportunity to reconnect with some of the DWeb Fellows from previous cohorts. We caught up on how we’ve been since our last encounter, delved into our current projects, and reminisced about our shared experiences at DWeb Camp.

In this post, let’s join Stacco (Fellow 2023), Remy (Fellow 2022), and me in our conversations below!

*Please note that the conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

____

Q1 ngọc: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today! Can you start by introducing yourself and sharing what you’re working on right now?

Stacco: Hi, yes! I’m Stacco from DisCO.coop, which is the project I represented at DWeb Camp 2023. DisCO is a cooperative intersection of feminist and anticapitalist responses to a lot of things like DAOs, what we want to do in the workplace, and how we want to spend our time productively. And it’s also a critical approach to designing technology. DisCO was founded in 2018, but it came out of the experience of a cooperative that we founded on distributed principles, called Guerrilla Media Collective. And a lot of the stuff that we prototype in Guerrilla Media Collective with economics and governance have led into DisCO.

Remy: Hey there, I’m Remy, from the 2022 cohort. I’m currently working at the Open Technology Fund as a programme specialist. I’ve worked kind of on an array of projects, but we get a series of applications that focus on circumventing Internet censorship in authoritarian contexts, whether that be research projects, community, convenings and so on.;

Q2 ngọc: What’s one thing from DWeb Camp that you’ve taken with you into your current work?

Remy:; When reflecting on my experience at DWeb Camp, I find two significant takeaways:;

The first one being that, at that time, I was coming from a very academic space. So, most of the work that I was doing was really focused and consolidated within academia, which was a fairly small realm of people. It was mainly archivists that I was working with, so we had kind of a narrow lane and scope.;

However, upon engaging with the broader web community, I was exposed to a diverse array of individuals working on directly related projects, each with intersecting identities and roles. I remember meeting a speculative fiction author, and I was like: “Wow, this is kind of an interesting addition to this cohort of people that I don’t think I would have naturally included in a conference!”. I also got to unlearn what a conference is and looks like, you know, I’m going to show up with my little briefcase and give my presentation, because that’s what academia looks like. And then coming in, it was a much more kind of relaxed vibe and open conversation with an array of different people. So I thought that was really interesting and opened my eyes like, wow, we do need to include more people in these conferences that we’re at, because designers play just as big a role as researchers and developers.;

And then I would say, the second thing that I learned was really what it takes from the ground up to develop a mesh network. I always kind of come back and think about that — all the love and time that it takes, and the patience to care for these systems. It really got me on a whole journey about thinking of systems of care, and what those look like in technical spaces.

Stacco: Following DWeb Camp 2023, I invited brandon (Fellow 2022, 2023) and mai (DWeb Fellowship Director 2019-2023) to Spain for a meeting called “DisCO Remastered”, which mai covered in an article. From this experience, we developed two prototypes, including one called “community supported digital commons,” inspired by the principles of community-supported agriculture. We have people who are more conscious about the food they eat and where it comes from. So how about we have that type of consciousness for the digital tools that mediate our daily lives? Having community funding and accessibility for digital commons is very important to ensure fair compensation for labor and improve accessibility to technology.;

Additionally, collaborating with brandon, we aim to explore cooperative alternatives to platforms like Spotify, but going much further. What if the musicians could develop their own technology with torrents? What if they could take full control of their work and earnings?;

Also for me, I really love the diverse age ranges, genders, sexual orientation, and provenances of DWeb Camp, especially among the Fellows. The Fellows was a super varied group and it was really fascinating to engage with people whose experiences differed from mine. I’m like, “Oh, your background is totally different from mine, let me find out about it!” There was like this commonly held space, and that really inspired me. When I was writing the introduction for our newly released website, I was actually thinking of the Fellows!;

Q3 ngọc: We’re gonna get a little bit retrospective here, what motivated you to apply (or reapply) for the Fellowship? Did the program meet your expectations and were you able to accomplish what you set out to do as a Fellow?;

