The Internet Archive is bringing more periodicals and scholarly resources to students directly and by working with disability offices in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

As more students with disabilities pursue higher education, demand is growing for books, journal articles and other learning materials to be available in accessible formats. This includes digitizing print materials for people who are blind or have low vision, those with dyslexia or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and people with limited mobility who might have difficulty holding print documents.

The Internet Archive is part of an expanding effort to make it easier for people with print disabilities to access information by digitizing books, periodicals, and microfilm needed to succeed in school and beyond. Once print materials are converted to machine-readable formats, users can listen with a screenreader, text-to-speech software or other forms of audio delivery—starting, stopping, and slowing down the information flow, as well as change the colors of text and background of pages.

With 10 percent or more of students at colleges in the United States requesting accessibility accommodations (Government Accountability Office, 2009, p.37), providing digitized learning materials is critical. Each semester Disability Service Offices (DSOs) on campuses respond to student requests to convert materials into accessible formats—often doing so in silos with limited budgets.

Libraries are being called into action to coordinate the delivery of accessible instructional materials. Doing its part to improve access to knowledge for all, Internet Archive is collaborating with others to share its collection and streamline the search process.

A level playing field

“There is a need for a fast turnaround with materials. Students [with print disabilities] need a level playing field,” said John Unsworth, dean of libraries at the University of Virginia. “The library is not just here for the able-bodied.”

UVA is working with the Internet Archive, BookShare, and the HathiTrust to reduce duplication of efforts across the country to convert text materials to accessible formats. Together, they are participating in the Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education (FRAME) project funded with a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Since 2019, the partners have established Educational Materials Made Accessible (EMMA), a hub and repository for digitized materials. The pilot includes six other universities: George Mason University, University of Virginia, Texas A&M University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Northern Arizona, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vanderbilt University.

---

“When looking at the intersection between copyright and civil rights…civil rights win every time”

– John Unsworth, university librarian, University of Virginia

---

EMMA provides DSO staff (on behalf of students) with a central place to retrieve—and library staff re-deposit—machine-readable texts from the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Bookshare. It provides a searchable database to locate materials requested by students more efficiently. Users can filter by repository, format and accessibility features—which will become more valuable as texts are remediated. The project relies on the Internet Archive as a large digital repository to provide a federated network of storage and delivery, as well as technical expertise.

Unsworth said the goal of EMMA is to speed up access to materials and help DSOs avoid duplication. If faculty tinker with a syllabus and add a book at the last minute, students with print disabilities need to be able to have a copy they can use at the same time their peers do. “It’s the nature of education that what you need to read changes during the semester,” Unsworth said. “[Students with print disabilities] can’t get materials at the last minute when everyone else has had it for two weeks.”

Often, libraries are not involved in collecting, cataloguing, or preserving educational materials for people with disabilities on their own campus, or making them discoverable to others. EMMA is designed to connect DSOs and libraries on the same campus — and with other institutions. Once materials are remediated, DSOs put them in a drop box that the library validates with the new metadata and uploads it.  “Libraries shoulder the burden of sharing—and by doing that, they help fulfill their mission,” Unsworth said.

Despite publisher warnings about what DSOs can do with their remediated content, Unsworth said concerns are not supported by law. “When looking at the intersection between copyright and civil rights…civil rights win every time,” Unsworth said. “Libraries are used to pushing back on publisher claims. Libraries bring a willingness to stand up to appropriate use rights.”

A coordinating hub for materials was desperately needed and, Unsworth said, something DSOs have been waiting to have for years.

---

“Everyone should have the same shot at succeeding”

– Angella Anderson, disability specialist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

---

Based on a student’s syllabus, Angella Anderson, a disability specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, arranges for needed accessible materials for students at all levels—from undergraduates to law students to doctoral students. “We have several students who—without this service—would have had significant challenges being successful in their programs.”

Now, with EMMA, if a book or journal article a student needs is already shared on the hub, the DSO can download it and save time. Anderson estimates it has cut her time searching for learning materials by half. “The problem we’ve all had over the years is that we are converting the same book at the same time. That’s a huge resource drain,” Anderson said, noting the potential benefit of EMMA. “Everyone should have the same shot at succeeding at whatever it is they want to do, so I feel this will be extremely useful to a lot of schools and a lot of students.”

Canadian efforts advance

In Canada, the Internet Archive supports work of the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE), a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries. At the Internet Archive digitization center at the University of Toronto, staff digitize on demand and prioritize requests received by ACE from students who need materials for accessibility. The turnaround used to take weeks, but Andrea Mills, digitization program manager, said the system has been improved and students with print disabilities now can get materials digitized often in less than two days. 

