This week at the Archive | 14 November 2011

Posted on November 14, 2011 by drinehart

San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge; a technical description in ordinary language (1936)

Here’s a fascinating book describing the building of the entire San Francisco (California) Bay Bridge, which opened seventy-five years ago. It’s full of fabulous illustrations.

http://www.archive.org/details/sanfranciscooakl00mens

— recommended by Mario Murphy

Buckminster Fuller, Everything I Know

Why? Because he was crazy enough to think he could change the world. Plus the pre-MTV green-screen production values are not to be believed. There should be a special award for anyone who can watch all 42 hours nonstop.

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

— recommended by Jeff Kaplan

Bad Panda

Bad Panda disseminates recordings based on the idea that, “music is about creative and passionate ideas, not product.” The label releases new work every Monday, an approach that’s earned a large following. For example, the ensemble Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles’ Brick City Love Song has been downloaded almost nine-hundred thousand times.

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

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This week at the Archive | 7 November 2011

Posted on November 7, 2011 by drinehart

Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of those works that’s become an integral part of popular culture, including an Oscar winning film. It’s worth going back to this 1894 edition to appreciate that a great story doesn’t need modern technology to work.

http://www.archive.org/details/alicesadventwond00carrrich

— recommended by Brewster Kahle

The Jonestown Death Tape (FBI No. Q 042)

A chilling audio recording made on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana immediately preceding and during the mass suicide or murder of over 900 members of the cult.

http://www.archive.org/details/ptc1978-11-18.flac16

— recommended by Gareth Hughes

The Three Stooges

These are the original knuckleheads. The American life shown in these popular films is charmingly dated, but the stupidity is timeless.

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

Posted in News | 1 Comment

This week at the Archive | 31 October 2011

Posted on November 1, 2011 by drinehart

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories, Aimee Bender

Here’s how the publisher described Bender’s 1998 debut collection of short stories: Aimee Bender’s stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect.

http://openlibrary.org/works/OL46566W/The_Girl_in_the_Flammable_Skirt

—suggested by George Oates

The Last Man on Earth

This classic film—based on the Richard Matheson science fiction Classic “I am Legend” and later remade as “The Omega Man”—features Vincent Price as a scientist in a post apocalyptic nightmare world consumed by bloodthirsty vampires. It’s a fine film for Halloween, or any other day.

For more information:

http://www.archive.org/details/the-last-man-on-earth

Recordings from the Illegal Art Exhibit collection

These songs are from the Illegal Art Exhibit, which documents the impact of copyright law on freedom of expression. Many of these tracks have been censored due to intellectual property law. For background on the particular tracks and the cases involved, see Copyright and Music: A History Told in MP3s.

http://www.archive.org/details/illegal-art

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Basics, and Joseph Goldstein on Satipatthana

These two selections—one from a great lay Buddhist meditation teacher, the other from a renowned American bhikkhu (Buddhist monk)—are essentially thorough courses in the development of the Buddha’s teaching. If there is one thing that I think should be preserved for future generations—one thing that will be as relevant in five years as it will in 5,000 it is to be found in both of these collections.

And what is that one thing? It is this: 2,500 years ago, an extraordinary human being, through rigorous self-experimentation, discovered a method for untangling human suffering. This path he devised is a gradual one and, as such, it does not place unconditional demands upon one’s faith. Instead it produces distinct results for one who makes the time and puts forth the effort to cultivate the practice.

Of all the audio series that I’ve heard on the subject, these two collections are among the very best. The first is a systematic explication of one of the most famous of the the Buddha’s discourses on the art of meditation in 35 progressive hour-long talks. The second collection consists of 55 15 minute impromptu discourses that focus on practical aspects of the teaching and methods for the development of intuitive wisdom.

http://www.archive.org/details/basics-thanissaro-bhikkhu

http://www.archive.org/details/satipatthana-joseph-goldstein

—Danny Bernstein

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

 

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This week at the Archive | 24 October 2011

Posted on October 24, 2011 by drinehart

Lincolniana

One of the interesting collections we are digitizing is the Lincoln Financial Collection, the largest privately owned collection of Lincolniana (yes, that’s a real word) in the United States. The collection includes many books Abraham Lincoln owned, including The life and speeches of Henry Clay. The volume features a note written by Lincoln and bound into the book when it was rebound.

It is a real treat to be able to touch a piece of history, something that Lincoln once held and read, one which surely influenced his thinking on the slavery issue. If you read the many notations in the description field, you will see that this was a book used by Lincoln in composing some of his early anti-slavery speeches.

—Jeff Sharpe

Zappa on Zappa

In a program recorded in 1968, Tom Donahue interviews Frank Zappa about his life and work, and allows the irreverent rock star to present some of his favorite music. The ensuing free form program ranges from surf music, doo-wop, jazz, the blues, to the works of Pierre Boulez. The song selection is very informative for any fan of Zappa’s music, as one can easily trace the influence of all these styles on his own creative output, be it the cheesy harmonies of 1950s pop songs or the intricate percussive patterns of Boulez’s avant-garde classical compositions. The role that such songs had on Zappa’s own musical evolution is made all the more clear at the end of this hilarious program when a selection of satirical songs from the Mothers of Invention are also heard.

—suggested by John Gilmore

Wayback to the Rescue

Graham Readfearn, an Australian writer, recently wrote to thank the Archive “for rescuing a former blog of mine, owned by News Ltd, from the internet dustbin.” Readfearn thought that twenty months of work had disappeared down the corporate drain until he discovered it was preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

“I suppose this raises broader issues about the permanency of work online and what kind of a responsibility, if any, major news organisations have for archiving work that doesn’t get committed to a printed page,” he wrote. “In this particular case, a not-for-profit organisation on a separate continent has filled the breach.”

Here’s the full story.

—suggested by Alexis Rossi

 Popeye: Fright To The Finish (1954)

This Halloween adventure is notable for Popeye’s memorable line, “Olive, I didn’t recognize you without your skin on!”

