Forty years ago as a freshman, I pulled my first book off the shelves of Hayden Library at MIT. This month, every MIT undergraduate departed from campus in an attempt to contain COVID-19, leaving behind the vast resources of that library. Ready or not, we are all being thrust into an enormous experiment in online learning. One that can have positive and permanent outcomes, if we handle it right.

With schools closing from Changshu to Cambridge, suddenly students are cut off from the physical resources they rely on: the teachers, the classrooms and libraries that are the backbone of learning. And in this flux, those in marginalized communities—from rural areas without broadband or schools with few online books—are even more profoundly challenged. The Economist reports that in the United states, “7 million school-age children cannot access the internet at home.”

“If this is just a prolonged pause in our education and economy, without the benefits of learning and adapting, one of the most profound impacts of COVID-19 may be…a “quiet brain drain.” It will be time our children never get back.”

But here’s the good news: we know how to do this, to impart knowledge at scale over the Internet. Online courses, online libraries and broadband all exist—but we need to expand and upgrade them to meet the needs of the close to one billion learners around the world whose classrooms have been shuttered.

24 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive as a nonprofit digital library serving more than a million learners every day. Today, the Internet Archive is working with hundreds of public, school and university libraries to digitize their core collections and make them freely available over the Internet. Even as MIT was sending students home, we were working with MIT Libraries to see how many of their books we have already digitized. In 24 hours, we were able to hand them back 166,000 digitized books to lend online through their catalogue and via archive.org. This week, the Internet Archive created a National Emergency Library of 1.4 million digitized books to serve the needs of students, educators and learners who can now access them from home.

Think of this as a huge experiment. In one big push, we can improve online learning and its infrastructure in a way that may otherwise have taken years. This crisis encourages universities to be bold, to make investments that ultimately may mean many more students can benefit. Perhaps 500 undergraduates can fill a hall at MIT, but how many millions can take an online MIT course, once the books, materials and lessons are online?

China is a few weeks ahead of the United States when it comes to experimenting with online learning. In January, my son, Caslon, was teaching English to 4th graders in Changshu. Now he is teaching them from San Francisco, with recorded lessons and online interaction. Next month, his school in China is poised to reopen, but I suspect it will be forever changed.

If this is just a prolonged pause in our education and economy, without the benefits of learning and adapting, one of the most profound impacts of COVID-19 may be what Dr. Kate Tairyan, Chief Medical Officer of the online college NextGenU.org, calls a “quiet brain drain.” It will be time our children never get back.

But we have the opportunity to harness American ingenuity to build a stronger, more robust educational system—by leveraging the Internet, new technologies, and our investments in digitizing books at scale into something that democratizes learning for a generation to come.

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, he has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. Kahle graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied artificial intelligence.

Readers consume publisher’s products many hours every day– and consume on publisher’s terms. Publisher’s framing on our screens, publisher’s business models, publisher’s flow and pacing. Yes, there are many publishers now, but we are, mostly, locked into their presentation forms. We check into their black box theaters and consume as intended.

Libraries have always bought publisher’s products but have traditionally offered alternative access modes to these materials, and can again. As an example let’s take newspapers. Published with scoops and urgency, yesterday is “old news,” the paper it was printed on is then only useful the next day as “fish wrap”– the paper piles up and we felt guilty about the trash. That is the framing of the publisher: old is useless, new is valuable. This has carried into social media– flip up to read on. Scroll through your “feed” (gosh, the word “feed” is illustrative, what happens after “feed” is “fed”?  Well, it comes out the other end in a way we do not cherish 🙂 ).

But a library gives old news a new life, not a commercial life, but a life that encourages reflection, perspective, critique, analysis. In a word– “History”. The library keeps the former “news” and offers it in new ways in a new framing, with new tools– not just flip flip flip. It can be quoted, placed side by side with other publisher’s news and enable researchers to inject commentary.

This capture, representation, searching, rethinking is not a crime– it is thought, it is memory and our history– it builds to become our culture. It has been supported, nurtured, taught.

But the library is in danger in our digital world. In print, one could keep what one had read. In digital that is harder technically, and publishers are specifically making it harder. Technical enforcement measures and laws are making remembering difficult, and worse, a crime.

Libraries live to offer new ways to see published works that were often produced for a different purpose. But this is difficult in a digital world.

Digital newspapers sometimes disappear from their web presence. App-based newspapers can not be pointed to with a citation or URL. Archives, sometimes available, are segmented into each publisher’s platforms.

Similarly, digital books live in proprietary digital book readers that disappear the books. If “cut and paste” functions at all, often just inside that “platform.” Annotations are stored with the vendor, with their terms and conditions.

A personal library now means a purchase list on a website.

Libraries and publishers have lived together throughout the paper era, not always peacefully, but libraries were possible because of paper technologies, laws, and funding. Multiple copies were kept in different libraries ensuring preservation and creating different access modes for different communities.