Mills said requested materials most often include non-fiction research books and novels, often printed between 1990 and 2010—before e-books were widely available. Elsewhere in Canada at the University of Alberta, another Internet Archive scanning center provides the same service, through their Accessibility Resources office, to students who have qualifying perceptual challenges.. 

“Sometimes people not part of the mainstream are forgotten,” Mills said. “It may only be a handful of users who have this need, and not represent a high number of downloads or uses, but these are people who truly need assistance.”

Learn more

Librarians: Join our free program to qualify your patrons to access the Internet Archive’s resources for users with print disabilities. Individuals can gain access by having a qualifying authority like the Vermont Mutual Aid Society enroll you in their program.

Like campuses across the country, Howard University in Washington, D.C., shut down last March when COVID-19 hit. Most of its nearly 6,000 undergraduate students have been remote learning ever since.

Without access to the physical library, demand for e-books has increased.  The university recently joined the Open Libraries program to expand the digital materials that students can borrow. Through the program, users can check out a digital version of a book the library owns using controlled digital lending (CDL).

Amy Phillips, head of technical services for Howard University Libraries, learned about the opportunity last fall through the Washington Research Library Consortium. Howard is one of nine D.C.-area libraries in the nonprofit consortium, which recently collaborated with the Internet Archive to do an overlap analysis of its shared collection. When the digital materials became available to use for free through the consortia, Howard decided to join, too.

After Alisha Strother, metadata librarian, ran an analysis of books in the Howard collection by International Standard Book Number (ISBN), it was discovered that more than 14,000 books matched a copy that the Internet Archive had acquired and digitized. Howard decided to join the Open Libraries program in January. This means that students can now check out these Howard books from across the country as they engage in online instruction.

“I see this as being an important resource for students to be able to access materials from anywhere,” Phillips said. “And I think it will have value and be heavily utilized even when we are back on campus.”

Howard is one of nearly 100 historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the United States. One of Howard’s most important entities is the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which is recognized as one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and cultural of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas and other parts of the world. Portions of its materials are also now available for digital borrowing through the Open Libraries program. The collection will now have greater exposure since it had previously only been accessible onsite for researchers who scheduled appointments. 

“This opens up a premier collection to public usage. From a scholarly and cultural point of view, this material is very much in demand,” Phillips said. “Looking forward, we think it will get a lot of traffic.”

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected people of color, prompting Howard to be cautious and extending online learning into the spring semester for most all students, Phillips said.  The university is doing all it can to connect students with resources and its libraries have been investing more in digital items. But budgets are limited and licensing agreements curb the library’s ability to broadly lend e-books.

“The Internet Archive has been an important way to open up more library materials to students,” said Phillips, adding that it’s new and just beginning to be promoted to students and faculty. “We’re excited and we know this will have a positive impact on student success and scholarship.”

Sometimes they arrive tied up in string because their binding is broken. Others are in envelopes to protect the brittle pages from further damage.

Aging books are sent from libraries to the Internet Archive for preservation. Thanks to the careful work of the nearly 70 people who scan at digitization centers in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, the books get a second life with a new audience.

Scanners sometimes call these “Last Chance Books” and they take pride in restoring them. As they turn the pages one at time to be photographed and digitized, they develop a daily cadence—but it must be adjusted with fragile materials.

• 

• 

• 

“We do our best with the flaking or cracking pages,” said Andrea Mills, digitization program manager for the Internet Archive stationed in Toronto, Canada. “You have to be really cautious that the flake doesn’t fall off and cover a word. It’s almost like a puzzle.”

Some books that land at the Internet Archive digitization centers date back to the 1700s. They are fiction and nonfiction, journals and pamphlets covering a range of topics. And, it can be surprising to learn what reviving the material means to patrons.

“We chuckled when we digitized a book on sea captains. We thought – who will care? And then a year later, it had hundreds of views,” said Elizabeth MacLeod, senior manager of satellite digitization services who manages remote operations out of Wilmington, North Carolina.

Digitization helps preserve materials that are no longer in circulation at their holding library because they are falling apart. It also gives new exposure to books that are out of print that may otherwise be forgotten.

Both Mills and MacLeod began working for the Internet Archive more than 10 years ago as book scanners – also known as Scribe operators. Mills has an arts degree in jewelry design and teaching; MacLeod studied biology. They were both drawn to the mission of the Internet Archive and share a passion of connecting people with resources.

