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Alexis Rossi announced as RFC Series Consulting Editor

Internet Archive - 1 september 2022 - 6:04pm

Alexis Rossi, the Director of Media & Access at the Internet Archive, was announced yesterday as the new RFC Series Consulting Editor for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The RFC Series contains documents that define how the Internet functions. The first RFC was published in 1969, when just a few organizations were trying to figure out how to communicate digitally. Now, 53 years later, more than 9,200 RFCs have been written by thousands of volunteers and these documents and protocols are the underpinnings of the Internet systems we use every day.

Alexis joins the IETF team to help maintain the archival quality of the RFC Series, and to provide guidance on the policies and processes for publishing these important documents. She will also continue in her role with the Internet Archive, managing the organization’s millions of digital items.

The Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, who has his own informational RFC (RFC 1625) published in 1994 for WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), said of Alexis’s new role, “From my own days working on WAIS, I know how important these documents have been to the development of today’s Web. I’m glad to know that someone with so much experience will be helping to keep this Series preserved.”

We wish Alexis well in her new endeavor!

The post Alexis Rossi announced as RFC Series Consulting Editor appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

September Book Talk: The History of the Computer

Internet Archive - 29 augustus 2022 - 4:10pm

From notched bones in the ancient world to self-driving cars powered by modern AI, for centuries humans have used computing systems to solve problems & enhance the way we live. But who are the people and stories behind these advancements? In THE HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER, author and illustrator Rachel Ignotofsky presents a fun-filled & beautifully illustrated journey through computing history, checking in on the notable personalities, organizations & technologies that have changed our world.

REGISTER NOW

In our virtual event on September 15 @ 10am PT, Rachel will be joined by Alexis Rossi, Internet Archive’s director of media & access, and Jason Scott, free range archivist, for a discussion of the people, the inventions, the passions, and the controversies that have defined the history of the computer and its role in our daily lives.

Purchase your copy of The History of the Computer from The Booksmith, our local bookstore in the historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, or your own local bookshop.

Looking for educational resources? Rachel has made all sorts of resources, including a coloring worksheet, available for use.

September Book Talk: The History of the Computer
Author & illustrator Rachel Ignotofsky in conversation with Alexis Rossi & Jason Scott from the Internet Archive.
September 15 @ 10am PT
Register now for the virtual event

The post September Book Talk: The History of the Computer appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Book Talk: Surveillance State

Internet Archive - 26 augustus 2022 - 4:56pm

“Josh Chin and Liza Lin have given us a truly groundbreaking investigation of China’s embrace of digital surveillance. The global scope and deep detail of their account retires the notion of an ‘all-seeing’ surveillance as some future scenario; it is happening already. They will open your eyes to the astonishing intersection of data, politics, and the human body. Anyone who cares about the future of technology, of China, or of free will cannot afford to miss this.”
—Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

Join authors Josh Chin & Liza Lin for an in-person discussion on life in China’s burgeoning surveillance state.
September 14 @ Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Doors open at 6:30pm, discussion starts at 7pm.

People living in democracies have for decades drawn comfort from the notion that their form of government, for all its flaws, is the best history has managed to produce. In SURVEILLANCE STATE: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin’s Press; September 6, 2022), award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin (Wall Street Journal) document with startling detail how China’s Communist Party is striving for something new: a political model that shapes the will of the people not through the ballot box but through the sophisticated—and often brutal—harnessing of data.

Registration is free for the in-person event. REGISTER NOW

Purchase a copy of Surveillance State at registration to be signed by the authors at the event. You can also purchase unsigned copies from The Booksmith, our local bookshop in the historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, to be delivered to you, or from your own local bookstore.

Book Talk: Surveillance State
Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin
September 14 @ 7pm PT
IN-PERSON @ the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Registration is required! Register now

The post Book Talk: Surveillance State appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Introducing the 2022 DWeb Fellows

Internet Archive - 26 augustus 2022 - 12:38am
A discussion session from DWeb Camp 2019 led by Fellows.

How do we ensure that the decentralized web fulfills its potential to create a better web for all? That the technologies, organizations, and approaches that gain traction and succeed (by any measure) uphold the security, privacy, and self-determination of everyone, especially those of marginalized populations who have the most to gain? 

The first step is to recognize that there are many people around the world who are already doing this work. They’re not only imagining and theorizing about a better web, but are actually creating and employing digital tools to uplift communities facing systemic inequities. They bring about justice and enable individual and collective agency, both through network technologies and by also creating and maintaining communities of care.

As the Decentralized Web (DWeb) San Francisco team, we help grow networks of solidarity among these individuals and organizations by creating opportunities for them to build relationships with each other and the DWeb community. Our Fellows from DWeb Camp 2019 strongly influenced our thinking as we defined a set of shared Principles and continued to hold virtual and in-person convenings in the three years since. 

As the Director of this year’s Fellowship program, one of my strongest hopes is that the DWeb Fellows are able to build lasting, fruitful relationships with each other and other DWeb Campers. My other hope is that the Fellows’ projects and approaches continue to shape the DWeb community overall – to connect and empower the most under-resourced, and ensure that the decentralized web we’re building truly addresses the needs of all.

The 2022 DWeb Fellowship program was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Mysterium Network, donations through the Gitcoin grant challenge, and others.

2022 DWeb Fellows

Alice Yuan Zhang, Media Artist/Researcher

Andrew Chou, Digital Democracy

brandon king, Resonate.Coop

Cody Harris, Seattle Community Network

Dana Beltrán, Colnodo

Esther Jang, Seattle Community Network

Hiure Queiroz, Portal Sem Porteiras

Jaime Villarreal, May First Movement Technology

Johan Michalove, Cornell University

Kemly Camacho Jiménez, Sulá Batsú Coop

Kola Heyward-Rotimi, COMPOST Magazine

Luisa Bagope, Portal Sem Porteiras

María Alvarez Malvido, Redes por la Diversidad, Equidad y Sustentabilidad A.C

Michael Abraha, Tigray Art Collective

Ngọc Triệu, Simply Secure | Decentralization Off the Shelf

Nicolás Pace, Association for Progressive Communication

Remy Hellstern, Xinjiang Documentation Project, University of British Columbia

riley wong, Independent Researcher

Rudo Kemper, Digital Democracy

Sanketh Kumar P, COWDe.Net | Janastu Servelots | GramSevaSangh

Shafali Jain, COWDe.Net | Janastu Servelots

Tania Silva, Coolab

T B Dinesh, Janastu Servelots

Vaipunu Ian Tairea, Project Sunrise | Tai Collective

Ying Tong Lai, Halo2 | ZCash

The post Introducing the 2022 DWeb Fellows appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Library Leaders Forum 2022: Registration now open

Internet Archive - 19 augustus 2022 - 8:53pm

Join experts from the library, copyright, and information policy fields for a series of conversations exploring issues related to digital ownership and the future of library collections. Learn more about the event on the Library Leaders Forum web site, or register below.

