At the Internet Archive, we’re celebrating the power of libraries to transform lives and communities during this year’s National Library Week (April 7-13, 2024). From preserving the past to shaping the future, libraries are vital hubs of knowledge, connection, and inspiration.
To mark this special week, we’re shining a spotlight on our incredible admin team. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, ensuring our events and virtual spaces are welcoming to all members of our global community.
Join us in thanking them for their dedication and hard work! Watch the video to meet the faces behind the scenes and learn more about how we strive to make knowledge accessible to everyone, everywhere.
“Sinykin’s Big Fiction is a book of major ambition and many satisfactions. Come for the comprehensive reframing of a key phase in U.S. literary history, stay for the parade of interesting people, the fascinating backstories of bestsellers, the electrically entertaining prose. The story of literary publishing in the postwar period has never been told with such verve.” – Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
Book Talk: Big Fiction Thursday, May 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed.
Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction.
Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists—including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O’Brian, and Walter Mosley—as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.
DAN SINYKIN is an assistant professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods. He is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Dissent, and other publications.
TED UNDERWOOD is a professor in the School of Information Sciences and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new opportunities created by large digital libraries, using machine learning to explore patterns of literary change that become visible across centuries and thousands of books. His most recent project moves in the opposite direction, using theories of historical interpretation to guide the development of large language models.
He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
Book Talk: Big Fiction Thursday, May 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
As an editorial strategist and tech journalist, JD Shadel spends a lot of time thinking about how the content on the internet continues to rapidly evolve. One telling example they’ve followed closely is the evolution of GIFs. Two decades ago, the web was filled with millions of jittery, pixelated, handmade GIFs wherever you looked. And for many of us, there’s a nostalgia for the early days of the web when things felt a bit wilder and untamed.
That nostalgia for the version of the internet they grew up with is what first sparked Shadel’s interest in collecting old-school GIFs. During the first months of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, Shadel started spending a lot of their extra spare time diving deep into the Internet Archive’s GifCities collection. Shadel’s personal fascination began with under construction GIFs, a rich niche in the GifCities collection full of animated construction workers and tools. Then came seeking out GIFs of Furbies, Tamagotchi, and other cultural touchstones that the 33-year-old came of age with online. Over the next few years, downloading and organizing GIFs became a hobby for Shadel.
Recently, it came time to update Shadel’s professional website. “It’s one of those evergreen chores it’s easy to obsess over as a freelancer, when your website is your calling card for new work,” said Shadel, who found themself digging back through the hundreds of GIFs they’ve curated thanks to the Internet Archive.
Early cyberspace-themed GIFs became the theme for their new and somewhat unconventional portfolio, which features more than two dozen images sourced entirely from GifCities. Users can, for example, click on a spinning globe for an introduction or a British Furby to learn about Shadel’s background as an American now based in London—including editorial work for outlets such as Vice, The Washington Post, and Conde Nast Traveler and consulting for clients including Airbnb and Adidas.
“I’m so happy GifCities exists to capture that specific snapshot of the internet,” Shadel said. “It really relates, metaphorically, to a lot of my work where the real world and the internet blur, where the digital and the physical intersect.”
In addition to GifCities, the Wayback Machine has also been useful to Shadel. Professionally, it is a resource when reporting and fact checking stories. Personally, they recently found material from a band they played in years ago.
“The Internet Archive just touches my digital life in so many different ways,” Shadel said. “As a journalist, it’s a fact-checking tool. Having the ephemeral internet preserved for future researchers, writers, reporters and editors is a huge service to democracy. And it’s also just fun.”
On the website with its Space Jam-like navigation, Shadel wanted to reference the history of the internet — and maybe even inspire visitors to think more actively about their own role in charting the future. “I think we can reclaim our digital lives and rekindle the notion of ourselves as ‘netizens’—citizens of the internet and not just passive participants,” Shadel said.
“That’s why the work of the Internet Archive is so important,” they continued. “Despite the fact that we have access to more information than ever before, it’s really easy to forget digital histories and the lessons that we can learn from that.”
Shadel’s writing touches on a range of intersecting topics—such as tech, travel and queerness—but the one thing they hope everyone takes away from their work is the idea that we’re all netizens with a role to play in shaping what we want these shared public spaces to be.
