Internet Archive to Receive 400,000 Dissertations from Leiden University

From https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/news/2024/10/he-internet-archive-takes-over-foreign-dissertations-from-ubl

Last month, the UBL announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. We are happy to report now that The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection.

The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. As Leiden University Libraries has limited space for growth in its stacks, it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions. The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy. The Internet Archive will now take over this collection from the UBL, and will take care of its future preservation and access. The UBL is pleased that The Internet Archive is able to give this collection of foreign dissertations a second life.

Shortwave Radio: A Unique Collection from the Cold War Era

It was the mid-1980s, Chuck Vesei developed a fascination with shortwave radio. He used his portable radio to tune into shortwave broadcasts from around the globe. Because shortwave signals can travel farther than regular AM or FM broadcasts, Chuck heard voices and music from across continents.

Listening to the far-flung signals, foreign languages, and different types of music let Chuck discover the world far beyond his hometown. Those international radio stations broadcast news, religious programming, government propaganda, cultural programs, and educational content.

QSL card from Radio Kuwait
QSL card from Radio Kuwait

Tuning in was just one aspect of his hobby: he also sent postal mail to the remote radio stations that he heard. Those stations sent replies. He received airmail containing broadcasting schedules, newsletters, and handwritten notes from broadcasters. The stations sent trinkets such as QSL cards, stickers, and pennants. Chuck ended up with stacks of mail from radio stations. He saved all of it.

But Chuck wasn’t just any shortwave fan: Chuck Vesei was a high school student in Niles, Michigan.

Almost four decades later, he donated the collection to the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, the entire collection is online. The Chuck Vesei Shortwave Radio Artifacts collection has hundreds of items that he received from shortwave broadcasters from 1984 to 1986.

The collection is a rich snapshot of Cold War-era radio, including broadcast schedules and program guides from Radio Baghdad, Radio Kiev, Radio Japan and many others. There’s a Christmas card from Voice of Free China, a card commemorating Radio Havana’s 25th anniversary in 1986, and wall calendars from Radio Beijing. Chuck also received hundreds of QSL cards — postcards confirming reception of a broadcast, each with unique designs and photos depicting the region and culture — and QSL pennants, collectable flags made of cloth or paper.

Three radio pennants: from Radio Canada, Radio France, and UAE Radio and Television in Dubai
QSL Pennants

“I developed an intense fascination with short wave radio, DXing, asking for QSLs from international broadcasters, and old radios in general,” Chuck said. “I grew up in a bilingual (Hungarian) household which cultivated a deeper interest in the world at large and especially with nations and cultures behind the Iron Curtain. In the mid-80’s the Cold War was in full swing and this type of thing was extremely fascinating to a teenager like me.”

He started with a Uniden CR-2021 portable radio, and over the months acquired a few more radios, including a Hallicrafters S-40 receiver and a Heathkit GC-1A Mohican receiver that his father built in the 1960s. “My father was an engineer who had a lot of expertise with old radios. I was fascinated by how radio signals could travel so far and under different atmospheric conditions.” His father’s engineering background inspired Chuck’s appreciation of radio’s magic: how signals could travel immense distances, influenced by the atmosphere and time of day.

Today, thanks to Chuck’s foresight in preserving these artifacts, anyone with an internet connection can step back into the 1980s and experience the wonder of shortwave radio as Chuck did—a high schooler in a small town, tuning in to a much larger world.

Experience this remarkable collection firsthand at Chuck Vesei Shortwave Radio Artifacts. It’s just a slice of the material available at Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.

QSL Card from Radio Beijing features an expressively drawn tiger

Vanishing Culture: Keeping the Receipts

The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

On August 13, 1961, the Sunday edition of The Honolulu Advertiser published its official Health Bureau Statistics (“Births, Marriages, Deaths”); on page B-6, in the leftmost column—just below the ads for luau supplies and Carnation Evaporated Milk—the twenty-second of twenty-five birth notices announced that on August 4, Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway had given birth to a son. The Honolulu State Library subsequently copied that page, along with the rest of the newspaper, onto microfilm, as a routine addition to its archive. Decades later, as Donald Trump and his fellow “birthers” tried to deceive the public about the birthplace of the 44th president, researchers were able to read the item in its original, verified context, preserved on its slip of plastic film.

A dramatic fate like that one awaits very few reels of microfilm, but the story underscores the crucial importance of authentication, and of archiving. Verifying and making sense of records—books, photos, government documents, magazines, newspapers, films, academic papers—is a never-ending task undertaken not only by historians but also by researchers, journalists, and students in every branch of learning: in the sciences, in medicine, in literature and philosophy and sociology. This is scholarship—the job of sieving over and over through the past, to research the truth of it, to reflect on and comprehend it, in the hope of providing people with useful observations, ideas, and help. That’s why we need records as detailed and accurate as we can make them; that’s the ultimate value of librarianship and archival work.

When people foolishly—and even dangerously—imagine that the past won’t matter to the future, the chance to preserve history evaporates. We live in times of increasing book bans and censorship and fast-deteriorating online archives. Some writers are even willing to deny the lasting value of their own work, shrugging off its place in a unique cultural moment. In July, when the archive of MTV News was summarily vaporized, contributor Kat Rosenfield wrote dismissively of her own work there:

So much of what we—what I—produced was utterly frivolous and intentionally disposable, in a way that certain types of journalism have always been. The listicles and clickbait of early aughts culture may differ in many ways from the penny press tabloids of the 1800s, but in this, they are the same: They are meant to be thrown away.