This year’s Library Leaders Forum will be organized on two separate dates to provide attendees with a flexible environment in which to reconnect with colleagues:

October 12: Virtual

October 12 @ 10am – 12pm PT
Online via zoom – Register now

In our virtual session, hear from library leaders as they navigate the challenges of the ebook marketplace, and their concerns about the future of library collections as content moves digital.

October 19: In-Person

October 19 @ 9am – 3pm PT
Internet Archive Headquarters @ 300 Funston, San Francisco

At our in-person session, we’ll gather together with the builders & dreamers to envision an equitable future for digital lending. Capacity for the in-person session, held at our headquarters in San Francisco, will be capped at 30 attendees. Interested in attending?

Conference Workshops

Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending

October 11 @ 10am PT – REGISTER NOW
The Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program empowers libraries to lend digital books to patrons using Controlled Digital Lending. Attendees will learn how CDL works, the benefits of the Open Libraries program, and the impact that the program is having for partner libraries and the communities they serve.

The post Library Leaders Forum 2022: Registration now open appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Launching Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (LLTDM-X)

Internet Archive - 16 augustus 2022 - 6:18pm

We are excited to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded nearly $50,000 through its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program to UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining research. NEH funding for the project, entitled Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (LLTDM-X), will support research and analysis that addresses law and policy issues faced by U.S. digital humanities practitioners whose text data mining research and practice intersects with foreign-held or licensed content, or involves international research collaborations. LLTDM-X builds upon Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Institute (Building LLTDM), previously funded by NEH. UC Berkeley Library directed Building LLTDM, bringing together expert faculty from across the country to train 32 digital humanities researchers on how to navigate law, policy, ethics, and risk within text data mining projects (results and impacts are summarized in the white paper here.) 

Why is LLTDM-X needed?

Text data mining, or TDM, is an increasingly essential and widespread research approach. TDM relies on automated techniques and algorithms to extract revelatory information from large sets of unstructured or thinly-structured digital content. These methodologies allow scholars to identify and analyze critical social, scientific, and literary patterns, trends, and relationships across volumes of data that would otherwise be impossible to sift through. While TDM methodologies offer great potential, they also present scholars with nettlesome law and policy challenges that can prevent them from understanding how to move forward with their research. Building LLTDM trained TDM researchers and professionals on essential principles of licensing, privacy law, as well as ethics and other legal literacies —thereby helping them move forward with impactful digital humanities research. Further, digital humanities research in particular is marked by collaboration across institutions and geographical boundaries. Yet, U.S. practitioners encounter increasingly complex cross-border problems and must accordingly consider how they work with internationally-held materials and international collaborators.

How will LLTDM-X help? 

Our long-term goal is to design instructional materials and institutes to support digital humanities TDM scholars facing cross-border issues. Through a series of virtual roundtable discussions, and accompanying legal research and analyses, LLTDM-X will surface these cross-border issues and begin to distill preliminary guidance to help scholars in navigating them. After the roundtables, we will work with the law and ethics experts to create instructive case studies that reflect the types of cross-border TDM issues practitioners encountered. Case studies, guidance, and recommendations will be widely-disseminated via an open access report to be published at the completion of the project. And most importantly, these resources will be used to inform our future educational offerings.

The LLTDM-X team is eager to get started. The project is co-directed by Thomas Padilla, Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services at Internet Archive and Rachael Samberg, who leads UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services. Stacy Reardon, Literatures and Digital Humanities Librarian, and Timothy Vollmer, Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian, both at UC Berkeley Library, round out the team.

We would like to thank NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities again for funding this important work. The full press release is available at UC Berkeley Library’s website. We invite you to contact us with any questions.

The post Launching Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (LLTDM-X) appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Why it’s Important to #OwnBooks

Internet Archive - 13 augustus 2022 - 11:45pm
Here’s Max Collins, lead singer of legendary alt-rock band Eve 6, reading a book that he owns.

As you know, the Internet Archive is currently being sued by four corporate publishers. The publishers want to stop libraries from owning books. In the age of Netflix and Spotify, ownership of culture is increasingly in the hands of large corporations rather than people, artists and public institutions.

We’re fighting back by celebrating book ownership with the #OwnBooks campaign. 

It’s very easy to take part. Choose a book that you’ve owned for a long time – ideally the oldest book you own! You can also choose another media piece, such as a record, CD, or DVD. Take a photo with the book and share it on social media. Tell us how long you’ve owned your book and use the #OwnBooks hashtag.

Check out why other readers like to #OwnBooks.

You could also tell us the story of your relationship with the book – what were the circumstances in which you acquired it? Does it spark any special memories for you? If you prefer, you could make a selfie video and record yourself telling the story of the book. 

We’ll retweet your posts. Make sure to use the #OwnBooks hashtag and mention @internetarchive to help us find them.

The post Why it’s Important to #OwnBooks appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Celebrating 20 Years of the Live Music Archive

Internet Archive - 12 augustus 2022 - 8:20pm

This week, the Live Music Archive collection at the Internet Archive reaches a milestone – 20 years since the collection was started. The roots of the Live Music Archive collection are visible right in the URL – etree. Did you ever wonder what the “etree” in the URL references? In 1998, the etree music community was created to promote the online trading of lossless audio recordings of live music performances. With the advent of more widely available broadband (by 1990’s standards, mind you) internet connections and the creation of lossless file compression formats (Shorten at first, followed by FLAC), the community established protocols to ensure the preservation and archiving of these original audio recordings. Preservation and archiving. The very ethos of the Internet Archive.

Early Live Music Archive logo

In July 2002, Jon Aizen, a software engineer at the Internet Archive and live music enthusiast, proposed to Brewster Kahle the idea of archiving live music recordings. Brewster was enthusiastic and so on July 23, 2002, Jon reached out to the etree community via their email list to make an offer. The Internet Archive was offering to provide “unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free” to ensure the preservation and easy distribution of these live music recordings. The reply came back:  “We don’t believe you. But if you could, that would be our dream.” And we were off to the races to create the first library archive of lossless, legal, live audio recordings. The first order of business was to get explicit permission from the artists to not only preserve but also make available easy access to their recordings. Aizen and others starting emailing bands and documenting their responses. It would be a great story to have the first item as part of the collection to be some rare Grateful Dead recording from 1968, but it is actually an unassuming Rusted Root audience recording from August 24, 2001 uploaded to the new Live Music Archive collection by Aizen on August 12, 2002. You can listen to it here. Of course, there has to be a Grateful Dead connection as the show features a guest appearance by Mark Karan, guitarist (at the time) for Ratdog, one of Bob Weir’s side projects. Perhaps the fact that it is unassuming is more in line with the goal of preservation and archiving. Preservation of all, not just the shiny fancy gem. Permission from the Grateful Dead came a little while later, through Brewster’s connection to John Perry Barlow, who worked together on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As the Live Music Archive was established, the etree community jumped in to help get things rolling – dedicating hundreds of hours to cataloging, uploading, and verifying recordings of shows. In those days it would take 6-12 hours to upload a show via FTP. Jon Aizen describes grabbing shows off etree’s FTP server network as well as from hard drives and other sources and uploading them to the Live Music Archive. Aizen also worked in the early days to create the curation process to enable volunteers to ensure that uploads were permitted by the artists. The Internet Archive team also worked on the “deriver” software which would convert the lossless recordings to MP3 and other more accessible formats (which came after heated debate amongst the etree community, for many of whom the notion of lossy distribution of recordings was anathema). Today’s uploading experience is a web interface that takes most folks 10-20 minutes to upload a show and have it almost immediately available to the world. There were many people involved in the early days and I’m sure we will miss some, but we’d like to thank the following notable contributors:

Alexis Rossi
Brad Leblanc
Bram Cohen
Caleb Epstein
Diana Hamilton
Ghost
Greg Pope
John Dailey
Jon Aizen
Lauren Gelman
Marc Pujol
Mark Goldey
Matt Vernon
Parker Thompson
Peter Hedeman
Ryan Brase
Tom Anderson
Tom Horton
Tracey Jaquith
Tyler Huff

Brad Leblanc recalls doing all the tasks manually – validating checksums, moving files to public download areas, running derivation routines to create mp3/ogg files for streaming. Brad, Jon, and all the others were curating this new collection, bit by bit, as well as building software to automate the process. The Live Music Archive volunteers today still refer to themselves as curators. An amazing task with incredible results.

A grand offer followed by a positive, yet skeptical, response. And then a lot of hard work by both Internet Archive staff and engineers as well as volunteers from the live music taping and trading community. For 20 years, we have kept curating, uploading to the Live Music Archive about 1,000 recordings per month with the total now at 240,000 recordings in total – by far the largest collection of live music recordings in the world. We should reach 250,000 by next summer. More than 8,000 artists have given permission to have recordings of their shows archived on the Live Music Archive. Those recordings have been listened to more than 600,000,000 (yes, 600 Million) times. And many of those are not even the Grateful Dead, giving visibility to artists that might otherwise have less exposure. The Grateful Dead remains the cornerstone artist of the Live Music Archive, but there are many other options on the Live Music Archive – jambands, folk singers, bluegrass, rock, pop, jazz, classical, experimental, mainstream artists, and every combination you can think of.

Beyond listening to the music, what impact has the Live Music Archive had on the artists? The recordings allow their fans to hear the shows they were at or couldn’t make it to or the one across the country that happened yesterday. Building and fortifying a fanbase through the community of live music recordings. Not just for the fans, but the appreciation from the artists as well. One of our curators was having a conversation backstage before a show with a musician friend. It was an “in the round” type show featuring four songwriters alternating to perform their songs with the others playing or singing along. One of the other artists was on the couch trying to take a nap before the show. As soon as the conversation turned to the Live Music Archive, he popped off the couch to say, “I love the Live Music Archive! That place is great. I go there to check out music all the time.” From a nap to excitement in a second. The Live Music Archive is a resource both personally and professionally for musicians. A new musician joins the band? Send them to the Live Music Archive to check out some shows to learn how the songs are played live, the seques occur. A recent text one of our curators received was an artist looking for a recommendation, “What is a good recent recording I can send to some musicians? I love the Tahoe and Eugene recordings from earlier this year but need something more recent.” It was certainly enough to put a smile on a curator’s face.

From trading tapes (reel to reel, cassettes, DATs) by mail months/years after the show occurred to CD’s to FTP server networks to hearing the show hours after it ended on your mobile device – a transformation of a community. No longer hundreds and thousands hearing the show, but hundreds of thousands.

The Live Music Archive curators are not just archivists, but tapers and music fans themselves. Here are some suggestions for curators past and present.

From Jon Aizen:

“It’s hard to pick one, but I think Sim and Uniit at the State Theater in Ithaca in 2002 is an amazing example of the power of the Archive. If it weren’t for the Archive, this recording would be sitting on a tape somewhere, probably lost forever. This small act, never to be repeated (Sim and Uniit are friends, but not a regular act) is a moment in time perfectly captured.”

Sim Redmond and Uniit Carruyo Live at State Theater on 2002-09-14

From vanark:

“Some of my favorite recordings are from the most intimate settings – especially house concerts and in store performances. Close to the performer in a more informal environment, without a big PA or sound system. Musician, instrument (usually acoustic), microphones, and a couple dozen fans. In this recording, the in store occurred in the afternoon prior to the evening performance at a local club. JJ Grey walks to the small area in the corner of the store, sees the microphones set up in front of him and asks, ‘Whose are these?’ I raise my hand and a big smile rises across his face and I get a ‘That’s great!’ A short 5-song set promoting the newest CD. There were still hours before the evening show, so I head home and upload the show to the Archive before heading to the club. I think I had more fun at the free in store than the main event.”

JJ Grey Live at Newbury Comics – Faneuil Hall Marketplace on 2008-10-25

If you want to listen to some of the most popular recordings of all time on the Live Music Archive, here are some selections.

The most listened to item of all time. OAR has quite a following, and this one might have been embedded on their Myspace page to get 2.7 million listens:

Of A Revolution Live at Madison Square Garden on 2006-01-14

The most listened to Grateful Dead recording (no, not Cornell 1977, although that is second):

Grateful Dead Live at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium on 1973-06-10

An interesting show in the top 20 of all time, from a pizza/brewery in Asheville, NC, recorded by curator Gordon:

Patterson Hood Live at Asheville Pizza & Brewing Company on 2006-01-07

Whichever show you choose to listen to, whether it has been listened to 500,000 times or a backyard show from last weekend listened to 50 times, they have value to someone and it is not measured by the number of listens. The tapers are still out there capturing the moments from artists, new and established, doing covers or originals. Capturing, archiving, preserving.

From all the listeners, artists, and tapers, thank you to the Internet Archive and etree for taking that leap of faith in 2002 and pushing it forward. Who knows where we can take it from here? Let’s keep it going! Let’s start planning that party for the 25th anniversary – who’s in?

The post Celebrating 20 Years of the Live Music Archive appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Book Signing with Congressman Adam Schiff at the Internet Archive

Internet Archive - 11 augustus 2022 - 10:29pm

Please join us for a conversation and book signing sponsored by Booksmith, Berkeley Arts & Letters and the Internet Archive.

Congressman Schiff is celebrating the paperback launch of his #1 New York Times bestselling “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could”.

Tuesday 8/16/22 7:30 pm

300 Funston Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

Adam Schiff is the United States Representative for California’s 28th Congressional District. In his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Schiff led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Before he served in Congress, he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles and as a California State Senator.