Over the years, Mills and MacLeod have worked closely with librarians and archivists around the world to digitize their collections, learning more with each project. They now manage digitization and support sites with training and best practices, many embedded in libraries, in 10 countries and upwards of 30 locations. Digitizing is a somewhat solitary task and some people “get in the zone” while scanning; others are very chatty or listen to music, Mills said.

Many employees have worked together for nearly a decade and there is a friendly, collaborative vibe at the centers. “We have all sorts of people—artists, printers and photographers. They are people who are meticulous and love books,” Mills said. A recent viral video shared on the Internet Archive’s Twitter account features Scribe operator Eliza Zhang, who has worked at the Archive for more than ten years. Book conservators from larger institutional partners also offer additional training for Internet Archive operators on best practices for handling their unique collections.

MacLeod says the scanners are all committed to providing a service to readers and it’s satisfying to help people with disabilities connect with books, “It’s energizing to be part of an organization that is thinking outside the box,” she said. “I want people to be able to have more access to whatever they are trying to find.”

Added Mills: “I’m an information junky. I love the search and the hunt and the finding the answer. The power of the internet and digitization is that you can find that answer faster. It just sort of opens up the possibilities of what you can do.”

Written by Professor Tom Gally, University of Tokyo, and Katie Barrett, Internet Archive & JET Program Alum
Translations by Tomoki Sakakibara, University of Tokyo

(日本語はページ下部にあります。 Scroll down for Japanese version.)

As our global society grows ever more connected, it can be easy to assume that all of human history is just one click away. Yet language barriers and physical access still present major obstacles to deeper knowledge and understanding of other cultures, even on the world wide web. That is why the Internet Archive is thrilled to announce a new partnership with the University of Tokyo General Library. Spearheaded by Masaya Nakatake as a member of the UTokyo Academic Archives Project Office, the Internet Archive partnership provides expanded access and a digital backup for some of the library’s most precious artifacts. 

Since June 2020, our Collections team has worked in tandem with library staff to ingest thousands of digital files from the General Library’s servers, mapping the metadata for over 4,000 priceless scrolls, texts, and papers. The collection, representing meticulous digitization efforts by Japanese historians and scholars, showcases hundreds of years of rich Japanese history expressed through prose, poetry, and artwork. 

Among the highlights of the holdings are manuscripts and annotated books from the personal collection of the novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an early manuscript of the Tale of Genji, and a unique collection of Chinese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.

Most of the works are written in Japanese, but some of them include illustrations that can be appreciated by anyone now. A search through the collection for 地震 (jishin, “earthquake”), for example, yields a fascinating set of depictions of earthquakes and their impact in past centuries.

In one satirical illustration, thought to date from shortly after the 1855 Edo earthquake, courtesans and others from the demimonde, who suffered greatly in the disaster, are shown beating the giant catfish that was believed to cause earthquakes. The men in the upper left-hand corner represent the construction trades; they are trying to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuilding from earthquakes was a profitable business for them.

Seismic destruction is expressed more horrifically in ukiyo-e prints of the burning of Edo (Tokyo) after that same 1855 earthquake and of buildings collapsing during the 1891 Mino-Owari earthquake. They are a sobering reminder of the role that natural disasters have played in Japanese life.

Other highlights are high-resolution images from the Kamei Collection of original etchings from Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francesco Piranesi e d’altri, originally published by Firmin Didot Freres in Paris between 1835 and 1839. 

We hope this partnership and collection will expand access to history and culture from Japan and spur a new generation of usage and scholarship.

About the University of Tokyo General Library

The University of Tokyo was established in 1877 as the first national university in Japan. As a leading research university, UTokyo offers courses in essentially all academic disciplines at both undergraduate and graduate levels and conducts research across the full spectrum of academic activity. The University of Tokyo Library System is composed of 30 libraries, with the General Library being the largest among them. While providing services to the researchers and students of UTokyo, the General Library also plays a central role in the operation and management of the Library System. The General Library’s history can be traced back nearly 130 years to the university’s founding and it now houses approximately 1.3 million books, including rare collections inherited from academies in the Edo period. 

