Author Archives: Caralee Adams

Current Affairs Magazine Demonstrates Paywalls Are Not Necessary for Publications to Thrive

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Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs.

An independent magazine published in New Orleans is proving that it’s possible to succeed without accepting advertising or putting up barriers requiring readers to pay for content.

In 2015, Nathan J. Robinson and Oren Nimni raised more than $16,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to launch Current Affairs, a print magazine featuring political analysis and satire. Its lean staff of six produces six issues a year, as well as a podcast and digital newsletter. To operate, the magazine relies on donations, grants and individual subscriptions—although its content is available to the public online for free.

Robinson said he’s motivated by the all-too-common and damaging problem that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free,” which he’s famously written about in the magazine. Outrageous stories and misinformation are easy to access, while factual news stories often require subscriptions to read.

“The moment you put in a paywall, you’re cutting down the potential audience—and you’re cutting it down to the people who are really committed, rather than those who need to read the piece the most. I want to reach the people who need to read it closely,” Robinson said. “It’s really important for democracy, because people need to be able to make informed decisions.”

Running a progressive magazine not backed by corporate interests gives the editorial staff latitude to tackle issues with a different lens, said Robinson, 35, who has a law degree and PhD in sociology. With so many distractions in the daily news, Current Affairs tries to keep people focused on what matters; for instance, critiquing how climate change policies should be addressed, and analyzing U.S. policy with Haiti over time. In 2023, Robinson wrote an article on the history of the New Masses magazine, exploring its mission as a left-leaning publication from 1926-1948.

“Being independent gives us so much creative freedom,” Robinson said. “We’re very experimental.”

Current Affairs has 3,000 subscribers (who pay about $70 a year), and staff work to build deep connections to secure their loyalty. Robinson hosts regular online Zoom sessions to get feedback from subscribers and extends an open invitation to stop by the magazine’s office in the Central Business District of New Orleans for a cup of tea. 

Current Affairs covers

Robinson’s goal: cultivate a community that wants to support the publication, rather than thinking of subscribing as transactions. When there is a new project or initiative, the magazine reaches out to subscribers for additional donations and often finds they are responsive.

“We’re trying to demonstrate the viability of independent media,” Robinson said. “We hope we inspire others to believe it’s possible and not accept the conventional wisdom that you need to put content behind paywalls, because you don’t.”

Content is produced by three editors (the other staff members cover graphics and operations) and freelance writers. Robinson said salaries and payments for submissions are modest to keep costs down, with an annual budget of just $600,000. The publication relies on traffic from social media to attract new readers. The team is dedicated to do what it can to persuade others about policy and culture, he said, and provides easy access to the public to join in the discourse. 

Robinson said the work of Current Affairs and the Internet Archive intersects, as both strive to remove barriers to knowledge. 

“The Internet Archive functions as a library should, putting out a lot of raw information,” Robinson said. “Our job is to sift through the information. Collection is important, but analysis is also important.”

In his work, Robinson said he frequently turns to the Internet Archive. After finishing graduate school at Harvard University, he lost access to the campus library. “The Wayback Machine is unbelievably important to anyone who wants to seriously research anything, because stuff goes away,” he said. 

Robinson co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism, which was released by Penguin Random House last year. Since many of the books cited in endnotes were out of print, Robinson said the Internet Archive was invaluable in verifying sources.

Recently, the magazine became registered with the Internal Revenue Services as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. With that new designation, it began to seek additional support and just received its first grant from the Craigslist Foundation. The hope is to expand its funding to be able to hire reporters to do more original reporting, Robinson said.

New start-ups, especially in the media space, struggle to find a sustainable business model, but Current Affairs continues to grow: “It feels amazing to bring something into the world that isn’t like everything else,” he said. “We’ve been around for eight years now, and we’re going to stay around many more.”

Blending Art and Technology Opens New Doors for Internet Archive’s Recent Artist in Residence

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As an Artist in Residence, Swilk said the Internet Archive provided them with the time, space, and support to create a meaningful piece of art that has opened up new possibilities.

“When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love” by Swilk.

Unveiled in November 2024, their immersive art exhibit combined weaving and technology to highlight the critical role of the internet during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Swilk, a 30-year-old artist based in Oakland, California, spent six months on the project with their colleague, Patty Pacheco — researching, designing and producing it for a show at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco.

“I felt like the Archive placed a lot of trust in me,” said Swilk of the sprawling installation in the Great Room. “They let me experiment in a space that was very important to them. I was grateful to be among people who would let me really dream.”

