Thanks to a recent $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we will be expanding our TV News Search & Borrow service that enables everyone to search, quote and borrow U.S. television news programs.

Launched last September, the service repurposes closed captioning to facilitate deep search and present relevant short-streamed with clips from more than 400,000 news broadcasts dating back to June 2009. We are striving to help inform and engage communities by strengthening the work of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, civic organizations and others dedicated to serving public interests.

We are beginning to see important public benefits arising from this new capability to apply digital search and analysis to news from our most pervasive and persuasive medium—television. Journalists are better able to investigate significant persons and events. Documentarians are more effectively finding key news footage to license and use. Educators can now focus the critical attention of their students on extensive real-world examples of how news stories are told and audiences engaged.

We recently worked with researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Center and MIT’s Center for Civic Media to facilitate direct machine queries of our television news library that returned structured data results to inform their media landscape analysis of the Trayvon Martin story and reveal key pivot points in its evolution.

Journalists and documentarians at the newly-launched Retro Report are using TV News Search & Borrow to help them take a fresh look at important stories of the past, share new perspectives and add insightful commentary to what are sometimes all too shortsighted first drafts of history.

We are also working with a number of scholars, journalists and civic organizations to see how our research library might help improve political accountability and transparency by indexing television political advertising and pairing them with information on ad sponsors from FCC-mandated “public inspection files” at each station.

   “Daisy“

Such a special collection could also be used to study interactions between campaign messaging and local news coverage. The 2013 elections in Virginia, a state with no political campaign contribution limits, may be a useful test-bed for experiments like these.

We are following up on suggestions from media professionals that a comprehensive research library of local television news might also better inform stations and their audiences about how programs are helping to meet the critical information needs of local communities.

Our TV News Search and & Borrow service preserves and makes responsibly accessible an enduring library of television news, serving important public benefit research interests of today and those of generations to come.  In doing so, it stands on the shoulders of the pioneering work of Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive and, more recently, UCLA’s NewsScape library.

We are humbled by the challenges of exploring the new territory of scaling intelligent access to our growing digital public library of television news and welcome feedback on how we can better serve the public interest.

An unclassified document from the National Security Agency from 2007 has some nice words to say about the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, and the Wayback Machine.

“The Wayback Machine is, very simply, one of the greatest deep web tools ever created.” -National Security Agency (2007)

https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/Untangling_the_Web.pdf

A searchable version, and a searchable PDF version.

Main section on us:

The Internet Archive & the Wayback Machine

You have to give Brewster Kahle credit for thinking big. The founder of the Internet Archive has a clear, if not easy, mission: to make all human knowledge universally accessible. And, who knows, he might just succeed. What has made Kahle’s dream seem possible is extremely inexpensive storage technology. As of now, the Internet Archive houses “approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. If you tried to place the entire contents of the archive onto floppy disks (we don’t recommend this!) and laid them end to end, it would stretch from New York, past Los Angeles, and halfway to Hawaii.” 102 In December 2006 the Archive announced it had indexed over 85 billion “web objects” and that its database contained over 1.5 petabytes of information. 103

But that’s not all that Kahle and company have archived. The Archive also now contains about 2 million audio works; over 10,000 music concerts; thousands of “moving images,” including 300 feature films; its own and links to others’ digitized texts, including printable and downloadable books; and 3 million hours of television shows (enough to satisfy even the most sedulous couch potato!). Kahle’s long term dream includes scanning and digitizing the entire Library of Congress collection of about 28 million books (something that is technically within reach), but there are UNCLASSIFIED  some nasty impediments such as copyrights and, of course, money. None of this deters Kahle, whose commitment to the preservation of the digital artifacts of our time drives the Internet Archive. As Kahle puts it, “If you don’t have access to the past, you live in a very Orwellian world.”

Brewster Kahle is honored to receive the 2013 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology this year.   It will be awarded at the American Library Association meeting in Chicago in June.

http://www.ala.org/news/pr?id=13005

Antenna on 2512 Florida Avenue, Richmond to offer free Internet for those with antennas on their roofs

As a free service to Richmond residents, the Internet Archive has installed a 70 foot tower on its physical archive building in Richmond California to offer free and fast Internet to those with roofs that can see the tower.  Those wanting to use this community wireless service would need to buy and install a directional antenna on their roof to connect, but from then on their Internet access is free.   In this way we call it a ‘free and fast roof2roof network’ since it will generally not reach people’s laptops inside houses.   The signal will work at over 1 mile to a suitable antenna with line-of-site to our tower.    Wifi receivers with directional antennas can cost as little as one hundred to two hundred dollars from vendors like ubiquiti.