Stacco: Yeah, absolutely. So the first time I couldn’t go. The second time, I applied again because I wanted to get a taste of what the decentralized community is like. More than the projects, I wanted to see what the humans behind them are like. There were a lot of contradictions which I also saw at Camp that were very interesting: There were projects which I had no interest in whatsoever, and there were other projects that I found really interesting. There’s also humans that I wanted to meet. I had been collaborating with brandon from Resonate Coop for four years and it was a great chance to meet him in person. It really was maybe like the best week I had last year. I was really, really happy. And I was really happy because of the human connections.;

With brandon king, I did a presentation that was quite successful. It was very great because we spoke about technology in a critical way and we mixed it with music, the audio, and the video. Then we left all the devices behind and we walked into the forest. That was really special. Some of the human connections that were fostered have carried on. That’s the quality time that you can only get, especially post-pandemic, by sharing a physical space.;

We were also really privileged. If you think about it, at least for the Fellows, for a week, we didn’t have to think about money or anything. We ate, we slept, we walked, we rested, we played guitar, and we danced. And that took money to do. Only that didn’t come from Mars, but money, which is like a pittance compared to some of the budgets that are being handled. So it makes you think, well, with about the distributions of value, what would life be like if it was more like DWeb all over?;

Remy: I remember, I found the Fellowship through a mutual colleague who worked at the Internet Archive. And at the time, I was really interested in the Internet Archive because I was working at a small human rights organization. We were using the Internet Archive all the time and I thought it was a really cool project. I was interested in finding out who these people that run it are and what does it look like?

And then the Fellowship popped up. At that time, I had been inhabiting a tiny little bubble that no one else really understood: I was a master’s student caught between an archivist school and public policy and people were kind of looking at me cross-eyed for talking about distributed archives or decentralised archives. So when I found out the Fellowship, I was like, wow, here’s a group that I really like and admire, and they are talking about the same thing I’ve been talking about. That’s kind of what motivated me — maybe I can learn from a lot of these people who are probably much more developed in the work than I am, and I can share this small use case that I’ve been doing and working on.;

When I read the blurb about DWeb Camp, I was like, it’s a group of people going to the woods and talking about tech. I thought it didn’t even seem real. I was wondering, like, is this real? I didn’t have much of an expectation rather than a feeling that I am going to meet really interesting people that are really smart and working on interesting projects. And then I was pleasantly surprised by how many projects I had been aware of, there were projects I’d written about in my papers as things to look at, and then I was able to meet them at the DWeb naturally.;

I mean, you’re just chatting, and then you were like: “Your project sounds really familiar. What’s it called?” And then you were like, “Whoa, that’s crazy. I was writing about your project!” I was just shocked that I was naturally coming across those people in the space, it felt like a very surreal moment. I got to meet Mark, who’s the director of the Wayback Machine. And subsequently, I’ve seen him so many times at other conferences that we’ve been to. And it’s always like, I just get so excited and happy and like, want to give him a big hug. It takes me back to that special time that we all spent together.;

ngọc: What’s one piece of advice or recommendation you’d like to share with the future cohort?;

Remy: Well, that’s a good question! I’d say, be confident in your ability and skills that you’re bringing and know that it’s a space of people that want to collaborate and work with you. It can be incredibly intimidating, walking into a space where you don’t know anyone and sometimes it feels like maybe there’s pre-existing communities of people that already know each other, but have the confidence to just walk up and start talking to them and know that it’s a very open community and everyone is really welcoming.

