We are excited to announce the release of our report, “Securing Digital Rights for Libraries: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet,” and the culmination of a months-long process consulting with leading experts from libraries, civil society, and academia regarding libraries’ role in shaping the next iteration of the internet. The Internet Archive did this work in collaboration with the Movement for a Better Internet, so as to help model how this community can work together towards building an internet centered on public interest values.

You can download and read the free, openly-licensed report HERE.

The consultation focused on two core questions: How can libraries (1) sustain their traditional societal function and (2) build on their strengths to support a better information ecosystem in the 21st Century? Participants discussed a wide range of challenges, including consolidation in the publishing industry, mis/disinformation, and providing equitable access to information despite these obstacles. The conversation was anchored in libraries’ traditional support of public interest values—i.e. democracy, equity, diversity and inclusion, privacy, freedom of expression, and more.

The key takeaway from this consultation process is simple: The rights that libraries have always enjoyed offline must also be protected online. The report articulates a set of four digital rights for libraries, based on the core library functions of preserving and providing access to information, knowledge, and culture. Specifically, if libraries are to continue ensuring meaningful participation in society for everyone in the digital era, they must have the rights to:

• Collect digital materials, including those made available only via streaming and other restricted means, through purchase on the open market or any other legal means, no matter the underlying file format;
• Preserve those materials, and where necessary repair or reformat them, to ensure their long-term existence and availability;
• Lend digital materials, at least in the same “one person at a time” manner as is traditional with physical materials;
• Cooperate with other libraries, by sharing or transferring digital collections, so as to provide more equitable access for communities in remote and less well-funded areas.

The report is intended as a guide for meaningful policy discussions among librarians, public interest advocates, and lawmakers. We encourage you to read it and join us next Thursday, December 8th for a webinar discussion about the report with leaders from Internet Archive, Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and the Association of Research Libraries. Come with your feedback, questions, and ideas for translating the conclusions of the report into actionable policy goals. We also encourage you to check out the Movement for a Better Internet, and join us there as we continue to work with different communities to build an internet that works better for everyone.

Democracies require an educated citizenry to flourish– and because of this, Democratic governments, at all levels, spend billions of dollars publishing reports, manuals, books, videos so that all can read and learn. That is the good news.  The bad news is that in our digital age, much of this is not accessible.   Democracy’s Library aims to change this.   

The aim of the Internet Archive Democracy’s Library is to collect, preserve and make freely available all the published works of all the democracies– the federal, provincial, and municipal government publications– so that we can efficiently learn from each other to solve our biggest challenges in parallel and in concert.

Democracy’s Library is the foundational information of free people.

We call this “Democracy’s Library” because Democracy is an open system that trusts its citizens to learn, grow and have independent agency. Democratic governments publish openly because they want important information spread widely.  There are no paywalls to the works of government, or there shouldn’t be. 

We need access to all the River reports so we can help understand and manage our declining clean water.   Access to Agricultural research to help farm more sustainably.  To Materials research to build better products and devices. To Local hearings on project results so other cities can overcome the same challenges.  To Training materials and text books for many professions.   All free– and in ways you can find them.

Bringing free public access to the public domain is the opportunity of the Internet– an infrastructure that effectively costs nothing to distribute information that has been collected and organized.

Yes, this will cost a small fortune– but it is within our grasp– to collect and organize billions of documents and datasets, preserve the materials for the ages and make them available for many purposes.  While scoping projects in the United States and Canada have now begun, we estimate this project will cost at least $100 million dollars. The big money has not been committed yet, and we’re still fundraising. But to get things kicked off, Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), are supporting the project. The Internet Archive has ramped up collecting government websites and datasets as well as digitizing print materials with many library partners.

Thankfully, we do not have the rights and paywall problems that have been strangling the Internet’s best feature: an essentially free information distribution system.   

Democracy’s Library can be a free public library available on your phone and your laptop.  

Democracy’s Library will be the foundation of new services, both non-commercial and commercial, that leverages language understanding, machine learning, automatic translation, speech recognition, and visualizations.

Democracies publish openly– let’s take advantage of this.  Leverage our library system to not just lease commercial publisher’s database products, but build open collections that everyone can use and reuse without limitation.

Lets build direct conduits from governments into Democracy’s Library for long term preservation and access. A public-public partnership that long served us in the paper era, that took a pause in the mainframe era of commercial databases, can flourish again in the Internet era.  

“Public Access to the Public Domain” can be a rallying cry for Democracy’s Library.

Democracy’s Library can be a flowering of information services for free people.

Please join in and help.   Jamie Joyce of the Internet Archive (jamiejoyce@archive.org) is leading the effort in the United States, Andrea Mills of the Internet Archive Canada ( andrea@archive.org ) is leading the Canadian effort.  The project is overseen by Brewster Kahle ( brewster@archive.org ).   

If you’d like to stay connected, sign up for the #EmpoweringLibraries newsletter.

Have ideas?  Have materials?  Have a use case?  Have resources to bring to bear?   This can only happen if we work together.  

Let’s build Democracy’s Library, together.

Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago?  Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago?   Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened.

For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.

And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.

Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.

Also, the digital media they reside on changes, too—from Digital Linear Tape to PATA hard drives to SATA hard drives to SSDs. If we do not actively tend our digital books they become unreadable very quickly.

Then there is cataloging and metadata. If we do not keep up with the ever-changing expectations of digital learners, then our books will not be found. This is ongoing and expensive.

Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

Also, how we use books and periodicals, in the decades after they are published, change from how they were originally intended. We are seeing researchers use books and periodicals in machine learning investigations to find trends that were never easy in a one-by-one world, or in the silos of the publisher databases. Preparing these books for this type of analysis is time consuming and now threatened by publisher’s lawsuits.

If we want future access to our digital heritage we need to make some structural changes:  changes to institution and publisher behaviors as well as supportive funding, laws, and enforcement.

The first step is to recognize preservation and access to our digital heritage is a big job and one worth doing.  Then, find ways that institutions– educational, government, non-profit, and philanthropic– could make preservation a part of our daily responsibility.

Long live books.

Illustration: midjourney AI generated.

The Internet Archive has recently set up its own Mastodon server– a federated/decentralized open source social media package– that has garnered lots of attention lately.

We use it in ways that we use twitter now (we are not leaving twitter):
• @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org for events, announcements, and fun things
• Staff accounts (e.g. my account @brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org) for, well, whatever.

Why?  We need a game with many winners, not just a few powerful players.  

Through our dweb work, the Internet Archive has catalyzed decentralized web technologies through conferences, summits, meet-ups and camps for 6 years. We need new tech to help with privacy, robustness, and work around issues of disinformation and corporate consolidation.  Mastodon is built on open standards so others can build alternative clients and integrate it into other systems.  

Looking forward to many social media alternatives: Blue Sky, Matrix, and many others. 

Personally, I want to see the evolution and combination of features of Slack, Twitter, SMS, Signal, email, Discord, Facebook, IRC, zoom, google meet, and other ways we communicate.  While we are at it, how about a more integrated environment of zendesk, jira, wordpress, and google docs.  Free and open technologies that invite interoperability while communities maintain control would be ideal.  And in my day-to-day I would love fewer systems to monitor that also limit my direct exposure to celebrities, influencers, and politicians.   Oh, I can dream…

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Please help us learn, this time about Mastodon.   Thank you, all!

Guide to the exhibition galleries of the Departament of Geology and Palaeontology in the British Museum pg 18