It’s a shocking thing, to hear a journalist say that the writing of the 19th-century penny press was “meant to be thrown away.” The rise of the penny press represents a key moment in the democratization of media; Benjamin Henry Day, founder of the first such newspaper in the U.S., The New York Sun (“It Shines For All”), is a towering figure in the history of journalism. (His son, Benjamin Henry Day Jr., invented Ben-Day dots!)

Day offered nonpartisan newspapers at a cheap price to a mass working-class audience—a fascinating mix of hard-hitting news, sensationalistic crime reports, and plain whoppers. The Sun ran a deranged report of winged people living on the moon, and it also broke the story of the Crédit Mobilier/Union Pacific corruption scandal in 1872, which brought down a whole herd of Republican congressmen, plus then-Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Day’s rivals, James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley, founders of The Herald and The New York Tribune, respectively, were no less momentous figures in the history of news media. Their sociological, cultural and political impact reverberates still: Bennett’s racist, segregationist views were hot issues in a New York Times story published just a few years ago, and a kaleidoscopically weird July op-ed in the Idaho State Journal called vice presidential candidate JD Vance “A Horace Greeley for Our Century,” despite the fact that Vance is a far-right reactionary conservative, in sharp contrast to Horace Greeley, who held openly socialist, feminist, egalitarian views. 

***

Pace Rosenfield, we can count ourselves fortunate that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved nearly half a million articles at MTV News; because of the Wayback Machine, future readers will have access to primary source materials on Peter Gabriel’s social activism, MTV News’s Peabody Award-winning “Choose or Lose” voter information campaign, early coverage of the allegations against pop icon Michael Jackson—and all the details and facts that will be available to provide crucial background and verification for stories we can’t yet imagine.

What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.”

Maria Bustillos, journalist and editor

The MTV News archive joins the archives of Gawker, the LA Weekly, and many other shuttered digital-native publications that would have disappeared entirely from the internet but for the Wayback Machine. Many leading journalists have greeted the Wayback Machine’s archival efforts with relief, and not only because it means preserving access to their own clips. They want all the receipts to be kept.

Tommy Craggs, a former executive editor at Gawker, expressed this idea back in 2018: “There should be a record of your fuck-ups and your triumphs, too.” He viewed Gawker’s archive as a valuable “record of how life was lived and covered on the internet for an era. Taking that away [would be] leaving a huge hole in our understanding.”

***

What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.” The records we are keeping now—filled as they are with contradictions, uncertainties and errors—are all that tomorrow can inherit from today. Each teeming, incoherent moment succeeds the last, Now upon Now, wave upon wave of recordings and photographs, testimonials and accounts—true, false, and everything in between—gathered together by librarians and archivists and hurled forward like a Hail Mary pass into the future. 

In other words, nothing is “meant to be thrown away.” Nothing. People may someday want to look into what happened in any part of the world, among any of its people, at any time; and every researcher, reader, and writer will have their own ideas, ideas that we might find incomprehensible now, about what’s worth keeping.

About the author

Maria Bustillos is an editor and journalist in favor of equality, press freedom, libraries, archives, beauty, and fun.

Aruba to Receive 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award for Groundbreaking Digital Heritage Initiatives

Leopold Tromp, age 18, native Aruban, Apprentice on Pressure Still operation (#4525, Lago, Aruba, April-May 1944). From Coleccion Aruba: https://archive.org/details/BNA-DIG-LAGO-MORRIS-001-04525

In a world where digital access to knowledge is increasingly vital, the island nation of Aruba has taken bold steps to ensure its cultural heritage is preserved and accessible for generations to come. We are thrilled to announce that Aruba will be honored with the 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award at our annual celebration on October 23 in San Francisco and online.

The Internet Archive Hero Award is presented annually to individuals, organizations, or nations that have shown exceptional leadership in expanding access to knowledge and supporting the digital preservation of cultural and historical materials. Recipients of the award exemplify the values of openness, accessibility, and collaboration that are essential to a free and informed global society. Previous recipients have included librarian and copyright expert Michelle Wu, public access advocate Carl Malamud, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the Grateful Dead.

Aruba’s Commitment to Preservation and Access 

Aruba’s commitment to preserving its history and culture through digital initiatives has been nothing short of visionary. Earlier this year, the nation launched Coleccion Aruba, a digital heritage portal that provides free global access to its historical materials and cultural treasures. The initiative ensures that Aruba’s rich history—its documents, artifacts, and stories—are accessible to the world, helping to safeguard its national identity in the digital age. You can learn more about the launch of this groundbreaking collection here.

From left: Mrs. Astrid Britten, Director of the National Library Aruba; Mr. Raymond Hernandez, Director National Archives of Aruba; and Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive, at the signing of the Statement Protecting Digital Rights of Memory Institutions, April 9, 2024.

In another historic first, Aruba became the first country to officially endorse the Statement Protecting Digital Rights of Memory Institutions, recognizing the importance of libraries, archives, and museums in preserving digital cultural heritage. By supporting this statement, Aruba set a powerful precedent for nations worldwide to protect the digital rights of libraries and memory institutions. You can read more about Aruba’s leadership in this area here.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, praised Aruba’s commitment to the digital preservation of cultural heritage, describing the nation’s efforts as “a beacon of hope in the global movement to safeguard history in the digital era.” In his reflections on Aruba’s leadership, Brewster wrote that “Aruba’s bold support of library digital rights shows what is possible when nations value not just their own history, but the global importance of memory institutions. Their commitment sends a strong message: culture, knowledge, and history belong to everyone.” 