It just sometimes takes the courage within you to make that first step forward and just walk into a circle of people and say: “Hi, this is who I am.” I know it’s always easier said than done, but I have thought that that was when the most natural conversations happen. And you know, be kind to yourself. A lot of these conferences can feel like a marathon sometimes and it can feel like you’re missing out on this or that, but the experience is always there so if you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed or burnt out, just step out. Some of my favourite moments from Camp were sitting with the Fellows and making buttons and just giving ourselves a second to breathe outside of everything else that was going on.;

So be confident, be courageous, and be kind to yourself when you’re there experiencing it. Another thing that I found really helpful was journalling. I journaled two or three times a day to help remember how I was feeling and what I was doing. And that was a really interesting experience to look back and read on. That would be my tips for people going to DWeb.;

Stacco: I’d advise people to not go crazy and try to join every talk or session at Camp. Just be where you are and you’ll find interesting people to talk to and interesting projects to collaborate on. While you’re there, make yourself known. In addition, don’t be shy and don’t be afraid to challenge people in a friendly way. The most special thing are the Build Days, when you’re setting up camp and we’re getting to know people. Don’t miss it, that’s my recommendation!;

___

Thanks to Remy and Stacco for joining the conversation and sharing their experience as a DWeb Fellow.;

We’re currently at the final stage of reviewing all 2024 Fellowship applications. Stay tuned to meet our new cohort in June!;

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Wed, 15 May 2024 17:35:08 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdKCY3L745TL_
<![CDATA[End of Term Web Archive – Preserving the Transition of a Nation]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdJVjH6qdYdAk

It’s that time again. The 2024 End of Term crawl has officially begun! The End of Term Web Archive #EOTArchive hosts an initiative named the End of Term crawl to archive U.S. government websites in the .gov and .mil web domains — as well as those harder-to-find government websites hosted on .org, .edu, and other top level domains (TLDs) — as one administrative term ends and a new term begins.;

End of Term crawls have been completed for term transitions in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The results of these efforts is preserved in the End of Term Web Archive. In total, over 500 terabytes of government websites and data have been archived through the End of Term Web Archive efforts. These archives can be searched full-text via the Internet Archive’s collections search and also downloaded as bulk data for machine-assisted analysis.

The purpose of the End of Term Web Archive is to preserve a record of government websites for historical and research purposes. It is important to capture these websites because they can provide a snapshot of government messaging before and after the transition of terms. The End of Term Web Archive preserves information that may no longer be available on the live web for open access.

The End of Term Archive is a collaborative effort by the Internet Archive along with the University of North Texas (UNT), Stanford University, Library of Congress (LC), U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO), and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Past partners include the University of CA’s California Digital Library (CDL), George Washington University, and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI).

Four images of Whitehouse.gov captured between 2008 and 2020
Whitehouse.gov captures from: 2008 Sept. 15; 2013 Mar. 21; 2017 Feb. 3; and 2021 Feb. 25

We are committed to preserving a record of U.S. government websites. But we need your help to complete the 2024 End of Term crawl.;

How can you help?!;

We have a list of top level domains from the General Services Administration (GSA) and from previous End of term crawls. But we need volunteers to help us out. We are currently accepting nominations for websites to be included in the 2024 End of Term Web Archive.

Submit a url nomination by going to digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2024/.
We encourage you to nominate any and all U.S. federal government websites that you want to make sure get captured. Nominating urls deep within .gov/.mil websites helps to make our web crawls as thorough and complete as possible.;

Individuals and institutions nominating seed urls are recognized on the individual contributors leaderboard and the institutions leaderboard!

Explore the End of Term Web Archive with full text search and download the data!

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Wed, 08 May 2024 16:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0q_VY4OmP8VdJVjH6qdYdAk
<![CDATA[Addressing Underrepresentation in Rural New England Community Archives: Documenting the History of Black Lives in Rural New England]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qQkAbpGqQgY8b1naedg1wr

Guest post by Dylan Gaffney, Information Services Associate for Local History & Special Collections, Forbes Library.

This post is part of a series written by members of the Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity for community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices. For more information, visit communitywebs.archive-it.org.

Forbes Library has been a member of Community Webs since its inception in 2017. At that time, we were hopeful that the program would allow us to create an archive which more fully represented the community in which we live, and provide a more diverse history/record of our region and the people we serve. This project inspired archives staff to examine the many silences in our archives, and make plans for the ethical collection and preservation of materials that would help fill in these gaps in our historical record. At the same time, the library had begun to shift its focus toward collaboration with other local historical and community organizations. 