“If we all have some shared sense of ownership of the internet, which is so involved in our lives, I believe we have a greater chance to make it better.” Sometimes, that can start in simple ways—in this case, building a DIY website with a bunch of old GIFs reminded one tech journalist in London that there are lessons we can take from the early internet. “We all have a part to play in making the internet a better place.” And at the least, they hope you enjoy the GIFs they’ve selected.
Join us for a book talk with ANDREA I. COPLAND & KATHLEEN DeLAURENTI about UNLOCKING THE DIGITAL AGE, a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era.
“[Musicians,] Use this book as a tool to enhance your understanding, protect your creations, and confidently step into the world of digital music. Embrace the journey with the same fervor you bring to your music and let this guide be a catalyst in shaping a fulfilling and sustainable musical career.” – Dean Fred Bronstein, THE PEABODY INSTITUTE OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Based on coursework developed at the Peabody Conservatory, Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishingby Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti [READ NOW] serves as a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era. This guide bridges the gap between creative practice and scholarly research, empowering musicians to confidently share and protect their work as they expand their performing lives beyond the concert stage as citizen artists. It offers a plain language resource that helps early career musicians see where creative practice and creative research intersect and how to traverse information systems to share their work. As professional musicians and researchers, the authors’ experiences on stage and in academia makes this guide an indispensable tool for musicians aiming to thrive in the digital landscape.
Copland and DeLaurenti will be in conversation with musician and educator, Kyoko Kitamura. Music librarian Matthew Vest will facilitate our discussion.
Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing is available to read & download.
ANDREA I. COPLAND is an oboist, music historian, and librarian based in Baltimore, MD. Andrea has dual master’s of music degrees in oboe performance and music history from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and is currently Research Coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM) database. She is also a teaching artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program and writes a public musicology blog, Outward Sound, on substack.
KATHLEEN DeLAURENTI is the Director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University where she also teaches Foundations of Music Research in the graduate program. Previously, she served as scholarly communication librarian at the College of William and Mary where she participated in establishing state-wide open educational resources (OER) initiatives. She is co-chair of the Music Library Association (MLA) Legislation Committee as well as a member of the Copyright Education sub-committee of the American Library Association (ALA) and is past winner of the ALA Robert Oakley Memorial Scholarship for copyright research. DeLaurenti is passionate about copyright education, especially for musicians. She is active in communities of practice working on music copyright education, sustainable economic models for artists and musicians, and policy for a balanced copyright system. DeLaurenti served as the inaugural Open Access Editor of MLA and continues to serve on the MLA Open Access Editorial Board. She holds an MLIS from the University of Washington and a BFA in vocal performance from Carnegie Mellon University.
KYOKO KITAMURA is a Brookyn-based vocal improviser, bandleader, composer and educator, currently co-leading the quartet Geometry (with cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, guitarist Joe Morris and cellist Tomeka Reid) and the trio Siren Xypher (with violist Melanie Dyer and pianist Mara Rosenbloom). A long-time collaborator of legendary composer Anthony Braxton, Kitamura appears on many of his releases and is the creator of the acclaimed 2023 documentary Introduction to Syntactical Ghost Trance Music which DownBeat Magazine calls “an invaluable resource for Braxton-philes.” Active in interdisciplinary performances, Kitamura recently provided vocals for, and appeared in, artist Matthew Barney’s 2023 five-channel installation Secondary.
MATTHEW VEST is the Music Inquiry and Research Librarian at UCLA. His research interests include change leadership in higher education, digital projects and publishing for music and the humanities, and composers working at the margins of the second Viennese School. He has also worked in the music libraries at the University of Virginia, Davidson College, and Indiana University and is the Open Access Editor for the Music Library Association.
Book Talk: UNLOCKING THE DIGITAL AGE April 3 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET VIRTUAL Register now!
LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO: The City and Bay in Motion March 18 @ 6:30pm – 9pm Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco Buy Tickets
This 18th edition of LOST LANDSCAPES immerses viewers in the dynamic tapestry of mobility and communication across the Bay Area. Delving into the rich archival footage of San Francisco and its environs, the film captures the essence of daily life, work, and celebration, while revisiting both familiar and obscure historical moments.
This unique film event is taking place at the Internet Archive where you can experience rare and unseen footage from the Prelinger Archives. The film features footage drawn from a vast repository of over 3,000 newly scanned archival films, including home movies, government productions, industrial reels, and unexpected gems.