Gayle McLaughlin, mayor of Richmond, when we told her about this, said: “We are dedicated to closing the digital divide in Richmond. Providing free access to the internet is a great benefit for our residents helping us create a better and more equitable city!”

End-user window mountable antenna for connecting to Internet Archive’s tower

We have achieved 80 megabits per second in both directions with this technology, so this should support many people’s normal Internet use.    Typical commercial Internet access runs at 1/10 this speed, so the fastest residential Internet in Richmond will likely be this system.    Currently average of 4 users are connect to our tower but we hope this will grow.

We hope that intrepid individuals will connect to this system in a way we have called “tier 3″.   While we do not have the budget to provide tech support, we hope that entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, or non-profit organizations will help others get online.

Another step would be to expand the number of houses and buildings that could connect to this system by putting repeater antennas on high locations to expand the number of rooftops with line-of-site to this backbone.    If you are an owner of a tall building or structure and are interested in participating, please let us know by writing to info@archive.org.   We would be interested in paying for the equipment and do the installation for a couple of well placed locations.

Location: Height 70′ above ground level, 2512 Florida Avenue, Richmond, CA.  Some more details on the equipment.   The network identifiers (SSIDs) include ‘archive.org’ in their names, and the 2.4GHz ones are open with no password or encryption.  Thank you to Ralf Muehlen for setting up this system, and thank you to the City of Richmond for allowing an tower to be installed with no delay or hassle.

Onward to a Free and Fast Internet for All!

Press: SF Chronicle   SeattlePI

The Internet Archive jumped into bitcoin in 2011 after many people asked to donate bitcoins– a non-techy set up our wallet (good sign), and we got about $2,000 worth of donations that first year.  In 2012 we got about $6,000 worth– interesting.

I think of it as the local currency of the Internet. I figured out how to do it (then found an easier way), read the key paper, watched a good intro video, loved watching bitcoin in realtime avoid a financial crisis without a bailout.  This is an “anti-fragile” system that is getting debugged.     Feels like linux where exposing bugs are thought of a good thing rather than prosecuted as a crime.

Then the fun began!  We offered employees to get partially paid in our donated bitcoins– 1/3 said yes, now we are buying sushi and beer.  We were written up in Bitcoin Magazine, The Next Web, arstechnica.

Sushi for Bitcoins

We set up an honor based Bitcoin ATM to convert $ to Bitcoin and Bitcoin to $.   Many people now use it.   Hacker space at NY college following, maybe hacker space in SF.

We offer to take Bitcoin to see a movie about Anonymous at the Archive.   5 people pay with bitcoin.

Bitcoin is becoming a day-to-day currency of the Internet Archive with employees using it as a way to settle small debts, like for dinner.

If you want to try it then set up a “thin” bitcoin wallet on your phone or laptop, come to the Internet Archive, convert some money, then go out to lunch,  drink beer and celebrate.

Completely fun, and very very interesting.

Since 1997, a dedicated team of scanners and curators have been assembling a collection of historical computer and technology-related items. This collection, called BITSAVERS.ORG, contains tens of thousands of documents and software products dating back from the 1950s and into the 2000s. From the days of mainframes and electronic counting machines through the home computer revolution and the short lives and shorter support of various pieces of equipment, Bitsavers volunteers have been scanning industriously. There are piles of manuals and brochures, as well as guides and overviews, that have been cast aside in favor of the next big thing. Bitsavers has been working tirelessly to rescue these lost documents.

And now, they are mirrored on the Internet Archive.

Currently, over 23,000 individual manuals, books, memos, and guides are hosted on the Archive in the collection, automatically ported over from the Bitsavers mirrors.

Every week, a dozen or more new documents join the Bitsavers archive, from all reaches of technological history. Whether you want to browse the original manual for the Apple I or learn the benefits of a Sanders Associates 5700 Tape System, there’s something for every person interested in seeing where computing has come from.

Some other gems in the collection:

• Rare Atari 400/800 technical reference notes and operating system source code from the Atari corporation.
• The proper way to handle a 5 1/4″ floppy disk.
• A history of the TX-0, the transistorized computer built in 1956 that represented the playground of beginning hacker culture. (The document, from 1999, is a reprint of a 1974 history.)
• A lost-for-decades history of the Whirlwind Project (an early important research computer) which was intended for publication in 1967 but never ultimately distributed.
• An eye-opening glance into the complicated instructions for using a word processor in 1985.
• That time someone put an entire Apple I circuit board into a scanner.
• A 1950s education from IBM about how all their functional wiring works, including punchcards, printers, and controls.

Whether for research, nostalgia, or interesting inspiration for artwork and writing, the millions of scanned pages in the Bitsavers collection are a click away from the collection page. Where possible, further sub-collections for companies like IBM, DEC and Control Data Corporation are also available.

A toast to this flood of computer history!