What the Award Means for Aruba

Reflecting on the award, the Minister of Finance and Culture, Mrs. Xiomara Maduro remarked, “We thank Internet Archive for this great honor of recognizing Aruba’s hard work and efforts in preserving and making our cultural heritage accessible through the Coleccion Aruba online platform. This award is a significant encouragement to continue our work in safeguarding our culture and history. Thank you for supporting our efforts to keep our rich cultural heritage alive and accessible for our future generations.”

Mrs. Astrid Britten, Director of the National Library Aruba: “We are beyond excited and deeply honored by this recognition from the Internet Archive. What began in 2018 with Mr. Peter Scholing at the National Library of Aruba, and our partnership with the Internet Archive, has grown into something truly remarkable. The launch of Coleccion Aruba earlier this year marks a significant milestone in our journey, and it’s inspiring to see over 150,000 digital items—more than the number of inhabitants on our island—shared globally. The involvement of the National Archives of Aruba (under the leadership of Mr. Raymond Hernandez and Mr. Edric Croes), UNOCA (Ms. Ray-Anne Hernandez), and other key partners since 2022 has strengthened our mission to ensure that Aruba’s cultural treasures are preserved and accessible, not only for our own people but for audiences far beyond our shores. Aruba’s dedication to preserving digital history and ensuring access to knowledge for all has set a new benchmark for collaboration, through innovation and partnership. This acknowledges Aruba’s impact in digital preservation.”

Mr. Raymond Hernandez, Director National Archives of Aruba: “On behalf of Coleccion Aruba, the National Archives of Aruba is deeply honored to receive the Internet Archive Hero Award. While we were never in pursuit of any awards, this recognition is a profound encouragement for the work we have been doing to preserve and share Aruba’s rich cultural heritage. This together with all of our partners as well. As a small island in the Caribbean with limited resources, our mission to make our national archives accessible to all has been driven by the belief that open access to knowledge is essential for our community and beyond. With the support of the Internet Archive, we are inspired to continue on this path and hope to serve as a model for other small island states in development, especially in the Caribbean. This award reinforces our commitment to creating a future where information is freely accessible  to all, and we are sincerely grateful for this support.”

Fotocollectie Hochstuhl, potret # 305 (1950-1960). From Coleccion Aruba: https://archive.org/details/ANA-DIG-HOCHSTUHL-305

Mrs. Ray-anne Hernandez, Managing Director UNOCA (A funding agency that cofinances Art & Cultural Projects in Aruba): “We are incredibly honored and grateful to receive the Hero Award from the Internet Archive. This recognition celebrates not only our commitment to preserving and sharing Aruba’s rich history and cultural heritage but also the invaluable collaboration with the founding partners of Coleccion Aruba: the Library of Aruba and the National Archives of Aruba. Together, we have worked passionately to make our collective history accessible to the world, and this achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the support and contributions of our many partners, both big and small. This award inspires us to continue our work with even more dedication, striving to conserve and promote Aruba’s national heritage for future generations. We are driven by our shared passion for culture and history, and we look forward to further collaborations that will continue to enrich our community and beyond. Thank you again for this prestigious recognition.”

Join Us in Celebrating

Aruba will officially receive the 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 23, 2024, in San Francisco. The event, themed “Escaping the Memory Hole,” will focus on the role of libraries and archives in preserving cultural history in the face of vanishing media. We invite you to join Aruba’s representatives and the institutions behind Coleccion Aruba for this special occasion as we celebrate this remarkable achievement and the global importance of preserving knowledge. Register now for the virtual celebration.

Having Fun in the Sun at Aruba (Postcard, ca. 1963) Sugar-white beaches at the Caribbean’s newest vacation playground. From Coleccion Aruba: https://archive.org/details/BNA-DIG-POSTCARDS-026-004

Register Now for the Virtual Library Leaders Forum

In our virtual Library Leaders Forum, you’ll hear from Internet Archive staff about our emerging library services and updates on existing efforts, including from our partners. How do libraries empower research in the 21st century? Join in our discussion!

REGISTER NOW!

Speakers from the Internet Archive include:

  • Brewster Kahle, founder & digital librarian, Internet Archive
  • Chris Freeland, library services
  • Elizabeth Macleod, book digitization
  • Liz Rosenberg, donations
  • Jude Coelho, interlibrary loan
  • Jefferson Bailey, Archive-It
  • Mek, Open Library
  • Mark Graham, Wayback Machine
  • Luca Messarra, Vanishing Culture

Community projects include:

  • Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada
  • Jennie Rose Halperin, Library Futures
  • Charlie Barlow, Boston Library Consortium
  • Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance
  • David Moore, BRIET

Library Leaders Forum 2024 – VIRTUAL
October 17 @ 10am – 11:30am PT
Register now for the free, virtual event!

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks

The following guest post from humanities scholar Katie Livingston is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once made of thin, flimsy pieces of plastic decorated with an old barn and windmill, the cover has long since fallen off and some of the pages are loose. The book is held together by three red rubber bands. My Grann explains that the plastic binder got brittle and began to fall apart—the rubber bands are her solution. The pages of the cookbook are yellowed from years of use. At least three generations of women in my family, including myself, have flipped through these pages, leaving them stained with the oils from their fingers and the drippings of in-progress recipes. Most importantly to me, they scribbled in the margins. My family’s edition of Down Home Cookin’ has reached a critical mass of notes in the marginalia such that it no longer counts as a simple copy of a cookbook: it is my Grann’s cookbook, our family cookbook. Holding it in my hands in my apartment in California (my Grann kindly agreed to mail it to me) feels off. It feels so delicate here, out of the context of her home, her kitchen, in the little cupboard where she has kept all of her cookbooks since I was a child. Now, it is more like a museum piece, something precious and precarious, meant to be handled with care, preserved, analyzed.