In the years following the kickoff of the Community Webs Project, Forbes library co-hosted multiple series of exhibits, films, workshops, walking tours, and community reads on themes of mass incarceration, the Underground Railroad, and the history of slavery in our region. These events, and the passionate response of the community to them, inspired us to continue seeking out collaborations, large and small, and solidified our view that surfacing stories of people who had been underrepresented in the archives should be a core value in our work as an institution.

This work inspired Forbes Library, Historic Northampton, UMass Amherst, and the Pioneer Valley History Network to take lead roles in the 2021 Documenting Early Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley project, which seeks to gather the fragmentary information about Black lives from the wide range of sources and archives in Western Massachusetts so that a whole might be perceived that is larger than the sum of those parts. The project, to date, has surfaced over 3500 records or references to people of color, enslaved and free, in Western Massachusetts from the 17th through 19th centuries. These histories are being made available through the project’s database and on the project website. We contributed an essay titled Searching for Black History in a Public Library Archive to the Project Handbook on the experiences and takeaways of doing this work from a public librarian’s perspective.

We know too little about Black lives in rural and small-town New England, and the places Black residents were able to carve out for themselves in these communities. With this project, we hoped to uncover names, details of their lives, and some small sense of how people of color survived in the Connecticut River Valley before and after the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. At the kickoff event for the project, UMass Amherst professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina mentioned challenging the assumptions of others (sometimes called Gatekeepers) who “might be quick to discourage a researcher interested in Black History, reporting that they don’t have much…or not thinking about ways that records of white families might be useful to this research” Gerzina remarked that researchers, curators, and librarians should ”start from the perspective of presence.” 

As the Documenting Black Lives project was undertaken with grant funding, and the time thus limited, we needed to develop an approach that would be productive right away. We identified several collections in the library’s Hampshire Room for Local History that we expected could be productive resources for identifying enslaved people in the area. The most promising of these was the Judd Manuscript Collection, a collection of 60+ volumes created by local newspaper editor and historian Sylvester Judd in the 1840s. The manuscript was originally purchased from the Judd estate by local historian James Trumbull and subsequently sold to the trustees of the library. It has been the property of the library since 1904, but use has been limited to a small group of academics and local historians who were aware of the contents and could physically visit during our few open archives hours. Those who knew of its tremendous historical value had discovered that it features content documenting Indigenous lives, enslaved people, and free Black people in New England and had used it to research Indigenous culture, the history of colonial settlement, enslavement, and the early abolitionist movement in the area. 

Sylvester Judd’s Account of Sojourner Truth speaking and singing at his grandson Hall’s funeral. Sylvester Judd Notebook Vol. 3.

Sylvester Judd’s Account of Sojourner Truth speaking and singing at his grandson Hall’s funeral. Sylvester Judd Notebook Vol. 3.

Public Historian and Author Marla Miller on the value of Judd:

“Sylvester Judd, in his transcriptions of historic documents as well as the conversations he described with local residents, preserves extraordinary details that survive nowhere else. Because of Judd’s meticulous, wide-ranging work, I was able to gain insight into the lives of laboring people that would never otherwise have been possible…Judd’s notes preserve genealogical information about enslaved people that is found nowhere else. The Judd manuscript is almost archaeological in nature, with shards of evidence that can be unearthed via careful scrutiny. As he records, for instance, who had the first piano in town, who laid the first carpet, the sound of the geese squawking through Sunday sermons, and a hundred other small details of daily life, a picture emerges that simply cannot be found in any other kind of more formal or systematic archival material. These pages, filled from edge to edge with his notes, cross references, sketches, and other materials, simply teem with the kinds of details that historians crave, but cannot hope to find—except in Northampton.”