RSVP here

The post Book Signing with Congressman Adam Schiff at the Internet Archive appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

New additions to the Internet Archive for July 2022

Internet Archive - 9 augustus 2022 - 2:44am

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons:  Books – 78,091 New items in July

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

1000 classic recipes Camera : a history of photography from daguerreotype to digital Canadian dinosaurs Audio Archive – 91,636 New Items in July

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

Goose Live at Radio City Music Hall on 2022-06-24 LibriVox Audiobooks – 119 New Items in July

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

The Gray Phantom’s Return The Mask of Death The Wind in the Willows (Version 7 Dramatic Reading) 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 8,888 New Items in July

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Anselmi Giuseppe – Delta TQD 3047 (1907-1909) D’ Assy Pierre – Discophilia DIS 376 (1908-09) Live Music Archive – 965 New Items in July

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Movies – 135 New Items in July

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

The post New additions to the Internet Archive for July 2022 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Canada is Leading the Way on User-Centered Copyright Policy

Internet Archive - 5 augustus 2022 - 10:38pm

In an important new copyright decision, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed its commitment to the principles of users rights and technological neutrality–principles which have made Canada a world leader in balanced copyright and support for controlled digital lending (CDL) by libraries.  

For many years now, the Supreme Court of Canada has emphasized the importance of these two principles in striking the proper copyright balance. With respect to user’s rights, the Supreme Court has held that exceptions and limitations to copyright are not mere loopholes–they are affirmative user’s rights. This means that copyright is not about maximizing the economic interests of publishers or anyone else, but instead about advancing the public good by seeking “the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users’ interests.” With respect to technological neutrality, the Supreme Court has held that the Copyright Act must be interpreted in view of the principle of technological neutrality, according to which “[w]hat matters is what the user receives, not how the user receives it.” This means that, in general, the courts should “interpret the Copyright Act in a way that avoids imposing an additional layer of protections and fees based solely on the method of delivery of the work to the end user.” These principles have been particularly important for Canadian libraries and their patrons, supporting CDL and other important library practices there.

In many ways, these principles seem like good old fashioned common sense. But publishers and others have long claimed that these user rights and technological neutrality “pose[] a direct threat” to their economic interests. In the new case, SOCAN v. ESA, these arguments were once again brought before the Supreme Court of Canada–and once again rejected. 

As Professor Michael Geist has noted, the case:

provides a further entrenchment of Canadian copyright jurisprudence that holds users’ rights and the copyright balance as foundational elements of the law. . . . the court’s support for these principles is not obiter, rhetoric, or likely to change. Indeed, copyright lobby groups have spent much of the past two decades in denial, convinced that somehow the growing body of Supreme Court copyright cases will be reversed the next time the court confronts the issue. That has now led to multiple defeats at Canada’s highest court by copyright collectives such as Access Copyright and SOCAN. In each case, the core copyright principles have remained unchanged. Indeed, if anything, they have become more solidified as precedent builds upon precedent. Given these outcomes and last week’s SOCAN v. ESA decision, it is long past time for these groups to engage in copyright policy based on the realities of balance, users’ rights, and technological neutrality.

These principles–and a balanced approach overall–allow libraries in Canada to continue to fulfill their mission in the digital age, and allow ordinary citizens access to quality information, all while supporting a thriving creative industry at home and abroad.

The post Canada is Leading the Way on User-Centered Copyright Policy appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

DWeb Camp 2022: A Grounded Convening of Those Building a Decentralized, Values-Driven Web

Internet Archive - 3 augustus 2022 - 1:11am

Much has changed since 2016, when the Internet Archive held the first Decentralized Web Summit. Scrappy teams with lean funding have grown into formidable organizations with budgets in the millions. Niche technologies and far-fetched debates from a few years ago have dominated headlines and are shaping entire economies.

Each of the DWeb events reflected a moment in a quickly shifting landscape of protocols, institutions, and ideologies. In the three years since DWeb Camp in 2019, some major trends have transformed people’s thinking. The explosion of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into the mainstream. The renaissance of projects centered on shared ownership and governance of assets. The reckoning with the power and potential of decentralized technologies: to either further entrench existing social inequities and exacerbate ecological harm, or radically reconstruct the ways in which individuals and communities can meaningfully address these and other crises of our time. 

As organizers of this community, the defining change was the development of the DWeb Principles. The Principles help us to define what we stand for, instead of merely what we stand against. They emerged out of discussions and alignment between many members of the DWeb community, and are just one part of a growing awareness of the ethics and beneficiaries of decentralized digital ecosystems. 

DWeb Camp 2022 will be held from August 24-28 at Camp Navarro, California. As the programming takes shape, the themes, spaces, and participants of this year’s event clearly reflect where we are in this still nascent movement. At DWeb Camp, we’ll be hacking and live testing cutting edge decentralized protocols, platforms, and hardware. We’ll tackle thorny topics about who these tools serve and how to govern and steward them sustainably. We’ll confront questions about power, marginalization, community, identity, ecology, and human rights. 

With all the DWeb events, we aim to create spaces for people to share their ideas, projects, and research among warm, supportive peers who believe in a plurality of approaches and solutions to build a decentralized values-driven web. By meeting in-person, outdoors among towering redwood trees, DWeb Camp is about manifesting that ethos as we invite all those participating to bring their full selves. We’re designing this event to be a place for us to be curious and humble. Not to come with all the answers but to be open to having your mind and heart changed.

Below are some of the Spaces, or thematic sessions, that will be held throughout the five-day event. In addition to the Spaces described below, we will build a local Mesh Network across the campground for participants to share locally-hosted materials, test hardware, and experience a community network first-hand.

Spaces
  • Hackers Hall  – Tech projects, Science Fair, and User testing
  • Healing Waters in Cambium Pavillion – Conversations, music, tea, and storytelling
  • People-2-People Tent – Exploration of emergent wisdom through play
  • Open Source Library – Storytelling, books and games
  • Redwood Parliament Pavillion – Imagine and co-inspire a governance layer for the DWeb
  • Filecoin Foundation Forest Hang Out – Connect with new friends while lying in hammocks
  • Redwood Cathedral – Wellness, meditation, and conversation 
  • Universal Access Amphitheater – Talks and breakout discussions
  • Be Water Waystation – Art and hands-on programs for children
  • Thunder Salon – Lightning talks

We’re lucky to have an incredible group of people stewarding the programming in each Space, ensuring that the sessions invite collective practice in discussion, imagination, and play. Continue reading below for more detailed descriptions of some of the Spaces, written by the stewards. An online schedule of all the sessions in each Space will become available the week of the event.

Hackers Hall

The Hacker’s Hall is the place for people of technical and non-technical backgrounds to meet each other at all hours of the day and night. We will have Wi-Fi, couches, whiteboards, and tables. It will be the Mesh Network Hub of the Camp. Come to the Science Fair on Thursday, where everyone can try interactive demos of existing decentralization projects and meet the people who are building them. Then on Friday, come to “Dogfooding Decentralization,” a User Testing Lab for DWeb project. Each team will have office hours where you can come deep dive with them.