By attending, you’ll directly contribute to supporting the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger will be presenting as per usual. Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of truly special evening!
Doors open at 6:30 pm. Film starts at 7:30 PM. Register now!
No one will be turned away due to lack of funds!
LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO: The City and Bay in Motion March 18 @ 6:30pm – 9pm Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco Buy Tickets
Please come join us as the Internet Archive partners with the Skyline College Art Gallery for the viewing of “Portraits of Growing Up Asian,” a photo exhibition that tells a visual story of a Chinese American family’s journey from China to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The Hall family’s arrival from China in the 1850’s resulted in the opening of the first Chinese herbal medicine shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1864 and became a hub for the local community. The business was open until it was unlawfully shut down by the FBI in 1957. This tragedy led to a family tradition in photography that spanned generations.
The exhibition features archived photographs and artifacts from the Hall Family Collection, including the family herb shop signage. It also features photographs by Timothy Hall and his experiences growing up in San Francisco from the 1950’s to contemporary times.
The exhibition explores themes of ancestry, family, discrimination, and all that comes with growing up as Chinese Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the mid to late 20th century.
In an era where the vast majority of “photographs” are a series of captured data points stored in the etheric realm of a digital universe, it becomes a delightful trip to step into the authentic past and to awaken to the sensations conveyed through the experience of an actual photograph. Please join us.
DATES: Mon Feb 26th Opening Reception and Opening 12-2pm Mar 26th – Closing Day
HOURS: Please visit the Skyline College Art Gallery Website for Hours Monday: 10am-12:30pm Tuesday: 4pm-6pm Wednesday: 10am-12:30pm Thursday: 4pm-6pm Friday: 11-4pm
This post was originally published in a newsletter by Project Liberty, February 20, 2024. Image by Project Liberty.
In the summer of 2023, the New York Times ran an article titled “Ways You Can Still Cancel Your Federal Student Loan Debt.”
The article outlined six ways to cancel student debt, with the final being:
“Death This is not something that most people would choose as a solution to their debt burden.”
At least that was the sixth reason until the New York Times revised it with a stealth edit. When you read the article today, choosing death as a solution to a debt burden has been replaced, but there’s no mention that this article was revised. The timestamp is still the day it was originally published.
The internet is constantly being revised in ways that allow history to be rewritten and a shared sense of truth to be questioned. With AI-generated disinformation, the potential to exert control over the future by rewriting the past has never been greater.
This week we’re exploring how digital archives are crucial in developing a record of truth in an ever-changing web.
The need for digital archives
Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine, spoke with the Project Liberty Foundation and shared the key reasons why there’s an even greater need for digital archives:
The importance of the internet. So much of what humanity publishes and makes available lives only on the internet. Given how much time we spend online, the internet has become a central medium of human expression, history, and culture.
The fragile and ephemeral nature of the internet. Graham shared two stats that underscore how fragile today’s internet is:
A study found that of the two million hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 to 2019, 25% of all links were broken (described as link rot).
The Wayback Machine has fixed 20 million broken links in Wikipedia articles with the correct ones.
“The web itself is a living thing. Webpages change. They go away on quite a frequent basis. There’s no backup system or version control system for the web,” Graham explained. That is, except for archives like the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a “time machine for the web,” in Graham’s words. It allows users to trace the evolution (or disappearance) of a webpage over time, enabling them to establish a record of what happened on the internet.
For example, the Apple.com URL has been archived 539,000 times since its first archived page in October 1996.
The Wayback Machine has archived over 866 billion webpages in its 28-year history. Today, it archives hundreds of millions of webpages every day and has become one of the most important archives of online content in the world.
How it works
The Wayback Machine “crawls” the web and downloads publicly accessible information. Webpages, documents, and data are stored with a time-stamped URL.
For information that’s not publicly accessible, Internet Archive offers web archiving services through Archive-It for 1,200 organizations in 24 countries around the world (from libraries to research institutions).
The Wayback Machine supports everyday people to help it archive the internet. Anyone can go to Save Page Now to archive a webpage or article.
The Wayback Machine partners with 1,200 fact-checking organizations globally to help it reference material on the web that was the source of disinformation. It has built a library of more than 200,000 examples where a claim has been made, and the Wayback Machine has provided additional context on if that claim is true (known as a review of the claim).
Archive of facts
Fixing links, archiving webpages, and fact-checking digital articles are part of a deeper, more important project to chronicle digital history and establish a record of facts.