Once publications became electronic, preservation and access became harder. Radio and television did not fit into the library mold. Early tele-text, Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw, and AOL really did not work as library collections in traditional libraries. Academic journal publishing shifted to digital and libraries moved to serve as customer service departments for leased database access.

Some of us helped build the Internet so digital works could be archived and “libraried”. And then made archives of Web pages and created services around them.

But it turns out that few of us did this, and the biggest, Google, did it privately and for profit.  The Internet Archive was created to help and has archived billions of Web Pages, millions of hours of TV and radio, millions of books, records, movies and software.

Most traditional libraries have done little to preserve digital materials. The Internet Archive is quite unique in focusing on this mission and I would say under supported. Encouraging, however, is that 100,000 individuals a year now donate to support the Internet Archive’s public services. Hope is there.

We need libraries of digital materials, tools to use these libraries, and ways to protect them, fund them and integrate them into schools and our lives more generally. This way we can remember, think, and build on the past.

With so much in digital form, and storage and communication so easy, it should be the librarian’s day!  It can be the library user’s day…

Let’s build that world… of preservation and access, of reflection and critique, with confidence that what happened actually happened so that our histories can rely on immutable evidence.

Libraries do not command the world, but libraries are necessary in the functioning of a thoughtful world.

Thank you for supporting the Internet Archive.

Viva la Library!

Mark Ellis alerted us to a Craiglist post of a storage locker of records being offered for free in San Jose in 2 hours. The owner wanted them gone. The Internet Archive sprang into action and our truck rolled.

Lots of people had responded to the ad that wanted specific records for free, but not that many that wanted 78rpm records. We love 78rpm records. We preserve them and digitize ones we do not have for the Great 78 Project.  At the end we got 1 pallet full of 78’s, maybe 2,700 discs, and they are queued for digitization.

Thank you to Joey Myers for posting on Craigslist, to Mark Ellis for alerting Jason Scott of the Archive, and the Archive staff that jumped on it.

The Internet Archive would appreciate some help from a volunteer programmer to create software that would help determine if a book cover is useful to our users as a thumbnail or if we should use the title page instead. For many of our older books, they have cloth covers that are not useful, for instance:

But others are useful:

Just telling by age is not enough, because even 1923 cloth covers are sometimes good indicators of what the book is about (and are nice looking):

We would like a piece of code that can help us determine if the cover is useful or not to display as the thumbnail of a book. It does not have to be exact, but it would be useful if it knew when it didn’t have a good determination so we could run it by a person.

To help any potential programmer volunteers, we have created folders of hundreds of examples in 3 catatories: year 1923 books with not-very-useful covers, year 1923 books with useful covers, and year 2000 books with useful covers. The filenames of the images are the Internet Archive item identifier that can be used to find the full item:  1922forniaminera00bradrich.jpg would come from https://archive.org/details/1922forniaminera00bradrich.   We would like a program (hopefully fast, small, and free/open source) that would say useful or not-useful and a confidence. 

Interested in helping? Brenton at archive.org is a good point of contact on this project.   Thank you for considering this. We can use the help. You can also use the comments on this post for any questions.

FYI: To create these datasets, I ran these command lines, and then by hand pulled some of the 1923 covers into the “useful” folder.

bash-3.2$ ia search "date:1923 AND mediatype:texts AND NOT collection:opensource AND NOT collection:universallibrary AND scanningcenter:*" --itemlist --sort=downloads\ desc | he\
ad -1000 | parallel --will-cite -j10 "curl -Ls https://archive.org/download/{}/page/cover_.jpg?fail=soon.jpg\&cnt=0 >> ~/tmp/cloth/{}.jpg"

bash-3.2$ ia search "date:2000 AND mediatype:texts AND scanningcenter:cebu" --itemlist --sort=downloads\ desc | head -1000 | parallel --will-cite -j10 "curl -Ls https://archive.\
org/download/{}/page/cover_.jpg?fail=soon.jpg\&cnt=0 >> ~/tmp/picture/{}.jpg"

You can take action now to expand access to 1.8million books worldwide.

Individuals can qualify now to access 1.8 million digitized books, free.   Internet Archive has recently expanded its program for those with low vision and disabilities.

Libraries, hospitals, schools, other orgs (worldwide!): can now sign up to authorize users, as well as get digital files for further remediation for qualifying users.

Publishers, please contribute your books for this program!

Service organizations, please host your digital books on archive.org to make seamless access to all books. Free.

Press: please help get the word out, let us know how we can help.

Donations needed to get 4 million more books. Donate books or money (about $20 per book).

Now available for access by anyone with disabilities worldwide… or for anyone to contribute books for people with disabilities: both helped by the US recently adopting the Marrakesh Treaty.

Now is our time to bring together a great library for those with disabilities.

Together we can.