Come build on and improve projects, test software, be a user tester, meet developers and designers, ask questions, and learn new things about the decentralization all around us! 

Healing Waters in Cambium Pavilion

Oceans and creeks, rivers and lakes, from the clouds in the sky to the pipes in our homes, water connects us all. This is the focus of Healing Waters at DWeb camp, an Indigenous-led, multi-modal celebration of this precious substance that supports all life on Earth. By the meeting place of the Navarro River and the Pacific Ocean, Healing Waters invites DWeb campers to explore their relationship to water and what it means to be fluid, literally and metaphorically. Our programming navigates the currents leading from Indigenous technologies and storytelling to hyper-modern science and cartography, with ports of call in art, music, policy, poetry, history, and mythology.

Programming Highlights:

  • A conversation led by Haudenosaunee artists Asha Veeraswamy and Amelia Winger-Bearskin about the parallels between open-source technology, decentralization, and the consensus-building practices that led to the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, and deeply influenced the U.S. Constitution 
  • Data visualization workshop using real water data from the US Geological Survey led by data manager/designer Martha Bearskin 
  • Real-time data-driven VJ session featuring artist/technologist Devin Ronneberg
  • Morning communal singing rituals led by artist and opera singer Amelia Winger-Bearskin
  • Musical performances and night raves in the majestic redwood forest
  • Sound baths (meditative experiences in which the audience is “bathed” in immersive spatialized audio)
  • Martial arts instruction, guiding students to access the deep aquifer of intuition that flows just below the conscious mind
People-2-People Tent

Let’s myceliate!

Let’s root and spread our hyphae through the ground: tree-to-tree, person-to-person, peer-to-peer, and node-to-node.

Let’s relieve networks of the extractive transactional usage and explore in earnest what it’s like to design, form, and experience networks the way fungi do. The way the complex systems of our bodies do. The way humans do when we weave our relational webs. Our webs have connections, overlapping points, tensions, resistances, and anchors.

Let’s weave, let’s twine, let’s interwingle. Let’s use our technologies of language, of frames, of digital media to better see and play with these patterns of relating in real time, in real life, with each other.

Those working on peer-to-peer (P2P) projects are invited to do a Kindergarten Lightning Talk to share  their technologies using crayons and paper and pipe cleaners. We’ll have interactive sessions from different P2P projects like Scuttlebutt, Holochain, and Fluence. There will be a full on battle session (playful, of course) between blockchain folks and fully distributed folks over what the “D” in DWeb stands for. Think arts and crafts and workshops meet P2P technology!

Filecoin Foundation Forest Hang Out

Our Venue Sponsor, Filecoin Foundation, invites you to hang out in the trees and meet Foundation leaders. This is the place to come to chill, meet new friends, and enjoy late night pizza cooked to order in a wood-fired oven on Wednesday and a Silent Disco on Friday. 

Open Source Library

Looking for a place of quiet contemplation? Come to the Open Source Library to peruse some favorite books of your fellow campers. We’ll ask each person to bring a few meaningful books to give away. Authors’ talks and storytelling, game nights and children’s films will all take place in the Library.

Redwood Parliament Pavilion

Imagine an Internet where democracy is at least as available as autocracy.

The decentralized Internet is a complex network of technical and social interdependencies; a mix of protocols and the communities that thrive in and across the network. However, the Internet as it currently exists has been flattened and consolidated to render these socio-technical complexities into top-down, autocratic defaults for social organization. And yet, these interdependencies continue to grow, challenging and proving the current form of the Internet socially unsustainable; calling us instead to develop more collective means and intuitions for how we govern our commons.

Redwood Parliament is a collection of events at DWeb Camp that will address these interdependencies in all of their complexity and practice alternatives to autocracy.

The track will bring together practitioners, researchers, artists, builders, and dreamers to actively imagine and co-inspire a governance layer for the decentralized Internet. Over four days, campers will have the opportunity to participate in a collection of distributed activities, workshops, and discussions designed to give us the conceptual and experiential tools and frameworks that we can take with us to help us do this work.

Together, we will:

  • Explore ways of flexibly composing and experimenting with different decision making structures through workshops and hands on engagement with new digital-native tools;
  • Immerse ourselves in a black-box modular governance Live Action Role Play (LARP);
  • Collectively develop a map of governance practices and protocols existing across the decentralized Internet;
  • Read, annotate, and be guided through various constitutions forming around the decentralized Internet;
  • Design ecological patterns, protocols, and mechanisms, guided by the ethos of the DWeb, to shape and inform the inter-relationship between our physical and economic environments; and
  • Engage in speculative writing and world building exercises focused on imagining approaches to governance past, present, and future;

These activities and happenings will complement and inform a series of meta-level discussions around research that the organizers of the Redwood Parliament have been conducting on this topic of a governance layer for the decentralized Internet.

— 

Redwood Parliament is a joint collaboration between Metagov, the Internet Archive, and RadicalxChange, with support from the Unfinished Network and the National Science Foundation.

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Colgate University Libraries Donates to Expanding Government Document Microfiche Collection

Internet Archive - 1 augustus 2022 - 2:00pm
Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology, Colgate University. Photo credit: Colgate University Office of University Communications.

From 1970 to 2004, Colgate University amassed as many as 1.5 million microfiche cards with documents from the U.S. federal government. 

The small, private liberal arts institution housed the collection in a central location accessible to the former reference service point and the circulation desk in Hamilton, New York. 

“Every single campus tour that goes through the library walks past this collection. Our well meaning student ambassadors would announce ‘Here’s our microfiche that no one uses,’” said Debbie Krahmer, accessible technology & government documents librarian at Colgate. 

Since the popularity of the miniaturized thumbnails of pages waned several years ago, many libraries have struggled with what to do with their microfiche collections, as they contain important information but are difficult to use. 

Krahmer was looking for ways to offload the materials and discovered the Internet Archive would accept microfiche donations for digitization. It was a way to preserve the content, make it easier for the public to access, and avoid putting the microfiche in a landfill.

“These government documents are meant to be available and accessible to the general public. For many there’s still a lot of good information in this collection,” said Courtney L. Young, the university librarian. “While the microfiche has been stored in large metal cabinets on the main level, many of our users do not see them. This project will improve that visibility and accessibility.”

About the donation

In July, the Internet Archive arranged for the twelve cabinets of microfiche, each in excess of 600 pounds, to be loaded onto pallets and shipped to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization. Materials include Census data, documents from the Department of Education, Congressional testimony, CIA documents, and foreign news translated into English. 

Microfiche cabinets ready for shipping to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization.

Colgate also gave indexes of the microfiche that will be “game changers” for other government libraries once they are digitized because the volumes are expensive and hard to acquire, Krahmer added. 

