By Carl Malamud
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE
Please join us on June 14 at the Internet Archive for a special event celebrating our collections from India including the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi and much, much more. Our doors open at 6 p.m. with a reception and our program starts promptly at 7 p.m.
Our special guest for this event will be Hon. Dr. Sam Pitroda, a former senior advisor and Cabinet Minister under 3 Prime Ministers and widely acknowledged as the father of the telecommunications revolution in India, the man who brought a telephone to every village in India. Dr. Pitroda will be joined by Hon. Ambassador Venkatesan Ashok, Consul-General of San Francisco. Rounding out our program will be Carl Malamud of Public Resource and the Internet Archive’s own Brewster Kahle.
Our event will be celebrating three collections hosted at the Internet Archive:
First, the Internet Archive is delighted to be hosting a mirror of the Digital Library of India, a collection of 463,000 books in 50 languages. The collection was created in India under government auspices and features 45,000 books in Hindi, 33,000 in Sanskrit, 30,160 in Bengali, and much more. In addition to hosting a mirror of the collection, the Internet Archive is adding value to the collection by creating e-books, using optical character recognition, and improving the metadata and cataloging information.
Second, we will feature the Hind Swaraj collection, materials that are integral to the story of Indian independence. Here you can read all 100 volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, as well as the complete writings of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. You can also listen to 129 audio recordings from All India Radio of Gandhiji speaking at prayer meetings and view all 53 episodes of the remarkable television series Bharat Ek Khoj.
Third, we will discuss additional collections of Indian materials, such as thousands of photographs from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and other sources which Public Resource hosts on Flickr and a collection of all technical public safety India Standards hosted on the Internet Archive and the Public Resource site.
Carl Malamud and Sam Pitroda have spent several years building out these collections. We hope you will join us at this event to hear more about how this came to pass and what the plans are for making this material ever more useful. We also hope to have some exciting announcements as well about new resources that will be available.
Universal access to knowledge is the goal of the Internet Archive. We are delighted to celebrate the immense contributions of India and the vital role both India and the United States—the world’s largest democracies—play in make knowledge available to all. Please join us on June 14!
When: Wednesday, June 14th. Doors open at 6 p.m. for food and drinks, and program starts at 7 p.m.
Where: Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave. SF, CA 94118
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Mnemosyne was the Greek muse who personified memory. She was a Titaness who was the daughter of Uranus (who represented “Sky”), the son and husband of Gaia, Mother Earth. When you break it down, Mnemosyne had a deeply complicated life, and ended up birthing the other muses with her nephew, Zeus. Ancient Greek myth was quite an incestuous place, and every deity had complicated and deeply interwoven histories that added layers and layers of what we would now call “intertextuality.” Look at it this way: a Titaness, Mnemosyne, gave birth to Urania (Muse of Astronomy), Polyhymnia (Muse of hymns,) Melpomene (Muse of tragedy,) Erato (Muse of lyric poetry,) Clio (Muse of history,) Calliope (Muse of epic poetry,) Terpsichore (Muse of dance,) and Euterpe (Muse of music). It’s complicated. Mnemosyne also presided over her own pool in Hades as a counterpoint to the river Lethe, where the dead went to drink to forget their previous life. If you wanted to remember things, you went to Mnemosyne’s pool instead. You had to be clever enough to find it. Otherwise, you’d end up crossing the river under the control of spirits guided by the “helmsman” whose title translates from the Greek term “kybernētēs” across the mythical river into the land of the dead aka Hades. What’s amazing about the wildly “recombinant” logic of this cast of characters is that somehow it became the foundation of our modern methods for naming almost every aspect of digital media — including the term “media.” Media, like the term data is a plural form of a word “appropriated” directly from Latin. But the eerie resonance it has with our era comes into play when we think of the ways “the archive” acts as a downright uncanny reflection site of language and its collision between code and culture.
Until the internet, the term cyber was usually used to measure words about governance and then later evolved to how we look at computers, computer networks, and now things like augmented reality and virtual reality. The term traces back to the word cybernetics, which was popularized by the renowned mathematician Norbert Wiener, founder of Information theory, at MIT. There’s a strange emergent logic that connects the dots here: permutation, wordplay, and above all, the use of borrowed motifs and ahistorical connections between utterly unassociated material. I guess William S. Burroughs was right: the world has become a mega-Cybertron, a place where everything is mixed, cut and paste style, to make new meanings from old. With people like Norbert Wiener, cybernetics usually refers to the study of mechanical and electronic systems designed at heart, to replace human systems. The term “cyberspace” was coined by William Gibson, to reflect the etherealized world of his 1982 classic, Burning Chrome. He used it again as a reference point for Neuromancer, his groundbreaking novel. A great, oft-cited passage gives you a sense how resonant it is with our current time:
J Spooky’s work ranges from creating the first DJ app to producing an impactful DVD anthology about the “Pioneers of African American Cinema.” According to a 
The trick to repacking in a timely fashion is to not look at the records. It’s a trick that is never performed successfully. Handling fragile 78s requires grabbing one or just a few at a time. So we’re endlessly reading the labels, sleeving and resleeving, all the time checking for rarities, breakage and dirt.