This sense of its history, of its fragility, of its potential for disintegrating, is why the cookbook is worth preserving, worth reading, worth moving from that little kitchen in Apache, Oklahoma, to my little kitchen in the Bay Area, to this page, to the archive. This is why all family cookbooks are worth preserving. As time presses on, this small print county cookbook, and others like it, are becoming pieces of personal family ephemera, fading into obscurity the way that other domestic objects—bills, receipts, manuals, phone books, baby books, children’s drawings, to do lists—do. Time has worked on this cookbook as my grandmother has worked from it. The pages are thin, brittle, and covered in age spots. I can imagine all the printed copies of Down Home Cookin’ tucked away in the kitchen drawers of Oklahoma women, slowly degrading, either through excessive use or mere forgetfulness.

Finding a replacement for these books is not easy. To procure a new copy, you have to mail in the old-fashioned way: to an address printed on the title page. This is the paradox of Down Home Cookin’: to obtain a copy of Down Home Cookin’, one must already have a copy of Down Home Cookin’. If one turns to the internet for permanence and reproduction,as we are apt to do these days, little can be found. Searching now reveals a few used editions floating around on eBay and one on Amazon. Unsurprisingly, the Amazon copy is marked with notes and stains. The seller writes: “pencil writing inside front cover, black marker writing on upper corner front cover written ‘(pie crust p.367’), diagonal crease on bottom back cover, and a couple of yellowed (grease?) stains on bottom of a few pages.”

If these books are not scanned, digitized, and archived, we lose not only the text of Down Home Cookin’, but also the contributed labor and knowledge of the women who owned them. Clearly, the owner of the Amazon iteration was fond of the pie crust on page 367. In another version for sale on eBay, the owner inscribed the cookbook with “C Cake” and “Caret Cake” in two locations, presumably as a reminder that this particular cookbook had her favorite carrot cake recipe.

Digitizing and archiving cookbooks challenges the assumption that a scanned book is nothing more than a poor replacement for an official ebook, something easily bought and immediately downloaded, read on a Kindle or an iPad. Scanning and archiving cookbooks documents not only their content, but also the hands that they have passed through; each copy has its own unique revisions and adjustments. Take, for instance, the annotations in the Internet Archive’s scan of A Selection of Tested Recipes, a community cookbook from Howe, Indiana. Not only does the scan capture handwritten addendums to recipes, but also pages in which the owner has added her own recipes. In an unused copy of this cookbook, these pages would otherwise be left blank. But the process of scanning and archiving these previously owned objects quite literally allows us to see the hand of the homemaker at work. 

That history is not visible for the cookbook’s digital analog: the recipe blog, perhaps the most ubiquitous means of publishing and accessing recipes today. Blogs offer little in terms of permanency and even less in terms of making the labor of recipe development visible. Though many of us have been raised on the popular phrase, “the internet is forever,” recipe blogs frequently disappear from the internet. Their content is perhaps even more precarious than that of the physical cookbook, no matter how obscure. Even more troublesome: edits, revisions, addendums and the work of recipe formation are not made evident in the form of the recipe blog. Edits become invisible, embedded in the revision history of the backend of a WordPress document rather than made visible to the naked eye.

“In the case of my Grann’s cookbook, her work and trial and error are evident. The recipe takes on the feeling of a living document.”

Katie Livingston, humanities scholar

In the case of my Grann’s cookbook, her work and trial and error are evident. The recipe takes on the feeling of a living document. Her cookbook is filled to the brim with her own clippings from news articles, her addendums, chicken scratch indicating revisions of revisions, photocopies of her mother’s recipe cards, and even her assessments of various recipes (“good, she says in the margins of the Farmer’s Haystack Pie recipe, “not great).

The cookbook, especially the community-made cookbook, does not just represent the labor and meaning-making of a single home or a single family; it acts as a tool to bind together and co-create the identities of small groups and sub-communities. While the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook has worked as a tool for nation-making (my Grann, along with thousands of other teenage girls her age, worked off that cookbook in home economics class), Down Home Cookin’ is representative of a regionally specific co-created identity of women and homemakers in Grady County, Oklahoma. As the political scientist Kennan Ferguson puts it in Cookbook Politics

These [community] cookbooks emphasize the material, the gustatory, the domestic, and the creative; they do so in order to regularize, communicate with, form, and inspire the women who are their presumed readers. In other words, they intensify. By being written, collected, sold, and passed from hand to hand, they make both the sense of belonging and the sense of community more intense (79). 

The Grady County Extension Homemakers are not ignorant to the fact of their cookbook as a tool for community building and the “intensification” of certain values and goals. The book is very clearly inscribed with its intent: to help women “gain knowledge and improve their skills in home economics and related areas so that the family unit may be strengthened, develop leadership skills, provide community service, promote international understanding, and meet new people” (454). There is even a charge that members are “friendly, helpful, full of ideas, eager to learn and believe in the home” (454).

“Preservation allows us to be critical and precise in our critiques of communal identity formation. It is not the case that all ideologies baked into the cookbook are ubiquitously good.”