Krahmer said the moving process with the Internet Archive was easy and would recommend the option to other librarians.

“This is a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get these materials recycled,” Krahmer said. “In addition to improving discovery and access, this supports the university’s sustainability plan. It’s going to get digitized, be made available online, and preserved. This is win-win no matter how you look at it.”

Public access to government publications

Government documents from microfiche are coming to archive.org based on the combined efforts of the Internet Archive and its Federal Depository Library Program library partners. The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), founded in 1813, provides designated libraries with copies of bills, laws, congressional hearings, regulations, and executive and judicial branch documents and reports to share with the public.

Colgate joins Claremont Colleges, Evergreen State College, University of Alberta, University of California San Francisco, and the University of South Carolina that have contributed over 70 million pages on over one million microfiche cards. Other libraries are welcome to join this project.

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Web Archiving to the Rescue: One Library’s Quest to Fill an Information Gap

Internet Archive - 27 juli 2022 - 5:00pm

Guest post by: Dana Hamlin, Archivist at Waltham Public Library

This post is part of a series written by members of the Internet Archive’s 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/

What is an archivist to do when items of public record, which have been systematically added to publicly accessible collections for over a century, suddenly turn from paper into bits and bytes that disappear from the web, or even get stuck behind paywalls? Like many in my profession, I’ve been grappling with this question for a while. Having no real training in digital archiving and facing this quandary as a lone arranger, it’s sometimes hard to keep that grappling from turning into low-key panicking that my inaction has been causing information to be lost forever.

Imagine my excitement, then, when I learned about the Community Webs program – access to and training for Archive-It, collaboration with the Internet Archive, and a network of others like me to bounce ideas off and get inspiration from? Yes please! With the blessing of my boss, I applied right away and my library joined the program in April 2021.

The outside of the Waltham Public Library. Photo by C. Sowa.

(This might be a good point for a quick introduction. I work as the archivist/local history librarian at the Waltham Public Library (WPL) in Waltham, Massachusetts. Waltham is a city about 10 miles west of Boston, and is home to an ethnically and economically diverse population of just over 62,000 people. The WPL is a fully-funded community hub, fostering a healthy democratic society by providing a wealth of current informational, educational, and recreational resources free of charge to all members of the community. The library is known throughout the area for its knowledgeable and friendly staff, welcoming and safe environment, accessibility, convenience, current technology, and helpful assistance.)

I eagerly dove into the program and used our first web-archive collection – Waltham Public Library – as a testing ground, a place to gain familiarity with both Archive-It and the whole process of web archiving. I’ve been trying to capture content that aligns with the material found in the library’s analog records – annual reports, policies, announcements, event flyers, records from our Friends group, etc. – by doing a weekly crawl of the library website, our Friends website, and the library’s Twitter feed. For the most part this collection has been thankfully pretty straightforward.

Our largest collection so far is COVID-19 in Waltham, which makes up a portion of the library’s very first born-digital archival collection. That collection began in April 2020, when the WPL (like most other places) was closed to help “flatten the curve.” A month or two prior, as the pandemic was building steam, I had become fascinated with the 1918 influenza. A poke through our archives for the topic had been disappointing, as there wasn’t too much beyond a couple of newspaper clippings, brief mentions in the library trustees’ minutes, and a few pages in the records of the local nurses’ association. I was hoping to put together a better picture of what it was like to live in Waltham during the flu, perhaps to give myself a glimpse of what I could expect in the coming weeks (heh… how naïve I was).

Scrapbook page showing newspaper clippings from the early days of the 1918 flu. Scrapbook is part of the records of the Waltham Public Library. Photo by D. Hamlin.

I put out a call via the library’s social media for those who lived, worked, and/or went to school in Waltham to share their stories, hoping to build the kind of collection I wanted and failed to find from 1918. There was an initial rush of Google Form submissions, a handful of photos, and one video, and then nothing. I was pleased we had received some materials, but still wanted to paint a broader picture of Waltham under Covid. Enter Community Webs! For the past several months I’ve been working to collect retroactively what I was hoping to capture at the time – news articles, videos, the city website, information from the schools, and so on. While it’s not as comprehensive as it might have been if I’d been able to gather it all as it happened, I’ve been able to save over 500 GB of data that will help those in the future to better imagine what it was like to live in Waltham during Covid.

Screenshot from a WPL Instagram post sharing a patron’s submission to our COVID-19 in Waltham collection. Screenshot examples of Covid-related content captured retroactively with Archive-It.

Finally, related to the quandary in the first paragraph of this post, our most complicated collection is the Waltham News Tribune. The WPL has microfilm copies of the paper going back to its earliest iteration in the 1860s, and part of my job has been to collect each issue and send yearly batches to a vendor for microfilming. However, as of this past May, the publisher has moved the paper entirely online, with some content requiring a paid subscription to view. The WPL has a subscription so that we can continue to provide free access to our patrons, but what happens to our archive of back issues? Does it just stop abruptly in May 2022, even as time and local news continue to march on? As it is, our microfilm is heavily used, especially since the paper’s offices burned down in 1999, making ours the only existing archive. 

Drawers full of microfilmed newspapers at the WPL. Photo by D. Hamlin.

Thanks to web archiving, we’re able to continue to fulfill our unofficial role as the repository for the city newspaper, at least in theory. In practice, I look at the daily crawls of the digital edition of the paper and can’t help but see that it is no longer the type of local news we’ve been archiving for over a century. The corporate publisher of the paper has consolidated ours with those from several other local cities and towns, and has sacrificed true local news coverage for more generic topics, many of which aren’t even related specifically to Massachusetts. This is a problem that sits well outside of my archives wheelhouse, but at least I feel I can do my due diligence by capturing what local news does trickle through. 

I’ve had a slower go of web archiving than I’d like so far, thanks to several months of parental leave in 2021 and a very packed part-time work schedule. Nevertheless, I’ve been chipping away at our collections and planning for more, with an eye to add more diverse voices than those that make up much of our analog collections. I’m grateful for the encouragement and help I’ve received from Community Webs staff and peers, and want to give a special shout-out to the Archive-It folks who hold office hours to assist us with technical issues! This really is a fantastic program, and I’m so glad my library is part of it.

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August Book Talk: Dataraising and Digital Civil Society

Internet Archive - 20 juli 2022 - 3:30am

Featuring the book How We Give Now by Lucy Bernholz. Published by MIT Press.

What is dataraising and why should nonprofits care? For millennia humans have given time and money to each other and to causes they care about. A few hundred years ago we invented nonprofit organizations and they’ve become a key mechanism in the donation of private resources for public benefit. Now, we can also donate digital data. Organizations such as iNaturalist use donated digital photographs to build communities of nature lovers and inform climate scientists. Other organizations are using donated data to build cultural archives, advocate for fair labor laws, protect consumers, and for medical research.