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

 

Posted in News | 2 Comments

Thursday Night 5:30pm Books in Browsers in San Francisco

Posted on October 24, 2011 by brewster

Books in Browsers logo Please join the Internet Archive and O’Reilly Media:

Eleven of the most exciting ebook startups and leaders in publishing will present short-form “ignite talks” on Thursday night, October 27, at Books in Browsers: Ignite!

Books in Browsers: Ignite!
300 Funston Ave, San Francisco
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Reception: 5:30 pm (snacks & wine)
Ignite program: 6:30-7:30 pm
RSVP at RSVP@archive.org
Donate 5 Books for scanning!

Ignite talks are a special format where each speaker has just five minutes to share their personal and professional visions in 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds. The list of talks is online at http://bib.archive.org/2011/09/12/books-in-browsers-ignite/

Books in Browsers evening gatheringThe Ignite program will bring the latest news from the Archive’s Open Library project plus 10 of the hottest new companies from around the world, many of them just emerging from stealth, that are defining the future of reading and publishing. Several of these start-ups will be presenting their work for the very first time.

Join us for a couple of hours on a Thursday night, and get a peek at the future of books! Press are welcome. Please RSVP at RSVP@archive.org and bring some books to donate to our new Physical Archive.

Posted in Books Archive, News | Leave a comment

This week at the Archive | 17 October 2011

Posted on October 18, 2011 by drinehart

With the Internet Archive growing by terabytes a day, it’s impossible for any one person to have more than a partial or specialized appreciation of what’s on offer. And so, we’re presenting some favorites from the collections. If you’d like to share yours, please send a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

Heaven’s Gate
I discovered the Internet Archive in 1997 after dozens of cultists in San Diego committed suicide in preparation to be picked up by a passing spaceship. (Who said air travel couldn’t get any worse?) The group’s Internet site was taken down after the tragedy, but press reports cited a copy of the site at the Archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961222130009/http://www.heavensgate.com/

I was grateful for that information; I’ve been using the Archive as a resource for my notebook ever since.

The drawings and engravings of William Blake
If you’re not familiar with William Blake, this volume is a great introduction:

http://www.archive.org/details/drawingsengravin00blakuoft

I’ll conclude with a few recommendations from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive

The Letter
James Maduzia
This Lego movie is well crafted and has a good story:

Are You Ready For Marriage?
Aaron Simpson
This video was made using footage from from the Prelinger Archives; it was shown at the couple’s wedding. It’s funny and an inspiration for all:

Ditty Bops
I discovered the Ditty Bops on the archive, and have bought all of their CDs. They could be described as a cross between the Andrew Sisters and the Roches.

More Ditty Bops concerts:

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

Finally, at the risk of being repetitiously redundant, please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof [at] archive.org

-David Glenn Rinehart

Posted in News | 1 Comment

Wayback Machine Scheduled Outage Friday through Monday

Posted on October 5, 2011 by internetarchive

Update Wednesday 5:45pm: We spent the day fixing hardware and brought up 7 of the machines that were down.  About 90% of the Wayback Machine data is back online now.  We do still have a few machines that don’t want to power up again, and will continue to work on getting that remaining data back online as soon as possible.

—————

Update Monday 12PM PT: We should be up now except for a small % of our data (we have a network switch that didn’t make it though the maintenance).  About 80% of the data is accessible right now, we should have the other 20% online again some time tomorrow.

—————

Update Monday 8:30AM PT:  Power to most of the Wayback machine’s storage servers has not been restored yet.   Engineers are working on it, and we will keep you informed via this blog post.

—————-

 

The Wayback Machine will be offline from Friday evening, October 7, through Sunday, October 9, 2011.  We expect the Wayback to be back in service by Monday morning (PST), October 10, 2011.

So, what’s up?  Maintenance is being done on the data center and cooling system where a large percent of the Wayback’s content is stored, and we’ll need to shut off the power there for the duration of the work.

We aren’t making any changes to the Wayback Machine.  When we power back up some time on Sunday, things should just start working again.  If you are seeing any issues with the Wayback on Monday morning (PST), please drop us a note at info at archive dot org.

Posted in News | 38 Comments

Thank you Friends of the SF Public Library for 130,000 books

Posted on October 3, 2011 by brewster

130,000 books, records, and videos were donated and then cataloged, de-duplicated, and readied for scanning and long term preservation in 2 days.   Thank you to the Friends of SFPL for our largest public donation ever.   With this, we believe we are ready to handle any size donation.   Please think of us as a good home for your library or collection or extras.

Every year residents of San Francisco donate over 100,000 books to be part of book sales to support the SFPL.   Each year there is a massive sale, and at the end of it, they donate what is left to a worthy cause.   This is the second year that we were that worthy cause.

* 20 volunteers (thank you!)
* 20 staff members
* 130,000 books, records, videos
* we cataloged 40,000 of them over the 2 days, and of those 20,000 were ones we did not have.   90,000 to go.
* we will preserve the originals for scanning and for the long term in our Physical Archive
* the duplicates will go to other worthy causes.
* and it was a blast.

Please donate books!  info@archive.org

Posted in Announcements, Books Archive, News | 20 Comments

Volunteer – Help us get 200,000 books on Sunday!

Posted on September 20, 2011 by internetarchive

We have a windfall: the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library are offering all the unsold books from their yearly book sale to the Internet Archive if we can pack them up.

The Archive will then move them to our Physical Archive in Richmond, California, scan the ones we do not have already, and ready them for physical preservation.  The duplicates will be donated to a charity that helps direct books to those in need.

