Standing room only for Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscape of San Francisco 6 at the Internet Archive last night.   New films including “process plates” from studios brought a new sharpness to many of the films presented.   Suggested donations was 5 bucks or 5 books, and people brought lots of great books for the Archive.

Next is Lost Landscapes of Detroit on February 22, 2012– this is Detroit without the narratives being imposed on it.   Doors open at 6:30, show at 7:30.

Thank you all!

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 6 (2011) is the latest in a series of historical urban explorations, made from home movies, industrial and promotional films and outtakes, and other cinematic ephemera. It sold out the Castro Theatre in December, and this will be its second screening. YOU are the soundtrack. Please come prepared to shout out your identifications, ask questions about what’s on the screen, and share your thoughts with fellow audience members.

Most of the footage in this program has not been shown before. It includes footage of San Francisco’s cemeteries just before their removal, unique drive-thru footage of the Old Produce Market (now Golden Gateway) in the late 1940s, cruising the newly-built Embarcadero Freeway, grungy back streets in North Beach, the sandswept Sunset District in the 1930s, and newly-rediscovered Cinemascope footage of Playland, the Sky Tram and San Francisco scenes, all in Kodachrome.

Suggested admission for the screening: $5 bucks — or 5 books, which will be donated to Internet Archive’s book scanning project. Reservations are required, the event frequently sells out.

What: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 6
When: Jan 24, 2012, 7:30pm
Where: Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118
Contact: rsvp@archive.org

Hackers & Founders organized a protest in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza. They joined forces with tech meetup organizers around the country to hold rallies in New York, Washington DC, Seattle and Silicon Valley to put a public face to the online protests and blackouts.

Speaking at the San Francisco event were many local luminaries including Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Ron Conway, Jonathan Nelson, MC Hammer, Caterina Fake and others.

Brewster Kahle speaks at the PIPA / SOPA Protest in San Francisco

A digital collection on the January 2012 web blackout in protest of the SOPA and PIPA legislation being considered by the US Congress. Internet Archive’s Archive-It created a collection of websites related to this protest including those participating in the blackout as well as commentary and news surrounding the event. Thanks to Library of Congress and other colleagues for their url contributions.

Archive.org is going dark for US residents from 8:00 am – 8:00 pm PDT on Wednesday January 18 (14:00 – 02:00 GMT) to drive a message to Washington.   We need your help to do this.

Legislation such as this directly affects libraries (pdf) such as the Internet Archive, which collects, preserves, and offers access to cultural materials.   Furthermore, these laws can negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive.

These bills would encourage the development of blacklists to censor sites with little recourse or due process.   The Internet Archive is already blacklisted in China—let’s prevent the United States from establishing its own blacklist system.

For United States residents, please take action.

For non-US residents: Sorry for dragging you into this, and if you are willing, sign a petition to the State Department to express your concern.

–Internet Archive

Some coverage: BayCitizen,
Archive at SF protest.

You can see it in action now with our upcoming embed codes to go with this new player.

It will allow for additional much wanted features like:
- off-site playlists
- fullscreen in many cases
- subtitles/captions

as well as the standard arbitrary width/height and “autoplay” options.

You can see some examples here:

http://www.archive.org/help/video.php

The rest is coming soon (if you are eager, you can even “opt in” now by clicking here:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies&newplayer=jw

(then take a look at one of your favorite items).

Now relax, sit back, and enjoy an archive video!

Cheers!
–tracey

This piece, featuring Timothy Leary, is from a series of video shorts produced by Retinalogic in the nineties.

It seems more like the sixties than the nineties (perhaps that was the intention?), and it’s long on form and short on content, but nevertheless makes for amusing viewing.

http://www.archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_141.dv

— recommended by Dirk Lavitz

Handy farm devices and how to make them (1912)

I liked last week’s recommendation of Modern Hardware for Your Home, but prefer this book for a look at a long gone agrarian way of life.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924080109832

— recommended by Helen Swanson

Internet Archive Statusboard

How did we amass a library of over three million books? In large part, by carefully scanning one book at a time. If you want to know what the most recent to our library is, visit the status board.

http://statusboard.archive.org/

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

This exhibit includes content from Internet Archive’s television collections, Mosaic: World News from the Middle East and Scola.

You may also be interested in the Understanding 9/11 Television News Archive.

A look at suburbia sponsored by Redbook:

Here is a priceless view of the socio-economic conditions which led to what we now have to live with.

— recommended by David Cox

http://www.archive.org/details/IntheSub1957

Eiffel Tower

You probably know what the Eiffel Tower looks like; here’s what it sounds like. Since 1889, the world has assumed they knew the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Artist China Blue has proven them wrong. In October of 2007, China Blue, along with her technical team headed by auditory neuroscientist Seth Horowitz, discovered that it is a living, constantly fluxing iron organism: a living thing with its own song, derived from the structural vibrations as it responds to its environment. The Tower produces a pulsing range of sounds, from the subsonic vibrations of the iron born from footsteps, motors and the wind, to the hum of the steel chariots in the machine room, to the human voices that surround her.

http://www.archive.org/details/EiffelTower

— recommended by Alain Bresson

Modern Hardware for Your Home (ca. 1925)

You may think your home is full of modern technology, and it is. But “modern” is relative; here’s what a modern home might have had almost ninety years ago.

http://www.archive.org/details/ModernHardwareForYourHome

— recommended by Sarah Burke

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

Ah, who conveys the holiday spirit better than Scrooge?

This is the original English version, some fifteen minutes longer than the version edited for Americans with short attention span.

http://www.archive.org/details/Scrooge1935

— recommended by Leslie Graham

Little Master’s English-Telegu Dictionary

I thought I was one of the few Internet Archive users who’d want an English-Telegu dictionary, but I see it’s been downloaded over 30,000 times … way to go!

http://www.archive.org/details/englishtelugudic020994mbp

— recommended by Indira Hiebert

Hanukkah O Hanukkah

Is there an antidote to too many Christmas carols? Probably not, but, if there is, it might just be Mista Cookie Jar’s rendition of Hanukkah O Hanukkah.

http://www.archive.org/details/HanukkahOHanukkah

— recommended by Yoshi Batlan

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

Once upon a time, a time before learned scientists talked about string theory and living in eleven dimensions, there was an age in which we knew about our world with certainty. And in the case of this book, we could list and illustrate those things, even though the oldest photograph in the world wasn’t even a decade old. The book promises “with pictures designed after nature,” and delivers.

http://www.archive.org/details/animalkingdomarr03cuvi

— recommended by Stefano Olieri

The Conet Project—Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

If you thought advances in telecommunication, encrypted email, and other new technologies obviated the need for short wave radio, then it’s time to think again. Here are a few lines from the introduction to this remarkable collection.

For more than 30 years, the shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations. Why has the phenomenon of Numbers Stations  gone almost totally unreported? What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the Swedish Rhapsody Numbers Station use a small girl’s voice?

http://www.archive.org/details/ird059

— recommended by Sarah Dillman

Mission Mind Control (July 10, 1979)

“This is the story of a thirty-year search by U.S. intelligence agencies to perfect mind control.” That’s how this 1970 ABC News documentary begins, after an unmistakably seventies musical introduction.

The film, part of the Archive’s FedFlix collecyion, hasn’t aged well, which is part of its appeal. With no pun intended, what a trip!

http://www.archive.org/details/FedFlix

— recommended by Alexis Rossi

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart