The Physical Archive in Richmond, California, turned into a festive venue October 21, welcoming the public to one of the places where millions of donated items are preserved.  

Nearly 350 people filled the Physical Archive to see the collection and learn how the organization processes donated materials for access and preservation.

On a tour of the facility, Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian, shows an area where donated items are separated by media type on pallets. “Can somebody read off one?” he asks the group. They shout out: “Yearbooks! Sheet music! Microfiche! Laser discs! Audio books! Manuals!” Kahle explains the “Ephemera” label includes posters and pamphlets.

“This is just part of our way of trying to find the great things that should be saved for another generation,” Kahle said.

Liz Rosenberg, physical donations manager, describes how an app can be used to scan a book’s bar code and determine if it’s a duplicate or something needed in the collection. The app is available for anyone to download and use.

“Our mission is to preserve and digitize one copy of every unique item we can find,” said Rosenberg, who arranges for the shipment of donations of all sizes and types from books to vinyl record collections.

Learn about donating physical items

Decluttering his East Bay home in the last few years, musician Klaus Flouride (bassist for the Dead Kennedys) has given the Archive several boxes of records he accumulated on his own, from his parents and estate sales—some dating back to 1901. “I didn’t want them to go in the trash bin. I know they are preserved here,” said Flouride, who looks forward to having access to the music online and attended the event to learn more about where his donation ended up.  

At another station, Elizabeth MacLeod demonstrates the Scribe software used to capture images of books being digitized for the Archive.

“How many pages do you do in an hour?” asks Susie Kameny, a public school teacher in San Francisco. MacLeod said she can finish over 200 pages an hour, then answers questions about scanning books in foreign languages and shares the steps of proofing the digitized version before it’s uploaded.

Kameny had been to Internet Archive’s headquarters on Funston Avenue for a professional development session for educators, but was curious to learn more at the Physical Archive. In her classes, Kameny said she shows students how to use the Archive, and finds it’s useful for locating primary resources and various materials to incorporate into her lessons.

“Every time I turn around, there’s a new collection or a new thing that they’re working on—and I think of a new way to teach about that,” said Kameny, who values the Archive as a trusted “anti-deep fake” source at a time when AI is emerging. “It’s very thoughtful, the way the Archive has [preserved materials]. We’re so lucky to have this.”

Learn about donating physical items

Christian Wignall said he’s found old books, newspapers articles, and photographs on cycling through the Internet Archive, which have been helpful as he prepared papers for the International Cycling History Conference. After having recently driven several carloads of academic books to the Archive to donate for a friend who was moving, Wignall said it was interesting to see where everything is processed at the Physical Archive.

“I’m just amazed at the scale of it,” Wignall said. “It’s just an enormous endeavor and an enormous place.”

Upstairs at the Prelinger Archive, Rick Prelinger describes the “magic process” that his team undertake to repair and preserve motion picture film, including documentaries and industrial advertising.

Steve Crawford came to the event to explore the possibility of donating some of his family’s  collections of film, maps and books to the Archive. His great grandfather had newsreel footage with aircraft from his factory in Southern California, along with aviation maps and magazines from the 1920s. His father had a hobby of recording above-ground nuclear bomb tests near where he grew up in the Mojavie desert, and Crawford thinks the film might be of interest to the broader community.

“I have miscellaneous things that have accumulated, so for me, this is like ‘wow’ I can get some of this out of my garage,” said Crawford, who is excited to connect with the Archive and begin the donation process.

With the new microfiche digitization center, Louis Brizuela said visitors were interested in how the operation works – the camera, the process and the science behind it. “It’s nice to see the faces that are actually reading and looking at the material,” he said.

Brian McNeilly, a volunteer who worked to improve the digital accessibility of Open Library when he was in graduate school for library science, said he was impressed by the size of the Physical Archive and the scope of materials – including microfiche.

“I haven’t thought much about microfiche since I was probably in middle school when I had to use it for research projects,” said McNeilly, who now works with the University of California Office of the President on digital accessibility. “There’s a reason we adopted microfiche way back when. And, of course, it’s still relevant and we’re starting to preserve and digitize it.”

Sandy Chu, a Google Summer of Code volunteer who worked on an open source translation project with the Archive, said she enjoyed looking at all the media on display at the event from iPods to VHS tapes. 

“There are just so many formats that exist,” she said. “It makes you appreciate there are people putting in the effort to figure out how we can convert these forms of media for future generations.”

Libraries, now more than ever, need innovative, dedicated champions to help them meet the needs of the public in the digital age. Internet Archive’s Lila Bailey said she sees hope in the talents of Georgetown University law students working at the school’s Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic (iPIP).

Bailey, Internet Archive’s senior policy counsel, was the keynote speaker at iPIP’s fifth anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C., on March 27. She praised the clinic for providing quality research and creative work products on projects that have helped the Internet Archive promote awareness of the public domain, controlled digital lending, and other issues related to the public interest mission of libraries at a challenging time.

“Libraries are at the forefront of using technologies of the day to serve the informational needs of their communities. And they do it without trying to sell you anything, and without selling any data about you either,” Bailey said. “Right now, libraries—whether they are digital, or brick and mortar—are under threat.”

Between moves to ban books, defund institutions, and dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, libraries are facing perilous times. Publishers have simply stopped selling digital books to libraries, forcing them to use commercial platforms that come with terms and conditions that restrict how those materials may be used, Bailey explained. The iPIP clinic had a hand in drafting a paper on the topic, she noted, called, “The Publisher Playbook.”

Today, libraries need lawyers, yet most don’t have in-house counsel, Bailey said. That makes the contributions of student law clinics so vital at this juncture.

“Clinics play an important role in the library and public interest tech community by expanding our capacity to tackle these existential threats and to pursue opportunities for positive changes,” Bailey said. “[iPIP’s Founder] Amanda Levendowski has built a truly outstanding clinical program in these five short years.”

Bailey explained under copyright law, a library can lend out a book it owns to as many people as it wants to, for as long as it wants to. It can also preserve a book for the long term, and make it available long past when a publisher may sell it. The law also allows libraries to make copies of a book in an accessible format for patrons who are blind or have other print-disabilities, and participate in interlibrary loan arrangements, so that patrons of other libraries can access books they don’t have in their own collections. Yet, Bailey said, under these licensing models with publishers, none of those practices is allowed.

“These market-based threats are a completely new kind of challenge that require creative legal and policy interventions,” Bailey said.

In her remarks, Bailey described how her interest in the field began nearly twenty years ago when she chose to go to law school at University of California Berkeley, in part because of its Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “[The internet] was new. I was optimistic to democratize access to information and saw it as a revolutionary force,” she said. Bailey’s first client at the clinic was the Internet Archive, working on a project that would eventually become the TV News Archive. She later became a teaching fellow at the clinic, and joined the Internet Archive staff in 2017.

Since iPIP’s first semester in 2020, Bailey said she has worked closely with student teams that exceeded her expectations, delivering materials to advance the needs of the Internet Archive, and the wider library community.

“The iPIP Clinic has become an indispensable partner to me as I do my work as an advocate for libraries working to build a healthier digital information ecosystem,” Bailey said.

Amanda Levendowski, associate professor of law and the founding director of the iPIP Clinic, credited Bailey and her willingness to work with students as a reason the clinic has been successful in tackling cutting-edge issues at the intersection of technological advancements and social justice.

“Library lawyering work is an exercise in imagination,” Levendowski said. “A sense of play and creativity around the law has never been more important, because that’s going to be how we get out of the moment we’re in.”