To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.
Brenton Cheng learned to program in BASIC on an Apple II Plus at age 9. His mother was one of the earliest computer programmers and his dad was a marketing consultant for technology products in Portola Valley, California. By age 12, Cheng had written a series of animated games that he put together in a hand-assembled software package. It sold about four copies.
Now, Cheng is a senior engineer at the Internet Archive, where he leads the user experience (UX) team. “Our goal is to give our patrons a great experience on the Archive.org website while making sure that under the hood, our technologies are as simple, robust and maintainable as possible,” said Cheng, who has been at the organization for seven years.
Despite his early computer exposure, Cheng wanted to study something more tangible in college. He pursued mechanical engineering and earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s from Stanford University. Along the way, he developed a love of contemporary dance and improvisation. Inspired by the creativity of movement, he veered toward biomechanical engineering in graduate school.
Entering the job market, Cheng said he wanted a flexible schedule so he would be able to take workshops and occasionally go on tour with dance companies. He was a freelance computer programmer for about a decade, then worked at Astrology.com and NBCUniversal for another 10 years.
In 2016, Cheng said he was drawn to the Internet Archive by its mission, reputation and people. “Being in the dance world, I was constantly surrounded with all kinds of eclectic, eccentric, fascinating, brilliant people,” he said. “There were certain common elements in the way the Archive embraces and benefits from diversity. I found many artists and engineers working in novel ways. That felt very much at home.”
From his experience working with improvisation in dance, Cheng said he loves trying to create the conditions within which people contribute their best work and feel good about what they’re doing. His team is focused on fighting for users and constantly making the website better for the public. “I also serve the digital librarians who are collecting and providing content for our patrons,” Cheng said. “I am giving them the tools, platform and environment to do their magic.”
Tell us something about your role at the Internet Archive that most people wouldn’t know about. Simultaneously with supporting the Archive’s mission and helping our patrons, I am always holding in the back of my mind the subtext of a “small team, long term.” These ideas guide choices around process, technologies and architecture. We regularly discard choices that would entail too much complexity or require too much on-going, hands-on maintenance. And we try to resist rushing features out the door that will only add to our technical debt later.
What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive? I set up a wiki to allow scholars to submit transcriptions of scanned Balinese palm leaves.
What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive? Creating a team that likes working together, is resilient through conflicts and pushes each other to keep getting better.
What are you reading? The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. It’s a contemporary writing style manual that incorporates cognitive science and linguistics and acknowledges the evolving nature of language.
To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.
If there’s an event at the Internet Archive, there’s a good chance Caitlin Olson had her hand in it. And with about 80 events last year, including 40 in-person, that keeps her plenty busy.
“I’m a helper by nature and my role involves wearing a lot of hats,” said Olson, senior executive assistant for seven years.
While not a librarian by training, Olson said she enjoys supporting librarians and their work. Olson provides support for webinars online and parties at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco. She also assists Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle in his work, helps staff with IT issues (including migrating to remote work during the pandemic), and pinch hits when needed.
“I’m the go-to person for most questions because if I don’t know the answer, I likely know who will,” Olson said, who prefers working behind-the-scenes and is known as a fixer who keeps a calm head. “Brewster says I help soothe the organization. I often can jump in and solve a problem.”
After graduating from high school in a small town in northern California, Olson said she gravitated to the Bay Area for college, so has both the “country mouse” and “city mouse” experience. After a stint in journalism, she was drawn to the Internet Archive. “I wanted to work for a place where people felt passionate about what they were doing—and I found that here,” Olson said.
What’s an aspect of your job that you especially like? I work with our ceramicist who creates all of our statues for the Archive. Fun Fact: after you work here for three years, you get a statue made in your likeness (if you want).
What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive? Our annual Public Domain Day events and the book talks we host in collaboration with The Booksmith.
What are you reading? Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach, which is about what happens when animals commit crimes, and From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty, which is a book that explores death-care in different cultures and it’s written by a badass mortician.
To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.
Liz Rosenberg first worked with the Internet Archive in the early days of the Great 78 Project. She helped design the digitization workflow of 78rpm records and estimates transferring 30,000 sides of records herself.
The self-described “record lady,” Rosenberg said the project was the perfect entrée to the organization. She graduated from Drexel University with a degree in music industry technology, with a specialty in audio recording and production.
In 2020, Rosenberg was officially hired by the Internet Archive in patron services and later asked to lead the organization’s physical donation program. She continues with the Great 78 Project, overseeing monthly uploads, resolving metadata issues and coordinating digitization of donated collections with partners at George Blood LP.
“The Internet Archive is a place that I had always dreamed of working,” Rosenberg said. “I really looked up to the mission of the Internet Archives so when the opportunity came up to work for them directly, I couldn’t have said yes faster.”
As donations manager, Rosenberg receives inquiries from individuals and librarians about donating their physical media to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization, from single items to collections of millions of objects. She has overseen the donations of small folk music collections, individual collectors’ passion projects, and college libraries including Bowling Green State University and the University of Hawaii.
The individual collector contributions often are triggered by the death of a loved one. “Those tend to be sensitive situations for families,” she said. “But they are grateful to almost be able to spend time with them through the preservation of their collection and be able to go and visit whenever they want. That’s very special.”
Rosenberg keeps a “warm and fuzzy thank you file” on her computer from donors that she said keeps her motivated to encourage others to share their collections, like the message below:
Dear Liz,
You are amazing! Thank you for your kind guidance and generous ways. Seeing the dedication today has brought a difficult and costly task of storing these books over such a long period of time to this heartfelt moment and for such a worthy cause. I am in the middle of grading portfolios and preparing for a solo art exhibition so, as usual, I need to juggle the books in between. I will be in touch soon but, again, I just wanted to let you know how wonderful you and your organization are 🙂
in kindest regard, Karen
What is the most rewarding part of your job? For me, it’s really about preserving stories. I feel such a connection to donors that I work with when I get to hear the story of how a collection was created. We want to preserve those stories alongside the media itself. And that’s really such a privilege.
What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive? Presenting on behalf of the Internet Archive at the 2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Conference. A recording of the presentation, as given to the Internet Archive staff shortly after the conference, can be found on the Internet Archive here.
What’s your favorite item at the Internet Archive? This transcription recording of a child playing accordion: https://archive.org/details/78_four-leaf-clover_sonny-walikis-and-his-squeeze-box_gbia0001730a. We transferred this record without knowing who the performer was or anything about their history. The family of Sonny Walikis actually found the recording in our collection shortly after their family member had passed away and reached out to tell us the history of the recordings. I always think of this record as the best example of why we preserve media – to connect people to lost stories and help memories live on.
What is your secret talent? Morphing into a children’s choir! I was a recording studio intern and we had children booked to sing the part but they got too distracted in the booth. So I sang all of the parts slowed down 10% and we sped them up to make me sound “child-like”. The results are one of my only vocal credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlKhVhuTiik.
To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.
Working from his home office in Wellington, New Zealand, Charles Horn is a metadata wrangler for the Internet Archive. He feels lucky to live near the Pacific Ocean, where he can kayak through the local marine reserve in his spare time — while also working with others internationally to improve access to information.
Horn is responsible for managing, matching and sharing bibliographic data at scale. He works with software tools and formatting to make sense of often obscure bibliographic data when opportunities present themselves through donations and patron requests. Call him a digital librarian or data scientist, his goal is to improve discoverability of materials for users online.
In New Zealand, Horn earned a double degree in classical studies and information systems at the University of Canterbury. His interest in ancient Greek language and literature meant he spent a lot of time in libraries. He worked as a software developer at various companies before joining the Internet Archive five years ago.
“It’s nice to work for a nonprofit that is having an impact around the world,” said Horn, who works closely with the Open Libraries project and is currently working on standard formatting for public domain audiobook recordings, like those available through Librivox.
Preserving older materials with modern information practices is challenging, he said, as well as fun and entertaining.