 

We need volunteers to:

Pack books into boxes
Sunday, September 25, 2011
from 4 pm until midnight
at Fort Mason Festival Pavilion

We will have snacks and refreshments, music, and mementos for all volunteers! Come help us accept the generous donation of approximately 200,000 books from the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

You can arrive at any time between 4 pm and midnight, but the earlier the better!    Fort Mason Festival Pavilion is located behind building E.  There is pay parking in the Fort Mason lot, or park outside of Fort Mason for free.  There will be no heavy lifting! Just book sorting and fun for everyone!

If you are also available to help on Monday and Tuesday (9/26-27), we will be there from 7:30 AM – Midnight both days and would love your assistance!

It will be fun and productive.  And you will be helping to build a library!

PLEASE RSVP on the Facebook event page, or by emailing ginger at archive dot org.

Posted in Books Archive, News | 2 Comments

3 Million Texts for Free

Posted on September 17, 2011 by brewster

Hundreds of libraries reached the milestone of offering 3 million freely downloadable texts yesterday through the Internet Archive website.  Our 3 millionth text is a Galileo pamphlet from the rare book collection of the University of Toronto.

Internet Archive has been scanning books since 2005.  We have made approximately 2 million books from 1,000 libraries in 200 languages available online since that time.   Another 1 million texts have been uploaded by others, including everything from original books to court records to scans from other digitization projects and 37,000 books from Project Gutenberg.

More than 100 people digitize books in Internet Archive scanning centers in 27 libraries in 6 countries.  At 10 cents a page, we are bringing over 1,000 new books online every day.

Archive.org is visited by more than 1 million different users every day.  Books are downloaded or read on archive.org about 10 million times each month, and approximately 2,000 books for the blind and dyslexic (print disabled) are downloaded every day.

Other projects use the texts archive in bulk.  Researches at the University of Massachusetts have used millions of archive.org books to do digital scholarship.  OpenLibrary.org integrates these books with many thousands of recent books for the print disabled and library borrowers.  All of the public domain books are full text searchable, indexed by multuiple search engines, and downloadable individually or in bulk.

Please help us build the library of free books by scanning and uploading, by donating physical books to the Internet Archive, or by sponsoring the digitization of great collections!

Posted in Announcements, Books Archive, News | 42 Comments

Hard Drive Archaeology – And Hackerspaces

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Jason Scott

Two different, but somewhat related additions to the archive you might want to check out.

First, I was contacted earlier this week about a project to recover information off of an old Cray-1 supercomputer hard drive. Unlike, say, trying to get your old floppies to read or pulling an old mix tape off of a cassette, with something as old as a Cray-1 (a computer once called the “World’s Most Expensive Love Seat“), you don’t even have a place to really plug it in: functioning Cray-1 machines are rare as you can get, and even if you were to get the hard drives spinning up and read off of – where would you get the data off the Cray?

Researcher Chris Fenton has a thing about Cray supercomputers – he built a tiny homebrew version of one that used emulation to allow you to experience some aspect of Crays, from his desktop. So when he found himself with a 80 Megabyte CDC 9877 disk pack, which was quite a lot for the early 1970s, it wasn’t just a matter of hooking it up to USB. (Actually, we have a brochure for the behemoth you would put this disk pack into to read it.)  Here’s what a nearly-the-same CDC 9987 looks like:

Ultimately, Fenton got the information off of the disk pack using a whole variety of techniques and experiments, as part of a research project this summer. He wrote a paper about the process, entitled “Digital Archeology with Drive-Independent Data Recovery: Now, With More Drive Dependence!” and it’s now mirrored here at the archive. If nothing else, be sure to browse through the paper just to see the customized stepper motor and reader he build to pull the magnetic data off the platters. And I was kind of understating things… ultimately he did hook it up to USB.

From this careful, forensic-quality magnetic scan of the drive, Fenton has produced a large image of the disk, one far larger than the data on it but allowing further experimentation and reading from the image without having to build a robot in your basement. And now, we’re offering this image on the archive. Remember, you won’t be able to pull this data down and go back to the 1970s, instantly – you should be reading up documentation of disk formats, learn about how pull information off of magnetic flux recording, and a whole other host of material and knowledge…. but hey, weekends are for having fun, right?

Even ten years ago, the idea of offering several gigabytes of something (that expands out to about 20 gigabytes of something) online was beyond crazy – that we’ve come so far in offering this much to so many people speaks how much the world has changed since the era of this disk pack.

Fenton is associated with the NYC-based hackerspace, NYC Resistor and it was their mailing list that got in contact with me to get this disk image up to the archive.

Coincidentally, this was also the week that two NYC Resistor members released a book, for free, which you might really enjoy. Bre Pettis and Astera Schneeweisz hatched a plan to make a book on hackerspaces at the end of 2008. They wanted to put it together in less than two weeks, and as people submitted photos, essays and other material, the project increased in size, more folks were brought in, and this month the end result was released for free.

Entitled “Hackerspaces: The Beginning”, this photo-filled book is available at the archive to read online or download. A worldwide view of hackerspaces throughout the world as of 2008, it also includes memories of spaces past and dreams of spaces future. It’s an excellent snapshot of a beautiful, technological world well worth browsing this weekend (and weekends to come).

So if you’re in the mood for advanced research or just to check out some great photos, the archive’s got something for you!

Posted in Cool items, Software Archive | 13 Comments

Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive

Posted on August 24, 2011 by internetarchive

We are proud to announce the launch of Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive, a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists and the public, the library presents one week (3,000 hours from 20 channels over 7 days) of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis, with select analysis by scholars.

911 collection pageTelevision is our preeminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. Scholars face great challenges in identifying, locating and adequately citing television news broadcasts in their research. This archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.

Background on the Television Archive

Internet Archive is a non-profit library founded in 1996 that started by attempting to collect every webpage from all websites. This is a major task but it is doable even by a non-profit.

Another medium, television, struck us as historically under-appreciated, despite its tremendous importance. Television is pervasive and persuasive, but it is difficult to access programs for research and analysis.  We felt that TV should be a medium of record, a moniker generally reserved for newspaper publishing. As we learned in high school, to effectively understand we need to be able to ‘compare and contrast’. We need to be able to quote.