Last month, the archive of press releases from a sitting member of Congress, New York’s Elise Stefanik, vanished after she came under scrutiny. The Wayback Machine documented this erasure and provided a time-stamped record of past versions of her website and press releases.
In 2018, a US Appeals court ruled that the Wayback Machine’s archive of webpages can be used as legitimate legal evidence.
The Internet Archive has countless examples of when the press have referenced the Wayback Machine to correct disinformation and dispel rumors. In one example from last year, the Associated Press relied on the Wayback Machine to set the record that the CDC did not say the polio vaccine gave millions of Americans a “cancer virus.”
Building digital archives is a bulwark against those attempting to rewrite history and spread misinformation. An archived, time-stamped webpage is not just unimpeachable evidence, it’s a foundational building block of a shared sense of reality.
In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine, the Wayback Machine captured evidence that a pro-Russian group was behind the missile attack. But it wasn’t the Wayback Machine’s algorithms that captured the evidence by crawling the internet; it was an individual who found an obscure blog post from a Ukrainian separatist leader touting the shooting down of a plane. That individual identified the blogpost as important enough to be archived, and it became a critical piece of evidence, even after that post disappeared from the internet.
As Graham said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. If you see something, save something.”
What pages can you help archive? Archive them with the Wayback Machine on Save Page Now.
From Prince of Persia to Replay: A video game creator’s family odyssey
Jordan Mechner (creator of “Prince of Persia”) shares his story as a pioneer in the fast-growing video game industry from the 1980s to today, and how his family’s back story as refugees from war-torn Europe led to his own multifaceted 4-decade creative career. Interweaving of past and present, family transmission, exile and renewal are at the heart of his award-winning graphic novel “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.”
For general audiences, including anyone interested in video game development, graphic novels, transmedia, or multigenerational family stories.
Book Talk: REPLAY March 27 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
About REPLAY
1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment ofice when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.
1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.
2015. e creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.
JORDAN MECHNER is an author, graphic novelist, game designer, and screenwriter. He created the video game Prince of Persia in 1989, rebooted it with Ubisot in 2003, and wrote the first screenplay for Disney’s 2010 film adaptation, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. His other games include Karateka and The Last Express. In 2017, he received the Pioneer Award from the International Game Developers Association. Jordan’s graphic novels as writer include the New York Times bestseller Templar (from First Second, with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland), Monte Cristo (Mario Alberti), and Liberty (Etienne LeRoux). Replay is his first book as writer/artist.
Book Talk: REPLAY March 27 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
How data surveillance, digital forensics, and generative AI pose new long-term threats and opportunities—and how we can use them to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.
Book Talk: The Secret Life of Data April 18 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET ONLINE Register now!
“I have been waiting a long time for a clearly written book that cuts through the hype and describes how data—big and small, old and new—actually operate in our lives. Neither utopian nor dystopian, The Secret Life of Data just tells it like it is.” —Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, The University of Virginia; author of Antisocial Media and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.
ARAM SINNREICH is an author, professor, and musician. He is Chair of Communication Studies at American University. His books include Mashed Up,The Piracy Crusade, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property, and A Second Chance for Yesterday(published as R. A. Sinn).
JESSE GILBERT is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design at his firm Dark Matter Media. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.
DR. LAURA DENARDIS is Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society and Director of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Her book The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press) was recognized as a Financial Times Top Technology Book of 2020. Among her seven books, The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press) is considered a definitive source for understanding cyber governance debates and solutions. Professor DeNardis is an affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, where she previously served as Executive Director, and is a life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds engineering degrees and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.
Book Talk: The Secret Life of Data April 18 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET ONLINE Register now!
Join us for a VIRTUAL book talk with author Joanne McNeil about her latest book, WRONG WAY, which examines the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. McNeil will be in conversation with author Sarah Jaffe.
This is the first Internet Archive / Authors Alliance book talk for a work of fiction! Come for a reading, stay for a thoughtful conversation between McNeil & Jaffe about the labor implications of artificial intelligence.
WRONG WAY was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New Yorker and Esquire. It was the Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year and named one of the best tech books by the LA Times.
“Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.
Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.
JOANNE MCNEIL was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Joanne is the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User.
SARAH JAFFE is an author, independent journalist, and a co-host of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast.
Book Talk: Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil February 29 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET VIRTUAL Register now!