“A lot of digital content is potentially quite ephemeral—and that’s where a lot of culture is happening,” he said. “Being a digital archivist or librarian, you need to think about how you’d want it preserved or cataloged for the future.”
Horn said he disagrees with people outside of libraries who think the institution is no longer relevant because everything’s online. It’s the transition to digital that makes libraries all the more relevant today. “There are researchers who need to work with increasing quantities of information,” he said. “Libraries and librarianship are incredibly relevant today, especially in the digital realm.”
Tell us something about your role at the Internet Archive that most people wouldn’t know about. I work on the metadata of about 5 million books for which we have full scans, and frequently process tens of millions more as we work with partners. I enjoy the fact that for any arbitrary book there is a good chance I have made a small addition, improvement, or added a link on a bibliographic record hosted on archive.org or openlibrary.org, making that information slightly more connected, more relevant, and more accessible.
What’s your secret talent no one knows about? I have been teaching myself Quantum computing and Information science, using online resources and physical books. For a library related task, I designed and implemented a quantum circuit to validate ISBNs using a single qubit.
What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive? Working with library partners to make practical controlled digital lending a reality and enabling access to hard to locate works for an audience that would be otherwise unable to access them.
Currently reading: The Bridge, by Iain Banks, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner. Looking forward to Breakable Things, by Cassandra Khaw when it arrives from Better World Books.
The law professor’s book, Digital Copyright, first published in 2001 by Prometheus Books, is available free online (read now). After it went out of print in 2015, University of Michigan Press agreed to publish an open access edition of the book. Litman updated all the footnotes (some of which were broken links to web pages only available through preservation on Internet Archive) and made the updated book available under a CC-BY-ND license in 2017.
“I wanted the book to continue to be useful,” Litman said. “Free copies on the web make it easy to read.”
Geared for a general audience, the book chronicles how copyright laws were drafted, written, lobbied and enacted in Congress over time. Litman researched the legislative history of copyright law, including development of the 1976 Copyright Act, and spent two years in Washington, D.C., observing Congress leading up to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998.
“Copyright is very complicated. It can take years to agree on the text,” Litman said. “The laws that result from that process are predictable in disadvantaging the public interest because readers, listeners and viewers don’t sit at the bargaining table — or the people who create new technology because they don’t exist yet.”
Indeed, it’s in the interest of people crafting laws to erect entry barriers to anything new, Litman adds.
Reclaiming Rights
Initial response to her book was positive, said Litman, the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. In 2006, she added an afterward with the release of a paperback edition of the book. As sales dwindled, the book went out of print. Still, Litman said there was demand and she wanted to make it broadly available to the public.
Taking advantage of the book contract’s termination clause, she wrote to the publisher to recapture rights to the book. Litman said she persuaded the University of Michigan Press to publish a revised online and print-on-demand edition with a new postscript under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND license.
Many authors are not aware of this option and the nonprofit Authors Alliance, of which Litman was a founding member, helps provide resources to assist authors in the process of regaining their copyright.
Typically, publishers require authors to sign contracts giving up their copyright so the company can publish, distribute and make a return on the investment of the book. One of the challenges over time, explains Dave Hansen, Executive Director of the Alliance, is that a publisher may stop printing a book when sales drop below a certain threshold. Yet, there may be potential readers that the author still wants to reach, if he or she could reclaim the copyright.
Once the author has the rights back, there are low- or no-cost options to make it freely available. A copy can be donated to a collection at a library, such as the Internet Archive, for scanning and posting. Additionally, academic libraries are increasingly offering open access publishing services to reformat and post works online.
The Promise of Open
Today, Digital Copyright is being downloaded hundreds of times every month. Free copies of the book had been available on the web from the mid-2000, in a variety of open access archives including Michigan’s Deep Blue Repository. The book is also available for hard copy purchase from online booksellers as a print-on-demand book through University of Michigan Press’s Maize Books series.
Litman is among a growing number of academics who advocate for more open sharing of their research. On the University of Michigan Senate task force, Litman helped revise the university’s copyright policy to give the institution the right to archive all faculty scholarly work as a condition of transferring the copyright in the work to the faculty member who creates it. She also worked with the law school library to help its law journals rewrite their standard form contracts to allow open access publication.