Talking with the Library of Congress in 2000 we found that they were not systematically recording TV. Talking with the Federal Broadcast Information Service which was collecting TV for the US intelligence community, we found it would probably be difficult to get the recordings from them for library use. The notable Vanderbilt TV News archive at that time was struggling financially and only captured several hours of television news each night. As a result, we decided to create the Television Archive to help preserve this culturally important medium.

Starting in late 2000, we began collecting Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, French, Mexican, British, American, and other stations… 20 channels of TV in DVD quality.

When the events of September 11, 2001 occurred, we, like most Americans, urgently wanted international perspectives on the United States. Stunned by the attacks, we tried to figure out what we could do to help.  Seventy-one people and organizations worked together to get one week of TV News up on the Internet to be launched on October 11, 2001. (Bear in mind this is 3 years before YouTube started.) Launched at the Newseum in Washington DC, we made a website that allowed anyone to research the collection of 20 channels for the week of September 11th.

Today, we are relaunching this collection with an updated interface with a conference at NYU.

Posted in Announcements, Event, News, tv archive | 21 Comments

Scanning a Braille Playboy

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Jason Scott

Hi. I’m Jason Scott, adjunct archivist at archive.org, and I wanted to talk about the time I watched the Internet Archive scan in a Braille issue of Playboy magazine.

Many people might not know there have even been Braille editions of Playboy, but they’ve been printed since 1970, a function of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) , which puts out a variety of transcribed versions of periodicals and books and other materials, in forms such as digital text, mp3/spoken, and of course Braille. The service has been going on since the 1930s, and makes these materials available to a wider audience than might otherwise get access. (In the 1980s, an attempt was made to drop the magazine, but it was re-instated after a court battle.) A friend of mine, Thomas Dell, had a copy and I brought it to the Archive, where we decided to scan it in.

For many folks, the Internet Archive is the group that houses the Wayback Machine, a miraculous petabytes-large collection of archived web pages that show progression of the World Wide Web since the 1990s, a browsable museum that grants near-instant access to over a decade and a half of information, much of it located nowhere else. To make this marvel work, a lot of engineering, planning and coding has gone into place, much of which is not instantly obvious as you go looking for that special page you saw once but which is now gone.

But the Archive is also the location of much more, including what I want to talk about today: an amazing, globe-spanning book scanner operation that is currently bringing in a fantastic amount of scanned books from a huge variety of sources. What rates as a fantastic amount? Try over one thousand books a day. Checking the internal statistics, I see an average of 47 books added every hour for the last year, which means a book is being added to the archives every 90 seconds.

How is this possible? I figured I’d find out.

So, I took my copy of Playboy and brought it over to the scanning center, where I was greeted by an impressive array of equipment and staff who can bring in so much so quickly.

There are lots of these scanning centers affiliated with or run by the Internet Archive worldwide, often in alliance with libraries or academic institutions, bringing in a whole range of materials – not just books. Audio, video, microfiche and a few other mediums are being brought in via a very well engineered combination of machines, processes and trained staff. This link gives a lot of information if you’re a group who has a bunch of books to scan in and want a great open service to work with.

There’s a bunch of incoming material to these scanning centers, and items patiently wait next to the equipment for their big chance. On another side of the room are the items on their way out, where they’re being made available for auditing, quality control and verification. Eventually these books might go back to donating institutions or to the Physical Archive, the recent addition to the Internet Archive’s family of projects. They’ll go into deep storage should the originals be needed again.

Venus, who was running the shift that day, allowed me to jump this queue with my strange little artifact (Officially “Playboy:Braille Edition, February 1992, Part 3 of 4, Volume 39 Number 2″) and run it through the scanning process.

It had already been assigned a unique identifier, playboybraile00nlsu, which makes it easy to find later, account for, and find on the web afterwards. A barcode reader at the scanning station assures it’s in the system.

The setup took longer than the majority of books do because these Braille issues are oversized, an odd color (kind of a paper bag consistency) and more like a newspaper stapled through than a standard binding. This was very informative, because the crew has a variety of tests and tools to make sure the scans are as good as they can be, including foam bracing, dowels, and shims. They tried a variety of approaches before settling on one.

Once the arrangement had been decided on, the calibration worked out, the lights adjusted and the process begun, it went very fast – this 98-page book was scanned in less than five minutes, and I only got a shot or two of the process. The Scribe system works very efficiently and someone trained with the system can work smoothly, with no damage or stress to the book or binding. Good thing, too – while the Playboy is only 19 years young, some of the books scanned have been around for centuries and wish to continue to do so.

Personally, this little note on the machines does it best to bring it home for me,  reminding that the goal is to scan one thousand pages an hour, and to shoot for eight thousand pages a day. Now imagine the multiple stations in this location, and the locations all over the world, and you begin to see how much is being done here.

I took back the Playboy and a few hours later, after a process of deriving the original scans into a whole host of convenient formats such as PDF, DjVu, and Epub, a Braille version of Playboy can now be seen on archive.org.

Now, I will be the very first to admit – the result is pretty silly. You’ve got something that needs to be read by touching it, which can’t be touched, and the two-sided indentations on the paper means it all looks pretty darn strange. So on one hand, it all can seem pretty useless.

But what can we learn by clicking on the link? Well, we find out that this sort of thing exists at all, and why, and what it looks like, and how Braille can be printed on both sides, and that it would take four copies to produce the text of a single issue… and that apparently, there’s no centerfold.

If you’ve not given the Archive a chance as a place to check out books, you should head on over to the OpenLibrary or the main Internet Archive site, where there are millions of books waiting for you, your friends, your family, your school.. and where it’s not just a scan of Braille, but some truly stunning works, like:

It’s all right there, waiting for you, an endless and amazing supply of information, research, entertainment and learning brought in by this spectacular group. May I suggest a browse?