If we start from an assumption of presence (of underrepresented people both in the community and in the archives), the primary obstacles to discovering and surfacing information in collections like ours, often revolve around issues of access, and methodologies for search and discovery. We had long dreamed of digitizing all 60+ bound volumes of the collection to make them available to a wider group of researchers and the public at large. When the Community Webs program began to explore funding for a digitization program dedicated to expanding the amount and diversity of locally-focused community archives available online to users, the Judd Manuscript Collection seemed a good fit.

Now that the volumes have been digitized, our mission is to spread the word about their value and availability, so that the materials within can inform and inspire new research and discovery. As an illustration of the value of the collection and its contents, it is useful to look at how the increased availability of this resource could lead to new discoveries in long hidden collections. As an example, I will examine how Judd enriched our understanding of one local Black family.

Judd entry for the Hull Family. Northampton Genealogies Volume 4, p. 380.

Judd entry for the Hull Family. Northampton Genealogies Volume 4, p. 380.

Judd devoted entire volumes to genealogies of local families, but the 600+ page volume on Northampton Genealogies contains, to our knowledge, only two Black families, both listed without last names. The work we had done in the Documenting Black Lives project enabled us to compile a list of 3500+ entries for Black residents of the region in the period between the 1650-1900. We recognized these names as those of Amos and Bathsheba Hull and their children. Bathsheba can be found elsewhere in our own archives as a member of the Church of Christ during Jonathan Edwards ministry between 1729-1750, in records recorded by Jonathan Edwards own hand.

Goods purchased by Amos Hull between 1754-1759, as listed in Judd’s transcription of Ebenezer hunt’s Account Book. Northampton Account Books, p. 68.

Goods purchased by Amos Hull between 1754-1759, as listed in Judd’s transcription of Ebenezer hunt’s Account Book. Northampton Account Books, p. 68.

This entry transcribed from a local merchant’s account book shows items purchased by Amos Hull, the services he would perform in exchange for goods received, and the rate at which he was paid. It notes that in 1761, the same year their daughter Margaret was born, Amos Hull died. Afterward, his widow Bathsheba paid for his and her accounts by washing. Bathsheba surely would have a difficult time supporting multiple children without her husband, and documents subsequently found elsewhere in our archives and in other institutions prove this to be the case.

Asaph Hull’s 1762 Indenture Record. Northampton Manuscript Collection.

Asaph Hull’s 1762 Indenture Record. Northampton Manuscript Collection.

By 1762, a document found elsewhere in our archives records their son Asaph indentured to Seth Pomeroy, who is well known for his service in the French and Indian War and would go onto fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill and achieve the rank of Major General.

Judd entry describing the town seizing Bathsheba Hull’s land. Northampton Vol. 2, p. 300.

Judd entry describing the town seizing Bathsheba Hull’s land. Northampton Vol. 2, p. 300.

Bathsheba and her family come up again in several entries in Judd, including multiple mentions of the town seizing her land and displacing her from it in 1765. This cruel act forces Bathsheba and her young children from the town. Bathsheba and her son Agrippa would relocate to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is in Stockbridge where Agrippa Hull would enlist in May of 1777, and served for the remainder of the Revolutionary War in the Continental Army, including witnessing the surrender of British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, enduring the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge and was part of the battle at Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey in June 1778.  He then served as a personal assistant for the famed Polish general, revolutionary and engineer Taddeusz Kosciuszko and became a close friend of the General, during their years of War Service together. Agrippa’s story and friendship with Kosciuszko, along with Kosciuszko’s friendship with Thomas Jefferson is examined in Gary Nash and Graham Hodge’s 2012 book “Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull”.

Portrait of Agrippa Hull, Courtesy of the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives.

Portrait of Agrippa Hull, Courtesy of the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives.

Agrippa Hull went on to become the most prominent black landowner in Stockbridge MA and is buried along with his wife and children in Stockbridge Cemetery. His brother Amos Hull, Jr. also fought in the Continental Army, and surfaces in Belchertown MA records recorded as part of the Documenting Black Lives project. 

This is just one brief example of the elaborate web of information that can be revealed when we prioritize the surfacing of stories that had previously been hidden in our collections, increase access through digitization, and collaborate to research and promote the information within. 