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is one of the largest libraries in the world and home of the Wayback Machine, a repository of 475 billion webpages. Founded in 1996 by Internet Hall of Fame member Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive now serves more than 1.5 million patrons each day, providing access to 70 petabytes of data—books, web pages, music, television, and software—and working with more than 800 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all. To make a donation to the Internet Archive, please visit https://archive.org/donate/

東京大学総合図書館の所蔵資料がインターネットアーカイブから利用可能に

世界のネットワーク化がかつてなく進んだ現在、人間の歴史のどんなことでもワンクリックで調べられるようになったと思いがちです。しかし、外国文化についての知識や理解を深めるうえで、たとえインターネット上であっても言語の障壁や物理的制約が大きな妨げとなる現状は変わりません。それだからこそ、インターネットアーカイブでは、東京大学総合図書館との新たな提携を発表できることをたいへん嬉しく思います。インターネットアーカイブと東大総合図書館が共同で進める本事業は、東京大学学術資産アーカイブ化推進室の中竹聖也氏を中心として進められ、東大総合図書館が所蔵する極めて貴重な資料群のデジタル・バックアップを提供し、アクセスを拡大するものです。

インターネットアーカイブのコレクションチームでは2020年6月より、同館スタッフと協力して東大総合図書館のサーバーから数千単位のデジタルファイルを取り込み、4000点以上の極めて貴重な巻物、写本、資料などのメタデータ整備を進めてまいりました。このコレクションは日本の歴史家や研究者による緻密なデジタル化作業から生まれたものであり、何世紀にも及ぶ日本の豊かな歴史が散文、韻文、図像によって表現されています。

特筆すべき資料としては、森鴎外 (1862-1922) の個人文庫に収められていた鴎外自筆の写本や鴎外本人による書き込みがある書物を集めた鴎外文庫、源氏物語の初期の写本、さらに、中国明代中期の条例（皇帝の判断に基づく法令や先例）をまとめた皇明條法事類纂（同館以外での所蔵は確認されていません）などがあります。

日本語で書かれた作品ではありますが、どなたでも理解できる図像入りの作品も少なくありません。たとえば、「地震」を検索語としてこのコレクションを検索すれば、過去数世紀に起きた地震とその影響が描かれた興味深い資料群を閲覧できます。

1855年（安政2年）の安政江戸地震直後の作と思われるある風刺画には、地震で大被害を被った吉原の遊女や町の人々が、地震の元凶と信じられていた大鯰（おおなまず）を懲らしめている様子が描かれています。左上の男たちが止めに入ろうとしていますが、それは震災後の復興で商売が潤った建築職の人たちだからです。

地震による被害がもっと恐ろしく表現されているのが、同じく安政江戸地震後に発生した江戸の火災や、1891年（明治24年）の濃尾地震による家屋倒壊が描かれた浮世絵です。いずれも自然災害が日本人の暮らしにおいて果たしてきた役割を改めて思い起こさせてくれる作品です。

そのほかの特筆すべき資料としては、亀井文庫『ピラネージ版画集 Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francesco Piranesi e d’altri』 (1835-1839、パリ、フィルマン・ ディド兄弟出版社刊) の高精細画像が挙げられます。

インターネットアーカイブでは、東大総合図書館との提携と本コレクションの公開によって、日本の歴史と文化が世界からいっそうアクセスしやすいものとなり、新たな世代の資料活用と学術研究が促進されることを願っています。

東京大学総合図書館について

東京大学は1877年（明治10年）に創設された日本最初の国立大学です。世界トップクラスの総合研究大学として、広範な専門分野における学部・大学院レベルの教育活動と、あらゆる学術領域にわたる研究活動をおこなっています。東京大学総合図書館は30の部局図書館・室で構成される東京大学附属図書館の中で最大の図書館であり、東大の研究者・学生向けのサービスをおこなうとともに、東大附属図書館の事務・業務を支える上で中心的な役割を果たしています。130年近くに及ぶその歴史は東大創設当初にまでさかのぼります。所蔵図書数は約130万冊にのぼり、江戸時代の学問所から継承された貴重な資料群も所蔵しています。

インターネットアーカイブについて

インターネットアーカイブ (Internet Archive) は世界有数のライブラリ（図書館）であり、4750億ページもの保存済みウェブサイトをアーカイブ検索できる「ウェイバックマシン (Wayback Machine) 」を運営する非営利法人です。インターネットの発展への功労者を表彰する「インターネットの殿堂 (Internet Hall of Fame)」に名を連ねるブリュースター・ケール (Brewster Kahle) によって1996年に設立されました。現在、一日150万人以上のアクティブユーザーに、書籍やウェブページ、音楽、TV、ソフトウェアなど70ペタバイト（約7万テラバイト）規模のデータへのアクセスを提供するとともに、世界800以上の図書館や大学と連携して、万人に開かれたデジタル図書館の構築を進めています。インターネットアーカイブへの寄付は https://archive.org/donate/ で受け付けています。

（訳：榊原知樹）