And remember, if anyone catches you reading that issue of Playboy we’ve been discussing and whose journey we got to witness… just claim you were truly, honestly reading it for the articles.

Posted in Books Archive | 11 Comments

Open Hardware: Inexpensive Enclosures From Junction Boxes.

Posted on August 5, 2011 by daniel

I had a need for a cheap, standard enclosure for a humidity and temperature monitoring project. While there are many, many options for enclosures out there, few are cheap AND locally available. It occurred to me that electrical junction boxes are widely available, inexpensive, and consistently dimensioned.

So, off to Home Depot I went, wallet and calipers in tow. There were a few attractive junction boxes, each around $1 each:

Raco 1-Gang Drawn Square Box
Model # 8190 Home Depot SKU # 587799

Raco 1-Gang Welded Square Box
Model # 8189 Home Depot SKU # 201863

Carlon 2-Gang 20 cu. in. Switch and Outlet Box
Model # A521DE-CARR Home Depot SKU # 271612

There was even a blue plastic cover!

But, on closer inspection, the cover turned out to be unsuitable. It’s made of PVC, which cannot be cut or marked on the laser. Etching or cutting PVC on the laser forms gaseous hydrochloric acid, which is toxic, corrosive, and voids the warranty on your laser cutter. Don’t cut PVC/Vinyl on the laser if you value your health, safety, and/or warranty. Incidentally, if you are buying a used laser, always look for signs of rust around the optics/cutting area. Rust is a good indicator that the laser was abused in this particular way.

After some iteration on cheap 1/4″ import Baltic Birch plywood…

I came up with this — a simple, Open Hardware cover and liner system for junction boxes. If you have access to a laser cutter, you can now make custom project boxes, suitable for holding Arduino AND a shield, in minutes. It’s as simple as a top plate and a bottom plate – the bottom plate designed to insulate the Arduino or other electronics from the metal box. Of course, as pictured above, you can also use the blue PVC boxes while retaining the laserability of this cover.

Here’s a nice shot showing some of the better features of this setup. First, by knocking out one of the knock-outs on the side, it is possible to feed in ethernet, USB, and sensor cables with room to spare. Second, even with the insulating plate in place, there is enough room for Arduino with a shield and header pins sticking up. Third, the box comes with screws suitable for fixing the cover in place. Pretty slick, and very cheap.

This is Open Hardware.

The Internet Archive is pretty excited about Open Hardware, and most or all of my work here will be released as such. This is release number 1 of many. Here is the artwork. (this link will be updated shortly).

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Hardware | 14 Comments

LEARNING FROM RECORDED MEMORY: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference

Posted on August 3, 2011 by internetarchive

LEARNING FROM RECORDED MEMORY: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference

Co-sponsored by Internet Archive and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Tisch School of the Arts

Wednesday, August 24, 4:00-6:00 pm; reception follows

New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Michelson Theater, New York, NY 10003

This conference highlights work by scholars using television news materials to help us understand how TV news presented the events of 9/11/2001 and the international response. Our collective recollection of 9/11 and the following days has become inseparable from the televised images we have all seen. But while TV news is inarguably the most vivid and pervasive information medium of our time, it has not been a medium of record. As the number of news outlets increases, research and scholarly access to the thousands of hours of TV news aired each day grows increasingly difficult. Scholars face great challenges in identifying, locating and adequately citing television news broadcasts in their research.

The 9/11 Television News Archive (http://archive.org/details/911) contains 3,000 hours of national and international news coverage from 20 channels over the seven days beginning September 11, plus select analysis by scholars. It is designed to assist scholars and journalists researching relationships between news events and coverage, engaging in comparative and longitudinal studies, and investigating “who said what when.” What kinds of research and scholarship will be enabled by access to an online database of TV news broadcasts? How will emerging TV news studies make use of this service? This conference offers contemporary insights and predictions on new directions in television news studies.

SCHEDULE

4:00:  Welcome: Richard Allen, Chair, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
4:05:  Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive
4:15:  Brian A. Monahan, Iowa State University
4:25:  Deborah Jaramillo, Boston University
4:35:  Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt Television News Archive
4:45:  Mark J Williams, Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College
4:55:  Carolyn Brown, American University
5:05:  Michael Lesk, Rutgers University
5:15:  Beatrice Choi, New York University
5:25:  Scott Blake, Artist
5:35:  Discussion
6:00:  Reception (Remarks by Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations, Fox Television)

SPEAKERS

Welcome: Richard Allen, Chair, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

 

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive

“Introducing the 9/11 TV News Archive”

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive in 1996.   An entrepreneur and Internet pioneer, Brewster invented the first Internet publishing system and helped put newspapers and publishers online in the 1990′s.  

 

Brian A. Monahan, Iowa State University

“Mediated Meanings and Symbolic Politics: Exploring the Continued Significance of 9/11 News Coverage”

In-depth analysis of television news coverage of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath reveals how these events were fashioned into “9/11,” the politically and morally charged signifier that has profoundly shaped public perception, policy and practice in the last decade.  The central argument is that patterned representations of 9/11 in news media and other arenas fueled the transformation of September 11 into a morality tale centered on patriotism, victimization and heroes.  The resulting narrow and oversimplified public understanding of 9/11 has dominated public discourse, obscured other interpretations and marginalized debate about the contextual complexities of these events. Understanding how and why the coverage took shape as it did yields new insights into the social, cultural and political consequences of the attacks, while also highlighting the role of news media in the creation, affirmation and dissemination of meanings in modern life.

Brian Monahan has extensively researched news coverage of 9/11, resulting in a number of scholarly presentations and a book, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 (2010, NYU Press).

