Author Archives: amandari@archive.org

Archive Staff Favorites 2024: Things We Think You’ll Love This Holiday Season

As deep-cuts in the Archive go, these staff-recommended resources are ones you won’t want to miss!

Time off over the holidays? Need a little break while visiting family? Sourcing recommendations for movie night? The Internet Archive has you covered.  We’ve gathered some of our staff’s favorite items (holiday-themed and otherwise) in our collections to share with you—enjoy this selection of publicly available movies, books, games, and more!

Movies

“We have a number of movies in the public domain within our collections, many of which we play in our HQ during Public Domain movie nights. Now, you can bring the public domain movie nights to your own home

The Haunted House (1921): A silent film starring Buster Keaton
Malice in the Palace (1949): A comedy short starring the Three Stooges
Charade (1963): A classic romance starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn”
-Internet Archive Admin Team

Books

My favorite collection is the Biodiversity Heritage Library.”
-Joy Chesbrough, Director of Philanthropy

“I’m a big fan of Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Collection, particularly this book on herbs from 15th century Italy. The illustrations are super well-preserved and mix realism and fantasy to depict herbs and their qualities.”
-Tanya Zeif, Patron Services 

“Enjoy over 19,000 public domain audiobooks read by Librivox volunteers. The collection has novels (Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, Moby Dick, etc.) + short stories and poetry read in over forty different languages. Pretty neat. I recommend The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
-Tom Mayer, Development Coordinator

“One of my favorites is The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor. It’s a guide to learning to drive from a woman who was a professional racecar driver in 1909. She briefly held the world land speed record (a blistering 79 miles per hour) and is credited with inventing the rearview mirror–she recommended that women bring their makeup compact along with them while driving so that they could hold up the mirror and see what was behind them without having to take their eyes off the road. A few years later, car manufacturers started including these mirrors in the vehicle by default.”
-Jenica Jessen, Marketing Manager

Software/Games

“One of my favorite items in the Archive is the Sierra On-Line Christmas Card from 1986. If you haven’t ever seen a DOS-based holiday card, we also have the 1990 and 1992 versions for even more animated computer card fun.”
-Chris Freeland, Director of Open Library

“I love the Malware Museum! It’s a collection of all these cool animations that would show up when a computer in the early aughts would have a virus. It’s a) So cool to look at, a vibe I think a lot of modern design tries to emulate, and b) so reminiscent of a specific time. Reminding me of some of my fave movies and shows from the 2000’s.”
-Amandari Karaca, Digital Engagement Specialist

Music

“I recently discovered Air in Resort. For skincare aficionados, it is a 1984 album commissioned by Shiseido to promote their new fragrance.”
-Andrea Mills, Executive Director, Internet Archive Canada. 

“I’ve been loving these recordings of a Bay Area radio station from the 60s. KYA San Francisco was playing early rock radio in the Bay until it was sold in 1983″
– Jeff Klein, Senior Software Engineer (Archiving and Data Services)

Here’s to a happy and safe holiday season from all of us at the Internet Archive. 

Unearthing Sweet Memories With Timeless Recipes

A vintage-style photograph of peanut butter cookies in a ceramic bowl.

Some of my clearest and fondest childhood memories are being in the kitchen with my grandmother and learning how to bake. 

My grandmother and my grandfather immigrated from Mexico to the Maryland suburbs in the late 1950s. Raising six children while learning English as a second language and living as a minority in a very homogenous community could not have been easy for her—but by the time I knew my grandmother, she was, to my eyes, the picture of American suburban domesticity. Alongside our Mexican staple dishes at the dinner table, my grandmother loved to bake sweet treats out of her much-beloved Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. And, as soon as I was old enough to hold a mixing spoon, I would be beside her, learning how to level the flour in a measuring cup and stirring the mixing bowl for bundt cakes. 

When my grandparents retired and moved from Maryland to Texas in 2003, that cookbook was donated–hopefully continuing to aid other amateur chefs to this day. But recently, I found myself wondering about one particular recipe. 

So, I turned to the Internet Archive and was surprised and delighted to find that we have a digitized version of the same Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook I remember so fondly from my childhood. And there, on page 258, was the first recipe I remember baking on my own at eight years old: a batch of Peanut Butter Cookies. Looking at the recipe now, I’m transported back to that time, remembering how proud my grandmother was when I showed her the cookies I’d baked.

I know that among the millions of texts in the Archive, there are countless other memories like this one waiting to be unlocked for numerous patrons. As I was perusing our collections, I stumbled upon some new favorites, including:

The recipe for peanut butter cookies found on page 258 of the cookbook.

I love each of these texts because I know each recipe contained within their pages likely has a story just like my own—beautiful memories of cooking them for and with loved ones. 

I hope you’ll also consider supporting our work in helping us preserve numerous cherished memories on the Archive. To make a year-end donation, please visit archive.org/donate. Thank you to all of our supporters who make this work possible.

Jessica Cepeda joined the Internet Archive’s Philanthropy team as a Major Gift Officer in 2022. She has a passion for engaging with donors and connecting them with opportunities to support the Archive. She comes to the Archive with a decade of experience in nonprofit development and individual giving, most recently at NYU Stern School of Business. She received a BA in the College of Letters from Wesleyan University and loves that her work at the Archive marries her passion for books and technology and her deep and abiding belief in providing free and open access to knowledge. Jessica lives in Brooklyn, NY, which she has called home for the last ten years. Outside of her work for the Archive, she enjoys traveling, reading, cooking, and exploring the city with her dog, Harry.