The Internet Archive would appreciate some help from a volunteer programmer to create software that would help determine if a book cover is useful to our users as a thumbnail or if we should use the title page instead. For many of our older books, they have cloth covers that are not useful, for instance:

But others are useful:

Just telling by age is not enough, because even 1923 cloth covers are sometimes good indicators of what the book is about (and are nice looking):

We would like a piece of code that can help us determine if the cover is useful or not to display as the thumbnail of a book. It does not have to be exact, but it would be useful if it knew when it didn’t have a good determination so we could run it by a person.

To help any potential programmer volunteers, we have created folders of hundreds of examples in 3 catatories: year 1923 books with not-very-useful covers, year 1923 books with useful covers, and year 2000 books with useful covers. The filenames of the images are the Internet Archive item identifier that can be used to find the full item:  1922forniaminera00bradrich.jpg would come from https://archive.org/details/1922forniaminera00bradrich.   We would like a program (hopefully fast, small, and free/open source) that would say useful or not-useful and a confidence. 

Interested in helping? Brenton at archive.org is a good point of contact on this project.   Thank you for considering this. We can use the help. You can also use the comments on this post for any questions.

FYI: To create these datasets, I ran these command lines, and then by hand pulled some of the 1923 covers into the “useful” folder.

bash-3.2$ ia search "date:1923 AND mediatype:texts AND NOT collection:opensource AND NOT collection:universallibrary AND scanningcenter:*" --itemlist --sort=downloads\ desc | he\
ad -1000 | parallel --will-cite -j10 "curl -Ls https://archive.org/download/{}/page/cover_.jpg?fail=soon.jpg\&cnt=0 >> ~/tmp/cloth/{}.jpg"

bash-3.2$ ia search "date:2000 AND mediatype:texts AND scanningcenter:cebu" --itemlist --sort=downloads\ desc | head -1000 | parallel --will-cite -j10 "curl -Ls https://archive.\
org/download/{}/page/cover_.jpg?fail=soon.jpg\&cnt=0 >> ~/tmp/picture/{}.jpg"

We have said previously that Canada is doing a relatively good job of achieving the appropriate balance in its laws between user rights and the rights of authors and publishers.

The Internet Archive joined the Internet Archive Canada today in filing a brief to the Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Trade (INDU) under that county’s statutory review of its copyright laws.

Our message to INDU is mostly: “don’t back pedal”. We do suggest that if Canada decides to extend its copyright term by 20 years pursuant to the USMCA, that they add a balancing provision allowing libraries to make those older works available to the public.

Our brief here.

Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships, Internet Archive

I have always been a storyteller. It’s how I make sense of the world and share what I value most. And it’s why I have come to love December. Because during this month, when we ask our community to support us, you also take the time to tell us what the Internet Archive means to you.

Thank you!  Thank you for the thousands of messages you send us each day of our campaign. By reading them, I learned what you cherish, how you like to pass your time. I recognize among you poets and pragmatists, idealists and those deeply worried about our future.

Your stories move us to keep improving—to do more.

Here are a few that I’d like to share:

When my boyfriend died, he left behind a ticket stub to a concert that he took me to. I had no idea that he had held on to it for over 30 years. You were able to help me find a recording of that first Grateful Dead concert I ever went to. Listening to it brought back the magic of that night. Thank you.   —Robyn

I used free internet resources when I was a penniless student. Now that I have a job, I want to help other penniless students.  —Stephen

One of 4 million digital books available on archive.org.

I am a recently retired professor of anthropology, and I am thrilled that I have access to resources that I once only had access to through my university library.  My university ends access to both email accounts and library access upon retirement. Apparently, they assume that retirees immediately lose interest in research when they retire.  Sad. —Linda

I am house-bound, reading my only enjoyment. On a fixed income, I appreciate what you provide and wish I could do more to support it.     —Barbara

Without BBC radio plays I do not see how I could get through another Canadian winter. . .  —Don

I love to read.  I have Chronic Lymphocyctic Leukemia, so it’s hard to go out to shop for books. THANK YOU for this opportunity to read books.  —D.G

I’m a student and I’m doing research about techno, house, clubs and rave culture.  So your site is like a gold mine for me!    —Elsa

I’ve searched so many websites for the same opportunities the Internet Archive offers, but was satisfied with none. With the Internet Archive library I feel joyous, happy and calm—cause I know it’s right there. Like my preferred name, I am just a happy reader. —Happy Reader

 

Website of the Western Montana Mycological Association, captured in the Wayback Machine on November 22, 2011.