 

 

Deborah Jaramillo, Boston University

“Fighting Ephemerality: Seeing TV News through the Lens of the Archive”

The experience of watching the news on TV as events unfold is often complicated by the space of exhibition — typically, the domestic space. When hour upon hour of news is catalogued and archived — placed in a space of focused study — the news and the experience become altogether different. What was meant to be ephemeral acquires permanence, and what is usually a short-term viewing experience becomes a rigorous, frame-by-frame examination. In this presentation I will discuss how the archive challenges researchers to adopt new ways of seeing and explaining TV news.

Deborah L. Jaramillo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Television, Boston University.

 

Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt Television News Archive

“An Overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive”

Marshall Breeding will give a brief overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and how it carries out its mission to preserve and provide access to US national television news.   He will relate the incredibly diverse kinds of use that the archive receives, including: academic scholarly research; individuals seeking coverage of themselves or family members that may have appeared on the news in life-changing events; those needing historic footage for current journalism, documentaries or other creative works; or corporations or non-profits researching news coverage of their vested topics.  Breeding will also outline some of the constraints it faces in how it provides access to its collection.

Marshall Breeding is the Executive Director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the Director for Innovative Technology and Research for the Vanderbilt University Library.

 

Mark J. Williams, Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College

“Media Ecology and Online News Archives”

Online TV news archives are a crucial digital resource to facilitate the awareness
of and critical study of Media Ecology.  The 9/11 TV News Archive will fundamentally
enhance our capacity for the study of historical TV newscasts. Two significant
research and teaching outcomes for this area of study are A) to better understand
the role of television news regarding the mediation of society and its popular
memory, and B) to underscore the significance of television news to the goal of
an informed citizenry.  The 9/11 TV News Archive will enhance and ensure the continued
study of the indelible tragic events and aftermath of 9/11, and make possible
new interventions within journalism history and media history, via online capacities
for access and collaboration.

Mark J. Williams is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College.

 

Carolyn Brown, American University

“Documentation and Access: A Latino/a Studies Perspective on Using Video Archives”

This talk will explore the possibilities and potential of using accessible video news archives in two areas: immigration research in the field of communication and documentary journalism. I will speak of the significance of video news archives in my current film, The Salinas Project, and discuss my continuing research on Latino/as and immigration in the news.

Carolyn Brown is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at American University. She produced daily news shows for MSNBC News and Fox News Channel, and has worked as a producer and senior producer in local news in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix.

 

Michael Lesk, Rutgers University

“Image Analysis for Media Study”

Focusing on television news coverage of the 9/11 attacks, this talk will outline strategies for automatic quantitative analysis of television news imagery.

After receiving a PhD degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories, where he worked until 1984. From 1984 to 1995 he managed the computer science research group at Bellcore, then joined the National Science Foundation as head of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, and since 2003 has been Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University, and chair of that department 2005-2008. He is best known for work in electronic libraries, and his book “Practical Digital Libraries” was published in 1997 by Morgan Kaufmann and the revision “Understanding Digital Libraries” appeared in 2004.  He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the Flame award from the Usenix association, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He chairs the NRC Board on Research Data and Information.

 

Beatrice Choi, New York University

“Live Dispatch: The Ethics of Audio Vision Media Coverage in Trauma and the Legacy of Sound from Shell Shock to 9/11″

What experiential narratives—sensory, aesthetic and political—are invisible to those exposed to traumatic events? Considering September 11, 2001, the media coverage of the event is predominantly visual. People drift in and out of news footage, covered in dust and ash as they exclaim that witnessing the attacks was like watching a movie . In contrast, the wailing of sirens, the staccato thud of feet running from the stricken towers, and the chaotic overlap of voices break through—sometimes even swallow—the visual narratives spun for 9/11. For contemporary American traumatic events, this inquires into how porous the sensory modalities are in experiencing and remembering shock. How, after all, do sensory representations of traumatic events leave in/visible marks on documentation? I address these questions by exploring sound as an alternate modality, evoking a different level of traumatic indexicality. First, I draw attention to the sensory discrepancy between audio and visual content dispersed for American traumatic events, taking 9/11 as the focal event. By investigating the most highly represented media vehicles in the event—television and radio—I delve into a critical visual-acoustic analysis, looking specifically at FDNY radio transmissions and NY1 Aircheck news footage. Finally, I examine the discursive legacy sound imparts in moments of American crisis from shell shock accounts in the late 19th – 20th century to post-9/11 narratives of post-traumatic symptoms. In delineating this legacy, I hope to reveal the ways in which these documented discourses evolve past preconceived sensory boundaries in the experience of trauma.

Beatrice Choi is an NYU MA Graduate from the Media Culture Communication program. She has worked with the 9/11 archives for a year as a Moving Imagery Exhibitions Intern at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and recently completed a thesis on Post-Traumatic Landscapes, focusing primarily on post-Katrina New Orleans.

 

Scott Blake, artist

“9/11 Flipbook and Quantitative Media Study”

Scott Blake has created a flipbook consisting of images of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Accompanying the images are essays written by a wide range of participants, each expressing their personal experience of the September 11th attacks. In addition, the authors of the essays were asked to reflect on, and respond to, the flipbook itself. Not surprisingly, the majority of the essayists experienced the events through news network footage. Blake is distributing his 9/11 Flipbooks to encourage a constructive dialog regarding the media’s participation in sensationalizing the tragedy. To further illustrate his point, Blake conducted a media study using the 9/11 TV News Archive to count the number of times major news networks showed the plane crashes, building collapses and people falling from the towers on September 11, 2001.

While best known for his Barcode Art, Scott Blake has created new works that are scandalous, witty, fun, pornographic, humorous and about a thousand other adjectives viewers might use when seeing them for the first time. A self-described “frivolous artist,” he mows over conceptual and visual boundaries to make work that is as thought provoking as it is entertainingly tongue-in-cheek.

RECEPTION

Remarks by Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations, Fox Television

THANKS TO

We thank the many people at New York University and Internet Archive who have helped to make this conference possible.