Join Lucy Bernholz, author of How We Give Now, Scott Loarie of iNaturalist, and Dr. Jasmine McNealy from the University of Florida for a discussion of the promises and perils of donating digital data and the implications for individuals, communities, and civil society.

REGISTER NOW Purchase your copy of How We Give Now from MIT Press.

August Book Talk: Dataraising and Digital Civil Society
Featuring Lucy Bernholz, author of How We Give Now, Scott Loarie of iNaturalist, and Dr. Jasmine McNealy from the University of Florida
August 10, 2022 @ 11am PT
Register now for this virtual event.

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Internet Archive Hosts Community Webs Symposium in Washington, DC

Internet Archive - 19 juli 2022 - 6:28pm

On June 21st, the Community Webs program team hosted its 2022 US Symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. For this day-long meeting, we welcomed over 30 librarians and archivists from across the country for presentations, discussion, networking, and some much-needed catch up following two years of entirely virtual events. 

National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC

Community Webs is a community history web and digital archiving program operated by the Internet Archive. The program seeks to advance the capacity for community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories, with a particular focus on communities that have been underrepresented in the historic record. Community Webs provides its members with web and digital archiving tools, as well as training, technical support and access to a network of organizations doing similar work. The Community Webs program, including this event, is generously funded with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Mellon Foundation. 

Jefferson Bailey, Director of Archiving & Data Services at the Internet Archive, describes the concepts that have underpinned the development of Community Webs since its inception

The day began with opening remarks and program updates from Internet Archive staff, including an overview of Community Webs and the significant growth the program has experienced since its launch in 2017. Staff provided a glimpse at what lies ahead both for Community Webs and the Internet Archive’s Archiving and Data Services team. This included plans to incorporate digitization, digital preservation and other forms of digital collecting into Community Webs, as well as projects and services either newly released or in development at IA.

Dr. Doretha Williams, Director of the Robert F. Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

The first keynote speaker of the day was Dr. Doretha Williams, Director of the Robert F. Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Williams detailed her organization’s commitment to serving its communities via the Center’s Community Curation Program, Internships and Fellowships Program, Family History Center, and Great Migration Home Movie Project. Throughout her presentation, Dr. Williams stressed the importance of community input and partnerships to achieving the Center’s mission, echoing one of the central tenets of the Community Webs program.

National Gallery of Art Executive Librarian Roger Lawson discusses his organization’s involvement with the Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA)

Following this presentation, three speakers shared their experiences working on collaborative web archiving initiatives. Lori Donovan, Senior Program Manager for Community Programs at the Internet Archive, began with an overview of various collaborative web archiving initiatives the Internet Archive and its partners have participated in, including the Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA), a web archiving initiative aimed at capturing web-based art materials utilizing a collective approach. Roger Lawson, Executive Librarian at the National Gallery of Art, shared his institution’s perspective as a member of CARTA. Finally, Christie Moffatt, Digital Manuscripts Program Manager at the National Library of Medicine, described working with colleagues both across her organization and externally to capture health-related web content at a national scale. Each of these presentations emphasized the advantages in scale, resources, staffing and knowledge-sharing that can be achieved by pursuing web archiving via collaborative entities.

Our afternoon session kicked off with a second keynote presentation from Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Johnston detailed the challenges NARA faces while contending with digital preservation across the enterprise. These challenges include the heterogeneity of digital outputs and technologies, the complexity of digital objects and environments, the scale of the archivable digital universe, and the difficulties in ensuring equitable access. As an antidote to these challenges, Johnston recommends archivists provide guidance to content creators, take a risk-based approach, prioritize basic levels of control, maintain scalable and flexible infrastructure, and engage in collaborations and partnerships. She also advocated for a people- rather than technology-centric approach to digital preservation, again mirroring the ethos of the Community Webs program.

Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation at NARA, outlines the challenges her institution is facing while contending with digital preservation

For our final speaker session of the afternoon, we welcomed Community Webs members up to the lectern to share their web archiving and digital goals and achievements. Librarian, archivist, Phd student, and creative polymath kYmberly Keeton discussed her work as founder of Art | Library Deco, an online archive of African American art. Keeton described working closely with the artists featured in the archive, reiterating the theme of collaboration espoused by other speakers at the event. Tricia Dean, Tech Services Manager at Wilmington Public Library (Illinois), argued for the importance of capturing the histories of small and rural communities through initiatives like Community Webs. Liz Paulus, Adult Services Librarian at Cedar Mill & Bethany Community Libraries described her efforts to capture the online Cedar Mill News via web archiving, stressing how one successful project can play a significant role when advocating for future resources. Longtime Community Webs member Dylan Gaffney, Information Services Associate for Local History & Special Collections at Forbes Library, described his library’s participation in States of Incarceration, a traveling exhibition on mass incarceration, the Historic Northampton Enslaved People Project, and other initiatives. Gaffney credited Community Webs with paving the way for an equity-focused approach to digital projects such as these. Finally, Dana Hamlin, Archivist at Waltham Public Library showcased her organization’s web archiving efforts, highlighting the library’s COVID-19 collections and their attempts to capture the online local newspaper, the Waltham News Tribune.  

Throughout the day, attendees had opportunities to discuss digital initiatives at their organizations, to catch up informally after a long hiatus, and to browse the exhibitions on display at the National Museum of the American Indian. We’re so grateful to all of our Community Webs members who were able to attend the event and especially to those who shared their knowledge. For anyone who was unable to attend or is itching to meet up again, registration is now open for our next Community Webs Symposium in Chattanooga this September 13 to coincide with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference. We hope to see you there!

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“Have you played Atari today?”

Internet Archive - 13 juli 2022 - 9:35pm

Guest post by Kay Savetz, professional web publisher and amateur Atari historian

For years I hunted for the answer to the question: who wrote the adverting tagline “Have you played Atari today?” Atari started using it in print advertisements on April 1, 1982. Soon after, the words were sung in a jingle in many Atari TV commercials. As an Atari historian, the question plagued me: who wrote those words?

The first newspaper advertisement featuring the famous phrase: April 1st, 1982.

My computer historian colleagues didn’t know. I asked Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. He thought it might have come from their ad agency at the time, Doyle Dane Bernbach. But when both a colleague and I separately reached out to DDB, we hit dead ends. I searched Internet Archive, commercial newspaper archives, and library collections, all in vain.

In 2021 I created a script called TIARA — The Internet Archive Research Assistant — which searches Internet Archive every day for newly uploaded items that match my selected words and phrases. (You can get the script free from https://github.com/savetz/tiara). It diligently searched for “Have you played Atari today?” daily, with no hint to the answer to my question.

Until June 2022 — when there was a hit. A book called “Graphis New Talent Annual 2016” had been scanned just the day before by Internet Archive’s scanning center in the Philippines. The book was available for immediate online borrowing. I checked it out for an hour, and had the answer I needed in just a minute. There on page 7 is a bio for Robert Wain Mackall, which says that he wrote the “Have you played Atari today?” tagline while working at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Finally, there was my answer! Internet Archive’s relentless scanning of books, its lending library, its full-text search capability, and my little TIARA script delivered a fact that I had been seeking for years.