Her advice to fellow authors: “Behave as if the law were more sensible than it is. Live in the world as you would like it to be, in hopes that the world will come around.”
Litman is an adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Copyright, a past trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA, a past chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property, and past member of the Future of Music Coalition’s advisory council.
She will discuss her open access publishing experience and her take on copyright law with Brewster Kahle at a free online book talk April 20. Register here.
UPDATE (3/16/23): In researching this post, Internet Archive librarians discovered that this book came to the Internet Archive through our literacy partnership with Better World Books, originating from a library in the UK. This story further highlights the value of our partnership in preserving books & cultural heritage for generations to come.
Brad Bigelow first became fascinated with obscure authors while perusing the vast library stacks at the University of Washington when he was an undergraduate in the late ‘70s.
“I would take down books I didn’t know anything about, just out of curiosity. As I read these books, I quickly realized that the only difference between the writers who get remembered and the ones that get forgotten is luck. It’s not talent or merit,” said Bigelow, noting some just had bad timing, lacked connections or didn’t have enough sales. “There are many good writers who deserve to be remembered.”
In 2006, Bigelow started the website Neglected Books, reviewing lesser-known books in hopes of giving the authors belated exposure for their work and sparking broader interest. Sometimes it can be a challenge to find information about writers and get copies of their often out-of-print books, said Bigelow, of Missoula, Montana, who runs the website as a hobby.
The Internet Archive is his trusted resource, providing access to information anytime, anywhere, he said.
“It’s a world asset. It’s just phenomenal,” said Bigelow. He uses the Archives’ search tools to learn more about authors (through back issues of Publishers’ Weekly and The Bookman magazines, for example) and the digital collection to borrow rare books unavailable elsewhere.
It was on the Internet Archive that Bigelow recently found a copy of “Makeshift,” by Sarah Campion, a 1940 novel about a bright, young Jewish woman’s flight from Nazi Germany. Bigelow published a blog post about “Makeshift” on Neglected Books and then promoted the post on social media, highlighting the rarity of the work. “There are just 19 copies of this book in libraries worldwide. Even Campion’s son doesn’t have a copy. But fortunately, it’s available on the Internet Archive.” Bigelow tweeted about his discovery.
For independent scholars and individuals, access to key resources in the research process such as back issues of old magazines can be limited. Bigelow said he is grateful for the Internet Archive, which offers an alternative to those not affiliated with a college or university, and donates regularly since he relies on its resources for his writing.
On Neglected Books, Bigelow said he enjoys shedding new light on unknown authors. “I don’t think my thoughts are original enough to have anything new to say about Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Shakespeare,” he said. However, unearthing little-known books that have been all but lost to history is satisfying.
Bigelow appreciates the Internet Archive for protecting cultural artifacts that have disappeared from physical library shelves and making them available to the public. “Information that is not passed on is useless,” he said.
It’s the classic librarian’s dilemma: Because no library has unlimited storage, every library has to carefully manage its physical collection, and that means removing books to make space for new ones. On one hand, it’s exciting to bring in fresh voices, new stories and modern research, but on the other, a library’s main goal is to preserve information over time. So how can librarians manage their physical collections with an eye towards preservation?
Since forming a global literacy partnership in 2019, Better World Books (BWB) and the Internet Archive have offered a unique pathway for libraries to ensure that the books they no longer need in their collections can be preserved and made accessible for generations to come.
The service that BWB provides is an important one for libraries. BWB collects used books from libraries, booksellers, colleges, and universities in six countries, which are then either resold online, donated or recycled. To date, Better World Books has donated over 35 million books worldwide, has raised close to $34 million for libraries and literacy, and has saved more than 450 million books from landfills. Through the partnership with the Internet Archive, BWB has donated more than one million books each year for preservation and digitization, totaling 4 million books to date.