Posted in Event, News, tv archive | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Rosetta Project’s Record-A-Thon at the Internet Archive tomorrow

Posted on July 29, 2011 by internetarchive

The Rosetta Project is trying to record 50 or more languages in one day in a Record-A-Thon event.  If you’re in the San Francisco area, stop by the Internet Archive’s offices tomorrow to participate.  The event was covered in the New York Times today.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

In-Library eBook Lending Program Expands to 1,000 Libraries

Posted on June 25, 2011 by internetarchive

Internet Archive announces 1,000 Library Partners from 6 countries have joined to build and lend a pool of 100,000+ eBooks; Extending the Traditional In-Library Lending Model.

San Francisco, CA – Today, the Internet Archive announced that the 1,000th library from 6 countries has joined its In-Library eBook Lending Program. Led by the Internet Archive, patrons may borrow eBooks from a new, cooperative 100,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books on OpenLibrary.org, a site where it’s already possible to read over 1 million eBooks without restriction. During a library visit, patrons with an OpenLibrary.org account can borrow any of these lendable eBooks using laptops, reading devices or library computers. This new twist on the traditional lending model could increase eBook use and revenue for publishers.

“As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “To grow from 150 great, forward-thinking libraries in Feb. 2011 to 1,000 libraries today, suggests that there is a true need for this type of program. We, as libraries,  want to buy eBooks to lend to our patrons.” (See the partial list of participating libraries below.)

This new digital lending system will enable patrons of participating libraries to read books in a web browser. “In Silicon Valley, iPads and other reading devices are hugely popular. Our partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org is crucial to achieving our mission — to meet the reading needs of our library visitors and our community,” said Linda Crowe, Executive Director of the Peninsula Library System.

A recent survey of libraries across North America was conducted by Unisphere Research and Information Today, Inc. (ITI). It reported that of the 1,201 libraries canvassed, 73% are seeing increased demand for digital resources with 67% reporting increased demand for wireless access and 62% seeing a surge in demand for web access.

American libraries spend $3-4 billion each year on publishers’ products. “I’m not suggesting we spend less, I am suggesting we spend smarter by buying and lending more eBooks,” asserted Kahle. He is also encouraging libraries worldwide to join in the expansion of this pool of purchased and digitized eBooks so their patrons can borrow from this larger collection.

How It Works
Any OpenLibrary.org account holder can borrow up to 5 eBooks at a time, for up to 2 weeks. Books can only be borrowed by one person at a time. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (viewed using the Internet Archive’s BookReader web application), or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the free Adobe Digital Editions software. This new technology follows the lead of the Google eBookstore, which sells books from many publishers to be read using Google’s books-in-browsers technology. Readers can use laptops, library computers and tablet devices, including the iPad.

What Participating Libraries Are Saying
The reasons for joining the initiative vary from library to library. Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida, said, “We have hundreds of books that are too brittle to circulate. This digitize-and-lend system allows us to provide access to these older books without endangering the physical copy.”

“Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers…”
Richard Nash
Founder of Cursor, Publisher

Digital lending also offers wider access to one-of-a-kind or rare books on specific topics such as family histories — popular with genealogists. This pooled collection will enable libraries like the Boston Public Library and the Allen County Public Library in Indiana to share their materials with genealogists around the state, the country and the world.

“Genealogists are some of our most enthusiastic users, and the Boston Public Library holds some genealogy books that exist nowhere else,” said Amy E. Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library. “This lending system allows our users to search for names in these books for the first time, and allows us to efficiently lend some of these books to visitors at distant libraries.”

“Reciprocal sharing of genealogy resources is crucial to family history research. The Allen County Public Library owns the largest public genealogy collection in the country, and we want to make our resources available to as many people as possible. Our partnership in this initiative offers us a chance to reach a wider audience,” said Jeffrey Krull, Director of the Allen County Public Library.

Publishers selling their eBooks to participating libraries include Cursor and OR Books. Books purchased will be lent to readers as well as being digitally preserved for the long-term. This continues the traditional relationship and services offered by publishers and libraries.

Jo Budler, Kansas State Librarian, comments, “Kansas librarians are very excited about offering this downloadable service to the residents of Kansas.  Historically Kansas librarians have been strong supporters of collaborative endeavors.  This project fits very nicely with projects undertaken in the past, and with the desire to continue to offer excellent customer service and new services into the future.”

“Creating digital structures that support access to content through public libraries is imperative. The Digital In-Library Lending project is a beginning. California is delighted to be involved a project that will create more online access to content for Californians” said Californian State Librarian Stacey Aldrich.

John Oakes, founder of OR Books, said, “We’re always on the lookout for innovative solutions to solve the conundrum of contemporary publishing, and we are excited to learn about the Internet Archive’s latest project. For us, it’s a way to extend our reach to the crucial library market. We look forward to the results.”

For More Information
Here are some eBooks that are only available to people in participating libraries.
Libraries interested in partnering in this program should contact: info@archive.org.
To use this service, please visit a participating library:

###

List of Participating Libraries

Aboite Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Dupont Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Georgetown Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Grabill Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Hessen Cassel Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Little Turtle Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Main Library, Allen County Public Library

Monroeville Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

New Haven Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Pontiac Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Shawnee Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Tecumseh Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Waynedale Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Woodburn Branch Library, Allen County Public Library

Adams Street Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Brighton Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Charlestown Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Codman Square Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Connolly Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Dudley Branch Library, Boston Public Library

East Boston Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Egleston Square Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Faneuil Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Fields Corner Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Grove Hall Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Honan-Allston Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Hyde Park Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Jamaica Plain Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Lower Mills Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Mattapan Branch Library, Boston Public Library

North End Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Orient Heights Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Parker Hill Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Roslindale Branch Library, Boston Public Library

South Boston Branch Library, Boston Public Library

South End Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Uphams Corner Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Washington Village Branch Library, Boston Public Library

West End Branch Library, Boston Public Library

West Roxbury Branch Library, Boston Public Library

Internet Archive

MBLWHOI Library, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Atherton Library, Atherton, California