Katie Livingston

Preservation allows us to be critical and precise in our critiques of communal identity formation. It is not the case that all ideologies baked into the cookbook are ubiquitously good. Ferguson touches on how many community cookbooks seem to “reinscribe the virtues of caretaking, housework, even domestic obeisance for both the book’s audience and for the authors themselves” (79). What can, on the one hand, be read as veneration for the homemaker and her work, on the other hand can also be read as a re-inscription of traditional gender roles, the gendered division of labor, and even a certain kind of nationalism through the production and maintenance of the suburban nuclear family.

Cookbooks are not only concerned with the domestic, the familiar, and the communal, but also with the Other, the foreign, and the unknown. There is an impulse, at least in the American cookbook, to bring “otherness” into the home and domesticate it for one’s own use, enjoyment, and consumption. It seems no mistake to me that the Grady Homemaker’s Extension Council promotes “international acceptance” alongside reinforcing the home, or that the 90s edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook seeks to include “more ethnic and regional favorites, such as stir-fries and gumbos, instead of standard meat and potato fare” (4).  My Grann’s cookbook contains the sections “Mexican” and “International” as a means of diversifying the offerings. And while the results are humorous (some of my favorites from this section include “Hong Kong Chicken Casserole,” in which cream of mushroom soup is a key ingredient, and “Mexican Spaghetti Casserole”), one can’t help but wonder what their inclusion means in the context of the whole.  

While these versions of taking the foreign into the domestic can be read as a good-faith effort to seek understanding and acceptance, older cookbooks take on a more voyeuristic, exploitative tone. Otherness is a popular theme in the Internet Archives’ most viewed cookbooks. Alongside the comforting title, Things Mother Used to Make” you’ll also find Southern recipe cookbooks with Mammy figures on the cover and Chinese cookbooks whose contents offer little more than several variations on “chop suey.”  If we lose these cookbooks, we risk erasing legacies of racism and culinary appropriation that proliferated throughout the twentieth century. Preservation, then, is not only about venerating our cultures and communities, but also understanding our past and present and turning a critical gaze on them when necessary.

What we preserve says a lot about what we value, what we want to bring with us in the future, and what we want to leave behind (for example, I could do without a recipe for Vienna sausages rolled in barbeque sauce and crushed Fritos). The humble cookbook may at first appear an inconsequential tool of everyday home life, but in it, one can read shifting ideologies, values, and tastes. A cookbook can make clear, through a simple collection of recipes, what a community is and isn’t, and what people seek to take into themselves and what they exclude. The pages of a cookbook can reveal the history of an individual, a family, a community, or a nation. It can make evident work that is often otherwise invisible or discarded. Most importantly, it can make you say (as Judie Fitch puts it in praise of her own recipe for Brisket Marinade): “This is really good.”

About the author

Katie Livingston is an English PhD candidate at Stanford University. With a focus on American literature from 1840-1940, Katie researches class mobility in the novel, women’s literature, and local color/regionalist fiction.

When she isn’t immersed in writing or teaching, Katie enjoys exploring the outdoors as a backpacker, hiker, and climber. She also finds joy in baking cakes, indulging in campy horror films, and spending time with her cat, Loaf.

Illuminating the Stories of Brooklynites Through Digitized Directories

The following guest post from Dee Bowers (they/them), Archives Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library Center for Brooklyn History, is part of a series written by members of the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices.

Some say as many as one in seven Americans have family roots in Brooklyn, and I expect the newly digitized Brooklyn city directories now available through the Internet Archive will get heavy use from genealogists, historians, authors, journalists, students, and even artists to trace connections to the diverse and ever-changing borough.

Black and white two-page spread of directory title page including map of Brooklyn.
Title page, Spooner’s Brooklyn Directory 1822. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

What is now the Center for Brooklyn History first joined the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program in 2017 as part of the original cohort. This program gave us the tools and training we needed to save over 2TB of web-based Brooklyn history content, including over 1,000 individual URLs. We also host our digitized high school newspapers and audiovisual material on the Internet Archive.

In addition to helping us preserve this web-based content, Community Webs has now also made it possible to increase access to our physical collections through digitization. As part of the Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections project, made possible by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we were able to partner with the Internet Archive to digitize 236 microfiche sheets of Brooklyn city directories. 

Microfiche sheet from the Brooklyn city directories, 1822. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

These directories show the movement, growth, and changing nature of immigrant populations in Brooklyn in the early to mid 19th century and help document the immigrant experience by providing data on the residency and, in some cases, ethnicities of Brooklynites over time. We knew that expanding digital access would be extremely useful to the many researchers who use our online resources, especially since our number one research topic is genealogy. The project is also directly in line with our mission:

Democratize access to Brooklyn’s history and be dedicated to expanding and diversifying representation of the history of the borough by unifying resources and expertise, and broadening reach and impact.

By increasing the visibility of these collections through digitization and freely available public access, researchers and historians will have a richer, more accessible view into the diversity of American history. The history of Brooklyn is extraordinarily diverse but, like many archives, our collections don’t always tell the fullness of those stories. By expanding access to our city directories, we provide insight into earlier residents of Brooklyn and enable diverse communities to trace their Brooklyn roots to a greater degree.

Screenshot of digitized directory page in Internet Archive viewer.
Screenshot of the early Brooklyn directories in the Internet Archive.