“What we’ve seen is the lifecycle of books become more complete,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. Once books are received from BWB, the Internet Archive digitizes them for patrons with print disabilities, offering readers like Pastor Doug Wilson, who has declining vision, access to books in digital form that are otherwise inaccessible. Then a subset of those books are used for digital lending, interlibrary loan and machine learning.
Dustin Holland, president and chief executive officer of BWB, says the arrangement allows these books to live on and to be put to the best use possible.
“Our goal has always been to maximize the value of the book,” says Holland. “To have a partner to which BWB may donate books that originate from thousands of libraries across multiple countries is a huge win for us, for the Internet Archive, and for our libraries. At the end of the day, it’s also beneficial for humanity, because there will always be access to these books.”
Supporting Ukrainian students
In May of 2022, BWB partnered with the Internet Archive to help support Ukrainian students and scholars. Customers were invited to contribute $1 with each BWB purchase, raising $17,200 to support the sourcing and digitizing of materials to preserve Ukrainian culture and heritage. This included more than 900 books that will become connected citations on the Ukrainian language Wikipedia page, in addition to more than 17,000 titles that the Internet Archive has already connected through its existing relationship with the Wikipedia community.
Helping libraries manage their collections
Wolfgram Memorial Library, Widener University-Chester
Since its dedication in 1970, the Wolfgram Memorial Library on the campus of Widener University-Chester in Pennsylvania has actively built a collection of more than 180,000 volumes. Three years ago Roz Goldstein, head of technical services and automated systems, undertook a collection management project to review the library’s holdings and determine which books no longer fit the library’s collection priorities.
The library packed up the older, underutilized books in boxes provided by BWB, which also paid for the shipping. Over the past two years, the library has contributed about 13,000 books to BWB, covering a wide variety of subjects, mostly non-fiction. Goldstein says the library’s main priority was managing collection space, but knowing some will see a broader audience is an added benefit.
“I was thrilled to find out that 600 of our titles have been sent to the Internet Archive to be digitized,” says Goldstein, who has shared her experience with other library colleagues and encouraged them to partner with BWB.
At the SEO Service Center, a branch of the State Library of Ohio, Jay Miley works with 98 libraries as the customer service and library systems manager. In January, he started sifting through 120,000 volumes stored in a central library building to see what no longer fit their collection development priorities. About 20,000 books were moved to local branches due to demand within the system for physical access. Then Miley began to look into options for some lesser-used books — not wanting them to end up in landfill.
Miley discovered BWB was a popular option among other state libraries, and he began to pack up boxes. So far, Ohio has shipped about 12,000 items to BWB and another 38,000 are queued for processing. Recently, he learned that 1,200 of the books that came from his library have been digitized and made available through the Internet Archive. “I think it’s awesome,” he says. “I immediately told my team, my boss and the state librarian.”
A growing impact
Over the past three years, the relationship between Better World Books and the Internet Archive has only grown stronger. BWB has streamlined the logistics of getting materials to the Internet Archive, Holland says, and the impact continues to grow. “The biggest thing we need to do is to educate and shout from the rooftops—to tell more people what we’re doing and how valuable this is for society.”
If your library is interested in learning more about the services that Better World Books provides to libraries, please check out the BWB Services page.
Since its founding in 2011, punctum books has been an independent, scholar- and queerled open access (OA) press committed to reshaping the way knowledge production is shared in academia and beyond.
Now, it is also a key player in the development of technology that’s making it easier for publishers to archive open access monographs.
The idea behind the open access movement is that scholarly research is a public good that should be made available to everyone in order to remove some of the technological and financial barriers to research and to accelerate education and research across the planet. Open access monographs are long-form scholarly publications released in the public domain under a Creative Commons or comparable license, which allows readers to freely access them without paywall. Authors of open access publications retain the copyright to their work.
“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available.”
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of punctum books
“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available,” said Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of the non-profit publisher, along with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy. “This is an ideological commitment — and, for us, this has been a guiding light in all our publishing work.”
Recently, punctum published its entire catalogue of close to 400 books to the Internet Archive’s online collection. It includes books about queer studies, film and media studies, Anthropocene studies, recuperative work and titles dealing with the Medieval period.