Bay Shore Library, Daly City, California

Belmont Library, Belmont, California

Brisbane Library, Brisbane, California

Burlingame Public Library, Burlingame, California

Burlingame Library Easton Branch, Burlingame, California

Cañada College Library, Redwood City, California

College of San Mateo Library, San Mateo, California

East Palo Alto Library, East Palo Alto, California

Fair Oaks Library, Redwood City, California

Foster City Library, Foster City, California

Grand Avenue Branch Library, South San Francisco, California

Half Moon Bay Library, Half Moon Bay, California

Hillsdale Branch Library, San Mateo, California

John Daly Library, Daly City, California

Marina Public Library, San Mateo, California

Menlo Park Library, Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park Library Belle Haven Branch, Menlo Park, California

Millbrae Library, Millbrae, California

Pacifica Sanchez Library, Pacifica, California

Pacifica Sharp Park Library, Pacifica, California

Portola Valley Library, Portola Valley, California

Redwood City Public Library, Redwood City, California

Redwood Shores Branch Library, Redwood City, California

San Bruno Library, San Bruno, California

San Carlos Library, San Carlos, California

San Mateo Public Library, San Mateo, California

Schaberg Library, Redwood City, California

Serramonte Main Library, Daly City, California

Skyline College Library, San Bruno, California

South San Francisco Public Library, South San Francisco, California

Westlake Library, Daly City, California

Woodside Library, Woodside, California

Anza Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Bayview/Anna E. Waden Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Bernal Heights, San Francisco Public Library

Chinatown/Him Mark Lai Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Excelsior, San Francisco Public Library

Glen Park Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Golden Gate Valley Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Ingleside Branch, San Francisco Public Library

San Francisco Public Library, Main

Marina, San Francisco Public Library

Merced Branch Library, San Francisco Public Library

Mission, San Francisco Public Library

Mission Bay, San Francisco Public Library

Noe Valley/Sally Brunn Branch, San Francisco Public Library

North Beach Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Ocean View, San Francisco Public Library

Ortega, San Francisco Public Library

Park Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Parkside, San Francisco Public Library

Portola Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Potrero Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Presidio Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Richmond/Senator Milton Marks Branch, San Francisco Public Library

Sunset, San Francisco Public Library

Visitacion Valley, San Francisco Public Library

West Portal, San Francisco Public Library

Western Addition, San Francisco Public Library

The Urban School of San Francisco

Augustana Campus Library, University of Alberta

Bibliothèque Saint-Jean (BSJ), University of Alberta

Cameron Library, University of Alberta

Herbert T. Coutts (Education & Physical Education) Library, University of Alberta

Rutherford Library, University of Alberta

John A. Weir Memorial Law Library, University of Alberta

John W. Scott Health Sciences Library, University of Alberta

Winspear Business Reference Library, University of Alberta

Architecture and Fine Arts Library, University of Florida

Education Library, University of Florida

Health Science Center Library, University of Florida

Borland Library, University of Florida

Veterinary Medicine Reading Room, University of Florida

Allen H. Neuharth Journalism and Communications Library, University of Florida

Library West, University of Florida

Marston Science Library, University of Florida

Mead Library, University of Florida

Music Library, University of Florida

Smathers Library (East), University of Florida

Robarts Library, University of Toronto

Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto

Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University

E J Pratt Library, Victoria University

Emmanuel College Library, Victoria University

Posted in Announcements, Books Archive, News | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

new audio/video player — safari/IE improvements

Posted on June 25, 2011 by traceypooh

below the current audio/video player on archive.org you have probably seen by now the link:

Would you like to try our new audio/video player? (beta!)

We had some known problems in this beta rollout that affected audio MP3 playback.

Specifically, on Safari, some 30-70% of the time (and it varied widely) the MP3 loading/setup would fail.  This has been fixed.   On Internet Explorer, we didn’t have the MP3 “flash based playback” option setup using the new audio player — and the lead developer, Michael Dale, came over today and fixed that for us.   Hooray!

So at this point, I believe the audio/video player is true “beta” — feature complete with a few things to smooth out left but the finish line is close:

1) i need to add back in captions/subtitles (it’s there in the player, just need to feed them through with our playlist)

2) video items with 3+ videos may play the last video 2x.  working on that!  8-)

hopefully, we can all listen to some nice archive music this weekend in peace without issues with this new player!  now grab your headphones or turn up those speakers…

-tracey

Posted in Audio Archive, Live Music Archive | Tagged , , | 26 Comments

Our Newest Addition – Film Scanning

Posted on June 24, 2011 by internetarchive

Müller Framescanner

We’re pretty excited about the film-to-digital scanner we just received. It is the first Müller Framescanner in the United States. It is the first film scanner in the world that supports all movie formats up to super 16 mm.

It scans Regular 8, Super 8, Pathé 9.5, 16 mm, Super 16m film and the images are stored as data.

Break out those home movies!

-Jeff Kaplan

Posted in News | 10 Comments

HTTP Archive joins with Internet Archive

Posted on June 15, 2011 by internetarchive

It was announced today that HTTP Archive has become part of Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive provides an archive of web site content through the Wayback Machine, but we do not capture data about the performance of web sites.  Steve Souders’s HTTP Archive started capturing and archiving this sort of data in October 2010 and has expanded the number of sites covered to 18,000 with the help of Pat Meenan and WebPagetest.

Steve Souders will continue to run the HTTP Archive project, and we hope to expand its reach to 1 million sites.  To this end, the Internet Archive is accepting donations for the HTTP Archive project to support the growth of the infrastructure necessary to increase coverage.  The following companies have already agreed to support the project: Google, Mozilla, New Relic, O’Reilly Media, Etsy, Strangeloop, and dynaTrace Software. Coders are also invited to participate in the open source project.

Internet Archive is excited about archiving another aspect of the web for both present day and future researchers.

Posted in News, Wayback Machine | 6 Comments