Here’s an example of how the directories look in the Internet Archive. In this screenshot above, they include content outside of just directory listings. In this case, there’s a chronological listing of “memoranda” – notable moments in Brooklyn history – including “June 11, 1812 – News received in Brooklyn, of the declaration of war between the United States and Great Britain.”

One example of research that can be conducted with these directories is finding out more about early Black Brooklynites. Slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, so the earliest days of post-enslavement Brooklyn are represented in the digitized directories.

Screenshot of digitized directory page in Internet Archive viewer with the purple highlighted surname “Hodges.”
Screenshot of 1857 directory on the Internet Archive with the highlighted surname “Hodges.”

By searching the text of the directories using keywords, I picked out an individual to learn more about, Rev. William J. Hodges, who lived on Broadway in Brooklyn in 1857. By cross-referencing with our digitized newspapers, I was able to find out more about him and his abolitionist activism in Brooklyn and beyond. It turns out he was not born in Brooklyn, nor did he reside there very long, but he did make an impact during his time there, as he founded the Colored Political Association of Kings County (which is the modern-day borough of Brooklyn).

Black and white newspaper clipping describing a “colored indignation meeting” in which William Hodges took part.
“Local Items,” June 5 1856, Brooklyn Times Union, page 2.

If not for the digitized city directories, I doubt I ever would have learned of Rev. Hodges and his time in Brooklyn. I hope that many more stories like these will emerge once researchers start digging into these directories.

Black and white image of buildings on a tree-lined street with information about T. Reeve, architect.
Directory advertisement for T. Reeve, Architect and Builder.

The directories also contain items like this – an advertisement showing this architect and builder’s office on Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn. This part of Brooklyn looks very different now, and this insight into what it looked like pre-photography is invaluable, particularly for people conducting house, building, and neighborhood research.

The directories are linked on our Search Our Collections page. We also have a tutorial for using the digitized directories. Additionally, we have several related research guides which assist researchers in exploring various topics. These materials are in the public domain, and we hope they will be used for a broad spectrum of applications, from family research to demographic research to writing to artwork. We are grateful to Community Webs, the Internet Archive, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for making this material available and searchable online and allowing us to expand access across the borough, city, and beyond.

Browse the Brooklyn City Directories on archive.org.

Vanishing Culture: On Filmstrips

The following guest post from film archivist Mark O’Brien is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Eastman stock filmstrip, with its chemical binder in the process of breaking down.

In 1999, I was working in information technology at a school district in rural upstate New York, and dreaming of writing angst-ridden, sample-laden music that might help people understand what it felt like to be me. Autism was not well-understood when I was a child, and I was simply left to try to pretend to be normal. One day I walked into the school’s library and saw an entire wall of shelves being emptied. The district was getting rid of old educational multimedia, most of it filmstrips.

Filmstrips were like slideshows, but on a continuous strip of 35mm film, published equally by independent publishers and juggernauts like Coronet, Jam Handy, Disney, and Hanna-Barbera. By the 1960s, most had soundtracks on record or cassette. A beep or bell sound on the recording told the projectionist to move the filmstrip forward one frame. Today, most people incorrectly call 16mm motion pictures “filmstrips,” but they were in fact a separate and distinct thing all of their own.

Instinctively aware that the records and tapes probably contained cheesy, anachronistic material that could also be manipulated in the music I dreamed of making, and also aware that no one else had probably thought to dig through filmstrip soundtracks, I quickly pled my case to the librarian, and she let me take them all home.

I gleefully digitized all the records and tapes over the next few months. At the time, I had a good turntable and cassette deck, a professional audio interface, and experience working with audio. I got a couple of filmstrip projectors too, and hosted a few get-togethers with friends where we laughed at the filmstrips’ authoritarian, buttoned-down nature, the out-of-time fashions and styles, and the failed attempts to try to seem cool to a high-school-aged audience. We pretended we were on Mystery Science Theater 3000, chastising the images on the screen. While everyone else was simply throwing filmstrips away, I had discovered a cultural artifact and viewing experience that aligned perfectly with the subversive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Sample film from the Uncommon Ephemera collection at Internet Archive

While I began to dream of some way to digitize the film and, perhaps, put it together with the audio in a pre-YouTube world (“Maybe I could learn Macromedia Flash!” I thought. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.) — I had neither the money nor the smarts to get it done. I hung onto the filmstrips for a few years and, feeling like a failure, finally threw them and the soundtracks away. Due to my ignorance and storage space constraints, the only thing left of those soundtracks are MP3s. These two atrocities – saving only MP3s instead of lossless audio, and throwing away the filmstrips, most of which I still haven’t found again – haunt me to this day.

Fast forward to 2018. After a long bout of fatigue, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I got the offending gland removed, but the fatigue did not abate. Still in rural upstate New York, I only had access to doctors who would say “your bloodwork looks correct, it’s not my problem.” I had no choice but to learn to live with the fatigue and, paradoxically, scramble to find something that could financially sustain me and accommodate my medically required non-traditional schedule.

I forget now, but something made me look into filmstrips again. Surely, between 1999 and 2019 someone had taken up this cause and I wouldn’t need to, right? In fact, just the opposite was true, and it shocked me: no one was saving them. I bought some on eBay and started to experiment.

I also continued to do research — wait, what do you mean 35mm film scanners cost $700,000?! No wonder these things aren’t getting saved! Still, I wondered if there was some way I could do it on equipment I could afford. I was hopeful maybe I could scan them somehow, put them together in a video editor and post them to YouTube and people would enjoy them, and maybe they would support me through Patreon.