Streamlining open access publishing
Not only did the publisher make its items freely available, it was also part of an effort to develop an open metadata management and dissemination system – known as Thoth – to encourage other open access publishers to do the same.
The automated deposit system was built as part of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. The open source platform, funded by Arcadia and Research England, is designed to streamline the sharing of open access books.
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director, punctum books
“We wanted to make the management of metadata more convenient, especially for small-scale publishers,” Van Gerven Oei said. “The systems to get digital publications into the world are very opaque and difficult to navigate. We developed a tool that makes everything easier. We hope that by offering this service the discoverability of open access books will be much better.”
Along with punctum, other scholar-led, open access publishers such as Open Book Publishers are using Thoth for their daily metadata management. Van Gerven Oei said there is never going to be one single solution to the distribution challenge for small open publishers, but he hopes this effort will redirect traffic to the Archive.
“The Internet Archive, as a central repository not only for publications, but for the entire history of the internet, is of vital importance,” Van Gerven Oei said. “I am happy that the Internet Archive is one of the first repositories connected to our work with Thoth.”
In addition, punctum is working with other libraries to develop open community-owned infrastructure to offer an alternative to commercial publishing infrastructures.
See recent COPIM blog post about the experimentation with automated archiving at Internet Archive.
“We see libraries as our allies in our fight for open knowledge,” Van Gerven Oei said. “Knowledge is a public good that should not be a private enterprise at all.”
The Library-Publisher partnership
The founders of punctum believe the press has a moral obligation to provide its materials for free and allow authors to share, remix, and reuse.
The UC Santa Barbara Library. Photo credit: UC SANTA BARBARA
Together, they conducted a two-year pilot project from 2018-2020 to test a no-fees open access book publishing model for the humanities and social sciences.
“The goal was to develop best practices, protocols and infrastructure, technical and otherwise, around punctum’s digital catalog, and create a Library Membership Program,” said Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian for research resources and scholarly communication at UCSB Library. The objective was to support punctum’s operations while advancing the library’s interest in no-fee OA book publishing.
Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian, UCSB Library
“It was a natural collaboration for the library,” said Uziel. “The University of California, Santa Barbara is very committed to opening up scholarship created by UCSB researchers to be freely available to the scholarly community globally. Making good on this commitment requires the investment of time, effort, and money toward transforming the current, very closed, scholarly publishing system for both journals and books.”
Many faculty members publish with punctum, because of shared values. UCSB community and punctum are both passionately committed to the mission of the public research library and to scholar-led, community-owned, and economically sustainable open science and publishing. The project was an opportunity for the library community, students, and faculty to learn about open access publishing through the lens of the pilot project and the partnership with punctum.
“Making good on [a commitment to open access] requires the investment of time, effort, and money toward transforming the current, very closed, scholarly publishing system for both journals and books.”
Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library
The relationship was mutually beneficial, as it was also a chance for punctum to broaden its distribution network.
“The partnership with UCSB has been a lifesaver,” Van Gerven Oei said. ”To get books out into the world – from publisher to readers – it’s not easy. UCSB Library helped us in understanding the landscape, finding allies, and getting metadata records in shape. In turn, we have provided students and faculty with knowledge of OA publishing.”
One of the outcomes of the pilot was the creation of punctum’s Supporting Library Membership Program. It now works with other libraries around the world on open access publishing.
“The library and scholarly communities have long advocated for free and unrestricted access to scholarly literature. The open science movement as a whole is gaining momentum, not only in the U.S., but also internationally,” Uziel said. “Open access publishing will continue to grow thanks to the implementation of OA policies by funders and institutions and the development of new innovative publishing models and open source platforms that facilitate the publication of OA content at a reduced cost. National and international library organizations are endorsing the OA policies and initiatives, and open access publishing is increasingly integrated into standard library operations.”
The road ahead
Experimentation on how to disseminate born digital books is happening across all sectors of publishing, with efforts like punctum books helping make systemic change across a field that has historically prioritized commerce over access, according to Maria Bustillos, editor of The Brick House.