As Marla Miller wrote in her letter of support for the NHPRC Archives Collaboratives grant:

“ We can hardly wait to learn— alongside the many other academic and avocational historians whose work will be enriched and transformed by these records—what else remains to be discovered. Once available in digital form, available for scouring by researchers with their own wide range of questions, these materials will certainly spark, inform, and enrich generations of new research, from student papers to dissertations to academic monographs. It is almost impossible to predict all the ways the volumes might reshape historiography, as well as conventional historical wisdom, because the contents at present are comparatively difficult to ferret out. But to be sure, these volumes have the potential to transform local and regional historical understanding, and once digitized, will certainly come to the attention of researchers nationwide.”

Click here to browse the Sylvester Judd Manuscript Collection on archive.org.

The Internet Archive and Community Webs are thankful for the support from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission for Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections, which will digitize and provide access to a diverse range of local history archives that represent the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities throughout the United States.

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Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0qQkAbpGqQgY8b1naedg1wr
<![CDATA[Book Talk: Unlocking the Digital Age]]> https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/pLN8ieYUf0oUpN6NtCZRouzdsCmHakzH

Join us for a book talk with ANDREA I. COPLAND & KATHLEEN DeLAURENTI about UNLOCKING THE DIGITAL AGE, a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era.

REGISTER NOW

Based on coursework developed at the Peabody Conservatory, Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing by Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti serves as a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era. This guide bridges the gap between creative practice and scholarly research, empowering musicians to confidently share and protect their work as they expand their performing lives beyond the concert stage as citizen artists. It offers a plain language resource that helps early career musicians see where creative practice and creative research intersect and how to traverse information systems to share their work. As professional musicians and researchers, the authors’ experiences on stage and in academia makes this guide an indispensable tool for musicians aiming to thrive in the digital landscape.

Copland and DeLaurenti will be in conversation with musician and educator Kyoko Kitamura.

REGISTER NOW

About our speakers

ANDREA I. COPLAND is an oboist, music historian, and librarian based in Baltimore, MD. Andrea has dual master’s of music degrees in oboe performance and music history from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and is currently Research Coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM) database. She is also a teaching artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program and writes a public musicology blog, Outward Sound, on substack.

KATHLEEN DeLAURENTI is the Director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University where she also teaches Foundations of Music Research in the graduate program. Previously, she served as scholarly communication librarian at the College of William and Mary where she participated in establishing state-wide open educational resources (OER) initiatives. She is co-chair of the Music Library Association (MLA) Legislation Committee as well as a member of the Copyright Education sub-committee of the American Library Association (ALA) and is past winner of the ALA Robert Oakley Memorial Scholarship for copyright research. DeLaurenti is passionate about copyright education, especially for musicians. She is active in communities of practice working on music copyright education, sustainable economic models for artists and musicians, and policy for a balanced copyright system. DeLaurenti served as the inaugural Open Access Editor of MLA and continues to serve on the MLA Open Access Editorial Board. She holds an MLIS from the University of Washington and a BFA in vocal performance from Carnegie Mellon University.

KYOKO KITAMURA is a Brookyn-based vocal improviser, bandleader, composer and educator, currently co-leading the quartet Geometry (with cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, guitarist Joe Morris and cellist Tomeka Reid) and the trio Siren Xypher (with violist Melanie Dyer and pianist Mara Rosenbloom). A long-time collaborator of legendary composer Anthony Braxton, Kitamura appears on many of his releases and is the creator of the acclaimed 2023 documentary Introduction to Syntactical Ghost Trance Music which DownBeat Magazine calls “an invaluable resource for Braxton-philes.” Active in interdisciplinary performances, Kitamura recently provided vocals for, and appeared in, artist Matthew Barney’s 2023 five-channel installation Secondary.

Book Talk: UNLOCKING THE DIGITAL AGE
April 3 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
VIRTUAL
Register now!

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description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2024
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