—Kay Savetz

What are some things you’re exploring on the Internet Archive? Tell us in the comments!

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Internet Archive Seeks Summary Judgment in Federal Lawsuit Filed By Publishing Companies

Internet Archive - 8 juli 2022 - 6:22pm

The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending.

The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Durie Tangri LLP, explains that our Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world. 

The brief explains how the Internet Archive is advancing the purposes of copyright law by furthering public access to knowledge and facilitating the creation of new creative and scholarly works. The Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.

Earlier today, we hosted a press conference with stakeholders in the lawsuit and the librarians and creators who will be affected by its outcome, including:

“Should we stop libraries from owning and lending books? No,” said Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “We need libraries to be independent and strong, now more than ever, in a time of misinformation and challenges to democracy. That’s why we are defending the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online.”

Through CDL, the Internet Archive and other libraries make and lend out digital scans of print books in our collections, subject to strict technical controls. Each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for, so authors and publishers have already been fully compensated for those books. Nonetheless, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020, claiming incorrectly that CDL violates their copyrights.

“The publishers are not seeking protection from harm to their existing rights. They are seeking a new right foreign to American copyright law: the right to control how libraries may lend the books they own,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “They should not succeed. The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world. Copyright law does not stand in the way of a library’s right to lend its books to its patrons, one at a time.”

Authors and librarians speak out in support of the Internet Archive

“In the all-consuming tide of entropy, the Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge,” said author Tom Scocca. “Out past the normal circulating lifespan of a piece of writing—or past the lifespan of entire publications—the Archive preserves and maintains it.”

“The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since,” said Benjamin Saracco, a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey. “If the publishers are successful in their pursuit to shut down the Internet Archive’s lending library and stop all libraries from practicing controlled digital lending, libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.”

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Librarian: If the publishers’ lawsuit is successful, “libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.”

Internet Archive - 8 juli 2022 - 6:20pm

On July 8, 2022, Benjamin Saracco, medical school librarian, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. These are his remarks:

Hi everyone. My name is Benjamin Saracco, and I’m a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey. My library serves the doctors, nurses, residents, and other healthcare workers in the hospital, and also the students, faculty, and staff of the medical school. 

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was an extremely stressful time for me and my colleagues at the hospital library. In March 2020, the Governor of New Jersey signed an executive order that closed all libraries in the state. Even the physical books in my hospital’s library were unavailable to circulate for a period of time during the pandemic. I remember being flooded with requests from medical students, nurses, and doctors during that time, particularly front line healthcare workers that were seeking information about COVID-19 and COVID-19 clinical care information to address the high rates of hospitalization in our state. 

Some of the most commonly checked out physical materials in our library are training materials for patient care. While our hospital library’s physical collections were closed due to the pandemic, I received multiple requests for at least two such materials: a Manual for Basic Life Support, known as the BLS Manual for Healthcare Providers and the Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Provider Manual. These books are used to train front line healthcare workers to handle life-threatening emergencies, for example by giving CPR or using an automated external defibrillator in cases of cardiac arrest, as well as more advanced skills to treat patients in life-threatening circumstances, many of which arose during COVID-19 in our hospital. Since our physical collection was unavailable, I searched for ebook versions of these materials in our database and did not find any.

However, I was able to locate older editions of both books that were available for borrowing at the Internet Archive, and was able to direct the healthcare workers requesting these materials to the digitized books at the Internet Archive. I also provided a demonstration over Zoom to medical school faculty on how to use the Internet Archive’s lending library to search for materials that might be useful for the curriculum.  As you can imagine, converting in person instruction for medical students training to be doctors such as working with human cadavers in a gross anatomy lab was a challenging endeavor to convert to a digital format.

From my educational and professional experiences as a librarian, especially during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I know the Internet Archive is an extremely valuable resource for the public. I have immense respect for the important work they are doing to ensure access to information through a digital medium.

As a professional librarian of over 12 years and an author and journal editor myself, I have been trained to always respect the rights of authors and publishers. In my view, the Internet Archive’s lending library is consistent with those rights. The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since. If the publishers are successful in their pursuit to shut down the Internet Archive’s lending library and stop all libraries from practicing controlled digital lending, libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.

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Author and Editor: “Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge”

Internet Archive - 8 juli 2022 - 6:20pm

On July 8, 2022, author and editor Tom Scocca spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. Tom is an editor at The Brick House, the proprietor of Indignity, and the former politics editor at Slate. He is the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future. These are his remarks:

To be a writer in the 21st century is to be caught between two conflicting concerns: the fear that one’s work will be stolen, and the fear that one’s work will be lost. These are the individual and personal expressions of the larger facts of our living amid an unprecedented availability of information, and of the unprecedented unavailability of that same information. Our knowledge and our work are caught up in rapid, unpredictable cycles of creation, dissemination, and destruction; just as I was sitting down to write these thoughts, I discovered a year’s worth of my own writing had been suddenly blocked from being read on the internet by an expired certificate.

But I could still find it on the Internet Archive. In the all-consuming tide of entropy, the Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge. Out past the normal circulating lifespan of a piece of writing—or past the lifespan of entire publications—the Archive preserves and maintains it. It’s surprisingly hard, logistically and conceptually, to remember what 2008 was like, let alone 1998, but miraculously, the evidence still exists. If it’s not quite like achieving immortality, it’s at least like no longer being buried in an unmarked mass grave.

This is the work that libraries have always done. Deep in the stacks, you can physically take a book off a shelf that no one else has checked out in 20 years. You could semi-physically, or semi-virtually, flip through a long-gone newspaper with a spin of a microfiche reel. One of my greatest thrills, when I became an author, was hearing from someone that their ordinary public library in some ordinary city had a copy of my book—a thrill quite different from the regular good news of knowing that some person had spent money to put a copy on their home bookshelf. In the library, my book could be read by anyone.

I was happy, then, to participate in the Open Library project, by putting my own work into an anthology to be published for digital lending. I understand—at a deep level, the level on which I wonder how I will pay the mortgage and what I will eat in my old age—how alarming the Open Library can sound to a writer. I feel that alarm: the sense that our already precariously remunerated work might be distributed for no money at all, that the greedy and impersonal culture of torrenting and piracy might be coming for us, too.

But practically, the idea is the idea of the library book. A single copy—bought and paid for—shared with one person at a time, and then returned to the shelf. The distribution may be virtual and seemingly unreal, but it behaves like a solid item. It behaves more like a solid item, in fact, than many provisionally available movies or texts on the consumer market, which act as your personal property for only as long as the underlying licensing agreement between the rights-holder and the seller lasts. That sort of dissolving culture isn’t a renewable revenue source, it’s a path to scarcity and amnesia.

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