“Free-thinking people are all involved in the same democratic, egalitarian project of building culture, whether they are librarians, academics, readers, students, journalists, artists or authors,” she said. “The sooner we all join forces to expand and protect the global commons, the better our world will be.”
Van Gerven Oei said he’s optimistic about the future of open access, but there needs to be policy and political will to support knowledge as a public good. In the meantime, he sees potential with providing online access to open access monographs.
“We have a deep understanding and love for all the forms of archives,” Van Gerven Oei said. “From the moment that the Internet Archive existed, we have been great fans of its omnivorous drive and applaud the enterprise. We are very happy to contribute even more data and become sustenance for future archivists.”
People from around the world — many wearing their best roaring ‘20s attire — came to the Internet Archive’s online party on January 19 to toast creative works recently added to the public domain.
The event was hosted in partnership with SPARC, Creative Commons, Library Futures, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
“We’re celebrating works published in 1927 becoming open to all in the United States where we can legally share, post, and build upon them without permission or fee,” said Jennifer Jenkins of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. “You’re free to reimagine the characters, the events, the settings, the imagery, and use them in your own stories, musical plays, and movies.”
Librarians and archivists are eager to preserve these cultural materials, the vast majority of which are out of circulation. Now that they’re in the public domain, anyone can preserve them and digitize them — making them more discoverable.
“The public domain is important because it enables access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history,” Jenkins said.
The first full-length film featuring synchronized sound was produced in 1927: The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson.
Rob Byrne, a film restorer and president of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, explained at the event that previous films were not truly silent since every motion picture performance in the 1920s was accompanied by live musicians—from full orchestras in big cities to single piano players in small town theaters. The average American went to the movies more than three times every week, and international movies were accepted because there were no language barriers, Bryne added.
Unfortunately, more than 80% of all the films produced prior to 1930 have been lost.
Even fewer films featuring Black casts made for Black audiences survived, said Cara Cadoo, associate professor of history, cinema and media studies at Indiana University. “Race has always been a part of the story of the American cinema,” she said.
It was because she could easily view movies in the public domain that Cadoo said she was recently able to discover a clip from a lost Black film. Through some detective work, she identified footage from the 1917 film, “The Trooper of Troop K,” while studying another film from 2023. “This history is something that just in recent decades, people have taken seriously,” Cadoo said.
Interest in the public domain is global! The map above shows where our viewers watched the celebration.
Brigitte Vezina, director of policy and open culture at Creative Commons, explained that libraries, museums and archives still face big challenges simply to fulfill their mission in the digital world. (See report Barriers to Open Culture.) Institutions are working in an outdated framework and copyright policy reform is needed, she said.
“We’ve been promoting open culture to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world,” said Vezina, citing its new call to action policy guide. “It’s based on this rich experience that our open culture program supports better sharing of cultural heritage globally.”
Along with works celebrated from 1927, SPARC’s Nick Shockey talked about another important milestone in expanding public access to knowledge. In August, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued new guidance that requires the federal government set the default to open for all publicly funded research in the United States.
“This will make over $80 billion each year in research produced with the support of U.S. taxpayer dollars immediately available to anyone online,” Shockey said. “The priority is part of a broader commitment to advancing equity in science and scholarship and recognizing the ways in which openness can be a powerful enabler of more equitable systems.”
“As we celebrate today, I hope the momentum that we generate can be channeled into ongoing advocacy to ensure that more and more of the knowledge that shapes our world is made available to everybody and to more fully realize the right of sharing knowledge,” Shockey said.
For an example of the value of free sharing of information from the federal government, Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge, highlighted NASA’s public posting of images from the Webb space telescope.
“Some things are born free,” said Internet founder Brewster Kahle. “Democracies around the world publish openly because they believe in education and they want it to be spread as widely as possible.”
Open does not always mean easily accessible, however. Kahle is working on Democracy’s Library, a project to gather government material from the U.S., Canada and around the world and preserve them in one place.