Thanks for helping keep open the only webport our tiny nonprofit has been able to offer since being attacked by WordPress hackers. The information is hard to find and invaluable to educators, poison control centers, and recreationists.   —Western Montana Mycological Association

I donated because civilization devolves into tribal skulduggery when knowledge is allowed to perish. This we must not allow.    —Jamaal

You are like an old hardware store full of vintage nuts and bolts…please stick around!           —Happy Surfer

The remedy for Internet Alzheimer’s… —Steve

“Wonder in Aliceland” Blog, captured in the Wayback Machine on May 13, 2010.

My daughter’s blog, Wonderinaliceland.blog.com ‘disappeared’ from the web some time ago and my friend Jonathan used your site to retrieve some of her wonderful writing. She has a brain tumor and will not be with us much longer. Her writing was her main way of dealing with her illness over the last eight years.        —Peter

I did because I had the option to do, not the obligation, and I love it.  —Tiochan

Thank you letters from the Internet Archive to our donors, mailed with vintage stamps.

When your write to us, we like to write back.  So if you find a letter with lots of beautiful stamps in your mailbox, you’ll know who it is from. Although we offer millions of free digital books and billions of Web pages throughout time, at the Internet Archive, we still appreciate a finely crafted 15 cent stamp.

And if you find our services useful, I hope you will make a donation and send us your own stories.  Thank you.

By the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative

In November 2016, the U.S. elected a new president who had sworn to roll back important environmental protections, dismantle the EPA, and who had once called climate change a “hoax.” In the context of warming global temperatures, rising tides, and oil pipeline battles, a dozen colleagues at universities and nonprofits across the country got together online, and decided to do something. We were concerned about the continued existence of federal environmental agencies—particularly in their abilities to protect the most vulnerable among us—as well as the preservation and accessibility of important environmental and climate data. More broadly, we were concerned with the collective investment in public research and agencies.

From our initial email we grew into the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (pronounced “edgy”), today a North American-wide network that includes 175 members from more than 30 different academic institutions, 10 nonprofits, and caring and committed volunteers who come from a broad spectrum of work and life backgrounds. Our work has included crowd-sourced archiving federal environmental datasets, monitoring and reporting on changes to federal environmental agency websites, and interviewing employees at EPA and OSHA. Major news outlets have reported on us, from the Washington Post to CNN to the New York Times, and we have contributed to and helped shape an ongoing, national discussion on the value of federal environmental protections, and the need for accessible and accountable data infrastructures and publicly-engaged forms of data stewardship.

DataRescue event in San Francisco in February 2017. Photo by Jamie Lyons.

So much of what we have been able to accomplish over the past two years is enabled by the Internet Archive, and in particular the Wayback Machine. For example, our first event in December 2016 sought to archive EPA websites, prior to Trump’s inauguration, by nominating key pages and datasets for inclusion in the Wayback Machine. This project grew over the subsequent 5 months, as over 49 DataRescue events were held across the country, and over 63,000 web pages from environmental agencies like EPA, NOAA, NASA, and OSHA were nominated to the archive. The DataRescue project ended in June 2017, but not before raising important questions about the politics of data accessibility and stewardship.

Through DataRescue we began partnering with the Internet Archive, which has become essential in another EDGI project: tracking ongoing changes at federal agency websites. Initially using a fee-based software program, Versionista, to crawl government web pages (currently crawling 42,000 URLs), we have been able to locate and report on the removal or alteration of web content on climate, non-renewable energy sources, and important environmental treaties. This kind of work increasingly relies on the Wayback Machine, and our reports systematically include references and screenshots from it. In our commitment to building participatory and responsive civic technologies and data infrastructure (partly inspired by the Internet Archive), we also developed our own web monitoring software, called Scanner, that is free and open-source, and which we plan to turn into a public platform. We are partnering with the Internet Archive to develop its functionality.

Example of screenshot comparisons (using Versionista) on the EPA website, where references to “climate change” have been deleted.

Let us end with a few words about why this work, and our partnership with the Internet Archive, is so important.

Our current federal records laws are outdated—they do not require online publication or webpage preservation, even as online research and access today is the norm (and the expectation).

Many of us who work with vulnerable communities on environmental justice issues have seen how access to online state environmental data is essential for social groups seeking to learn about and document environmental harms in their community. Data access is a justice issue.

Beyond mere access, we need creative, participatory, community-based, transparent, accountable, and justice-oriented data infrastructures, and new communities of data practice and care. We need these not only to enable government and industry accountability, but to help usher in a better, more just world. The Internet Archive’s commitment to participatory archiving, archiving vulnerable content, and free access, has both inspired and enabled EDGI’s work, and we are glad to partner with the Internet Archive to continue building this important data ecology and community of practice.

–Lindsey Dillon & EDGI

Lindsey Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. She is one of the founding members of EDGI.