Learn more about Mark O’Brien & Uncommon Ephemera
– Uncommon Ephemera website: https://uncommonephemera.org/
– Internet Archive collection: https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera

But I quickly realized this wasn’t preservation as much as it was triage. Most filmstrips were printed on Eastmancolor, a film stock which is now notorious for self-destruction. First, the cyan and yellow dyes fade, destroying fine detail and leaving the film an intense shade of red. Then, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place begins to disintegrate. Once this happens, the dye layers move and smear, destroying the images on the film. The speed at which this happens is dependent on the environmental conditions in which the film was stored. All Eastmancolor film is now red, most of it can no longer be properly color-corrected, a lot of it is in the beginning stages of binder breakdown (called “vinegar syndrome”), and some filmstrips are already physically lost.

Realizing this wasn’t traditional preservation, and researching the methods by which a small number of others had saved a small number of filmstrips, I came to an uncomfortable decision: the only way to get this done with limited economic resources was to use a flatbed scanner that accepted 35mm negatives, and carefully cut them to fit in the scanner’s film negative adapter. I’ve heard this makes “real” preservationists wince, but they had thirty-plus years to digitize the format on the right equipment. If I do not do this work now, these filmstrips, containing K-12 and university educational media, business and industry training films, presentations for religious organizations, and sales films used by insurance companies, Amway, and other organizations would be completely unviewable in less than a decade.

With my obsessive-compulsiveness on full alert, I began learning how to make high-quality scans, and developed a process in a video editor to make the filmstrips behave like they did when viewed on a projector, with their characteristic visible movement of the film between frames. In 2019 I was still a long way from being a good preservationist; some of the filmstrips I digitized at the beginning were still discarded after I got a good scan. Today, I try to keep everything just in case.

I left YouTube for a while in 2022, when Scholastic, one of the largest children’s book publishers on earth, tried to get my channel deleted. Turns out they bought the assets of a defunct filmstrip publisher whose work I was trying to save. So not only had no one preserved these things, but a corporation hoarding bankruptcy assets now threatened the very point of preservation in the first place: making history available for viewing. That’s when I moved my primary home to the Internet Archive, who have been unequivocally wonderful to me.

“Sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place.”

Mark O’Brien, film archivist

Without filmstrips, our memory of American culture in the 20th century would be severely lacking. They provide historical perspective, cultural context, and reflect the successes and failures of our education system. They are original sources, unaffected by the space constraints and biases of historians and content aggregators. And they’re fun, full of anachronism, awkward photography, non-theistic proselytizing, and so much incredible hand-drawn artwork that runs the gamut from gorgeous to insane to psychedelic to “my three-year-old drew this.” I feel they could be equally attractive to historians and meme makers, squares and cool kids, the religious and nonreligious, fans of education and fans of comedy.

For this essay, I was asked to explain why preserving filmstrips is important. And that’s why I’ve told you this story; sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place. As an independent and self-taught archivist, it’s disheartening when I have an interaction with people who admonish me about my credentials (I don’t have any), my affiliation with a university (I flunked out of one once, does that count?), or my methods, borne out of necessity and urgency. It’s heartbreaking when people on a “lost media” subreddit flame me for saving “lost media no one cares about,” or when universities and institutions dismiss what I do while simultaneously beating their chests about the important work they’re doing. And it’s ignorantly classist when someone suggests I just wait until I have $700,000 to scan them “correctly.” (I assure you, there will be no Eastmancolor film left on the planet in preservable condition by the time that money comes around.)

Eastman film stock with fading dyes.

While I continue to improve my processes, I am regularly disappointed at how much of what I do isn’t actual preservation: it turns out to be mostly raising awareness, setting boundaries, scraping for a dozen YouTube views here and there, and shouting into the void that is social media — none of which I am particularly good at, having what is effectively a social learning disability which challenges my ability to be an effective communicator.

However, pressing questions remain: how do I convince people it’s not only important, but urgent to save whatever of this format is still out there? How do I get help instead of gatekeeping from other archives and institutions? How do I compensate preservationists who help for their time? How do I compete for attention and financial support on platforms that thrive on viral, rage-bait, and us-versus-them content? Can one person, working as hard as he can on something important but not popular, ever do enough, in an age of content creators with a hundred employees and millions of followers, to even be seen?

I hope these words reach some people, but I’m acutely aware of just how many thousands it takes to truly spread the word about something in the modern age. I have more than 2,000 filmstrips left to scan, most from a few generous donors, and I estimate that’s about ten years of full-time work. Most are printed on Eastmancolor. It will probably take longer to save them than they have left. I am saving as many as I can, but I fear unless I find a way to more effectively communicate the urgency of it all, I won’t be able to save them all. I think it would be shameful if those things got in the way of saving filmstrips, a critical and cool part of our past.

About the author

Mark O’Brien lives in upstate New York with his wife, who you can follow on X at @MrsEphemera, and their cat Charlie, who they got at a yard sale.

Lending of Digitized Books

On Sept 4, 2024, the US Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the lower court ruling in the lawsuit filed against us by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. While the Internet Archive is disappointed by this opinion—it was never the Internet Archive’s intention to get into a lawsuit over lending digitized books—we respect the outcome. 

To date, we have removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org (and therefore also openlibrary.org). While we are reviewing all available options, this judicial opinion will lead to the removal of many more books from lending. It is important for the Internet Archive and all libraries to continue to have a healthy relationship with publishers and authors.