“This is the internet we’re dreaming of. Let’s go and make sure that it’s got all of the public domain materials publicly accessible – not just all those things that are from the classic era. Let’s go and celebrate the current public domain.”
Also presenting at the celebration was Rick Prelinger, an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting ephemeral films (used for specific purposes such as advertising, educational and industrial films) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. He partnered with the Internet Archive to make a subset of the collection — now more than 8,500 films — available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse in the Prelinger Archive.
Throughout the program, students from the Snowden International School (Boston) and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of The Arts (San Francisco) read poetry newly entered into the public domain from Caroling Dusk: an anthology of verse by Negro poets by Countee Cullen.
Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of Library Futures, and Lila Bailey, senior policy counsel at the Internet Archive co-hosted the party.
Festivities are planned on January 19 to recognize Public Domain Day and embrace the possibilities of new works freely available from 1927.
In the United States, the recent declaration of the federal year of Open Science and the White House memo unlocking publicly funded research outputs has buoyed the open community and its outlook on knowledge sharing.
However, the celebration will be muted in Canada where librarians and educators are assessing the impact of a vast expansion of the copyright term.
Canada’s copyright protection for artistic works was extended as 2022 came to a close from life of the author plus 50 years—to life of the author plus 70 years. The change was the result of international trade negotiations in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), requiring Canada to bring its terms closer to that of the U.S.
Once items are in the public domain, they can be republished or repurposed without seeking permission or paying a rights holder. This allows libraries, museums, and archives to use materials freely for research and historical purposes, as well as post online archives of the important documents and creative works.
The change in Canada means books, movies, plays, and songs that were previously scheduled to be free from copyright will not be in the public domain until 2043.
“It’s a disappointment and a feeling of mourning,” said Andrea Mills, executive director of Internet Archive Canada, of the policy change that prompted the cancellation of Public Domain Day parties in the country. “It feels more like we should have a wake.”
Canadians used to feel good about the annual Public Domain Day, with its shorter copyright term than the U.S., said Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa. Now, the country is beginning to consider the ramifications of the new terms, including disruptions to digitization projects and the increased cost of materials that will remain under copyright for educational institutions.
“Not having an enriched public domain for 20 years creates some real harms,” said Geist, who is also a member of the Internet Archive Canada board. “The vast majority of works that have no commercial value at the end of their life will be locked down for an additional 20 years.”
The policy change was buried in a budget bill and there was no public announcement, leaving many Canadians unaware, Geist said.
The extended protection was agreed to as part of closed trade negotiations, said Peter Routhier, a copyright attorney who is on the Internet Archive’s policy team. That kind of negotiation does not follow the same sort of open process as a democratic legislature. In these kinds of settings, commercial interests are often prioritized, and there are very few ways for the public to engage, he said.
Mills said these recent changes by the government have an “overall chilling effect” on copyright policy.
Before the copyright terms were extended, the Canadian government did hold hearings to consider registration solutions and exceptions to works entering the public domain. In the end, those proposals were not adopted.
When looking at thousands of works, there is value in the overall collective rights for the authors, Geist said. But, he noted, there are also education costs to acquire works and loss of creativity to revise works in new ways when materials remain under copyright.
“It’s hard to be optimistic,” Geist said. “But it’s in the realm of possibility the government could consider some [copyright exceptions], particularly for groups like librarians, archives, and museums. “The government has not shown a lot of interest in this issue. If anything, it has sort of done its best to try to keep it below the radar screen. We’ll have to wait and see.”
To advance the public interest, librarians in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere are pushing for reforms to licensing agreements to e-books. With the pause for new works entering the Canadian public domain, advocacy to make knowledge open by default is even more important.
The events in Canada are a reminder that what is—and isn’t—in the public domain is ultimately a policy decision and vigilance is needed to ensure the public interest is elevated in policy conversations about copyright.
Tune in to learn more about Public Domain Day at an event hosted by the Internet Archive in collaboration with partner organizations on January 19 at 4 p.m. ET. Register here. This year’s event will celebrate the theme, “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” and feature a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists, and others.