Please be assured that millions of digitized books will still be available to those with print disabilities, small sections will be available for those linking into them from Wikipedia and through interlibrary loan, books will continue to be preserved for the long term, and other protected library uses will continue to inform digital learners everywhere.

The Internet Archive is also increasing its investment in digital books from publishers willing to sell ebooks that libraries can own and lend. While this is currently from a small number of publishers, the number is growing and we see it as a future for the long term sustainability of authors, publishers, and libraries. Encouragingly, the Independent Publishers Group recently endorsed selling ebooks to libraries. The growing number of libraries purchasing and owning digital books brings fair compensation to authors and publishers, along with permanent preservation and access to author’s works for communities everywhere.

We respect the opinion of the courts and, while we are saddened by how this setback affects our patrons and the future of all libraries, the Internet Archive remains strong and committed to our mission of Universal Access to All Knowledge. Thank you for your help and support.

Vanishing Culture: On the Importance of Remembering Forgotten Books

The following guest post from author and editor Brad Bigelow is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

In Herbert Clyde Lewis’s novel Gentleman Overboard, Preston Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling early one morning on deck of a freighter bound for Panama and falls into the Pacific Ocean. No one notices his absence for hours, by which point any hope of rescue is lost. “Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” he cries. “But of course, nobody was there to listen,” Lewis writes, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.”

There’s only one way to succeed as a writer: be read. A lucky few will continue to be read long after their death, earning lasting status as major or minor figures in the literary history of their time. Most, however, will be forgotten—many for good reasons, perhaps. Others, however, are forgotten due to nothing more than bad luck. Mistiming. Poor marketing. The lack of a champion. A prickly personality. Illness. Old age. War. Politics. Whatever the reason, fate often plays mean tricks on writers by taking away their audience.

Brad Bigelow, author and editor

But the same fate plays a mean trick on us as readers, too. Much of how literature is studied and taught rests on the assumption that classics are classics because they represent the best work of their time. And on the corollary that the texts that have been forgotten deserved it. After decades of searching for and celebrating the work of neglected writers, I know that neither is true.

There’s a fine line that separates the writers whose works win a place in the literary canon and the many others whose don’t, and it’s a line drawn by chance, not by the critical evaluation of any judge or jury. The difference rarely has anything to do with literary merit. Sadly, talent often matters less than connections, opportunities, good fortune, or unlucky accidents. But to discover this truth, one must look beyond literature’s well-traveled paths and discover the riches to be found in the vast landscape of forgotten books.

The Internet Archive plays an essential role in this process—indeed, it’s revolutionized our ability to discover works that have been forgotten. Let me illustrate by contrasting two books I’m currently working to bring back to print.

The first is a 1939 novel by Gertrude Trevelyan called Trance by Appointment. I learned of Trevelyan in 2018 when I read her first novel, Appius and Virginia. At the time, there were at least a dozen used copies of the book available for sale online. Within a week or so of looking for the book and at the cost of under $20, I was able to have a copy in hand. I found the book so striking in style and substance that I sought out the rest of Trevelyan’s oeuvre, eight novels in total. Although most were extremely scarce and expensive, I was able to purchase them. There were no copies, though, of her last novel, Trance by Appointment. In fact, the only copies in existence were those in the four registry libraries supporting British copyright law of the time. I was only able to read the book by traveling to London, getting a reader’s card from the British Library, and sitting with the library’s sole copy at a table in the Rare Books room. From the condition of that copy, it was apparent that no one had ever opened it since it was added to the collection. Obtaining a copy of the book for the purpose of reissuing it was even more problematic.

A few years later, I stumbled across a review of a 1940 novel by Sarah Campion titled Makeshift. Intrigued, I went looking for a used copy. There were none. Like Trance by Appointment, virtually the only library copies were in the British registry libraries. No longer living a train ride away from London, I was about to give up hope until I checked the Internet Archive. And lo, there was not only a copy of Makeshift but copies of other equally rare novels by Campion. I used the archive’s borrowing capabilities and quickly read Makeshift, gripped by its uniquely caustic narrator and her story of being caught up in the diaspora of Jews from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. With a little research, I was able to locate Campion’s son (her real name was Mary Coulton Alpers) and obtain permission to reissue the book as part of the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press.

Trance by Appointment will be reissued in 2025 by from Boiler House Press (UK).

Both Trance by Appointment and Makeshift will be reissued in 2025, but the simple difference in the level of effort involved in getting access to the two books demonstrates the extraordinary value of the Internet Archive. It has, for essentially the first time in mankind’s history, made a library of material of incredible depth and richness available to the billions of people worldwide for whom Internet access has become a basic part of their lives.

The Internet Archive transforms our understanding of literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in much of the American West is practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. And even more if you get out of the car and hike any of the thousands of trails that lead into the wilderness. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of our landscape is what you can’t see from the freeway.

And literature is like that. The canon of well-known classics, the books one can find in just about every library and bookstore, the books most commonly studied and written about, is like the freeway system of literature. These works have, until recently, been our most accessible and most heavily traveled routes through our literary landscape. With the creation of the Internet Archive and the steady incorporation of material into its collection, a huge amount of our literary landscape—by now a large share of the published material from the seventeenth century on—is just a few clicks away from over half the people in the world. I look forward to seeing many amazing forgotten books and writers get rediscovered and celebrated anew as more readers come to realize that so much of the literature that has historically been remote and inaccessible can now be found just steps from their front doors.

About the author

Brad Bigelow edits NeglectedBooks.com and the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press (UK). He is the author of the forthcoming Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts from the University of Nebraska Press.