The finished piece, When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love, drew on thousands of historic HIV/AIDS documents and web resources in the Archive’s collection — many of which have since been altered or scrubbed off the live web. Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.

The idea for the project, like much of Swilk’s work, centers on concepts of home and historic origins.

Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.

“As a queer person growing up in the Midwest, I found a lot of solace on the internet, and community,” Swilk said. “The more I was able to connect with my own history through content I found on the internet, the more at home I felt.”

In their household, HIV was a very charged subject, and misinformation swirled around, so Swilk turned online for answers.

“The internet was this deeply impactful, incredible resource that was harboring so much information,” Swilk said. “I wanted to make something that highlighted that.”

Swilk said they long wanted to automate their work, and the Internet Archive provided the appropriate development space to mount motors and technical assistance to make the piece come to life.

“I didn’t know anything about computers,” Swilk said, prior to coming into the Artist in Residence program. “Being able to incorporate mechanization into my art feels like I have a completely new medium to paint with now — and that feels really exciting.”

Swilk credits the team at the Archive (Amir Esfahani, Evan Sirchuk, David Eisenberg) for helping make the exhibit happen. 

Artist in Residence Program
The Internet Archive’s Artist in Residency is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani, and is designed to connect artists with the archive’s collections to show what is possible when open access to information meets the arts. Please contact Amir at amir@archive.org for any inquiries.

Swilk was pleased with the response to the installation, which was viewed by hundreds of people during the Archive’s annual event in October and a reception in November. They look forward to incorporating more technology into their art. Swilk also composed music that played in the background with the exhibit. It was composed over field recordings of spaces HIV information was traditionally spread, such as coffee shops, night clubs, and hospitals. It included a quote from a 1997 interview by HIV activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Other synths were made from modulated retro computer sounds. 

“Whenever I’m given the opportunity to be a resident artist somewhere, my work explodes,” Swilk said. “I really feel like this is putting my work in a different direction. I don’t think I’m going to make something that doesn’t move again.”

Although the program ended with the show, Swilk said it doesn’t feel like it’s over. “I very much feel like this is the start of something. I’m very excited about what comes next,” they said. “I think that’s the point of a successful residency: to develop work that we can use to jump off.”

Swilk said there are so many ways to use the Internet Archive, both digitally and physically, to do creative and interesting projects outside of the box. “It’s a place where you can come with big ideas and leave with them realized.”

Update on the 2024/2025 End of Term Web Archive

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Whitehouse.gov captures from: 2008 Sept. 15; 2013 Mar. 21; 2017 Feb. 3; and 2021 Feb. 25

Every four years, before and after the U.S. presidential election, a team of libraries and research organizations, including the Internet Archive, work together to preserve material from U.S. government websites during the transition of administrations.

These “End of Term” (EOT) Web Archive projects have been completed for term transitions in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, with 2024 well underway. The effort preserves a record of the U.S. government as it changes over time for historical and research purposes.

With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.

“Access by the people to the records and output of the government is critical,” said Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a participant in the EOT Web Archive project. “Much of the material published by the government has health, safety, security and education benefits for us all.”

The EOT Web Archive project is part of the Internet Archive’s daily routine of recording what’s happening on the web. For more than 25 years, the Internet Archive has worked to preserve material from web-based social media platforms, news sources, governments, and elsewhere across the web. Access to these preserved web pages is provided by the Wayback Machine. “It’s just part of what we do day in and day out,” Graham said. 

To support the EOT Web Archive project, the Internet Archive devotes staff and technical infrastructure to focus on preserving U.S. government sites. The web archives are based on seed lists of government websites and nominations from the general public. Coverage includes websites in the .gov and .mil web domains, as well as government websites hosted on .org, .edu, and other top level domains. 

The Internet Archive provides a variety of discovery and access interfaces to help the public search and understand the material, including APIs and a full text index of the collection. Researchers, journalists, students, and citizens from across the political spectrum rely on these archives to help understand changes on policy, regulations, staffing and other dimensions of the U.S. government. 

As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage, where previous term archives are already stored. While separate from the EOT collaboration, this effort is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) support Democracy’s Library to ensure public access to government research and publications worldwide.

According to Graham, the large volume of material in the 2024/2025 EOT crawl is because the team gets better with experience every term, and an increasing use of the web as a publishing platform means more material to archive. He also credits the EOT Web Archive’s success to the support and collaboration from its partners.

Web archiving is more than just preserving history—it’s about ensuring access to information for future generations.The End of Term Web Archive serves to safeguard versions of government websites that might otherwise be lost. By preserving this information and making it accessible, the EOT Web Archive has empowered researchers, journalists and citizens to trace the evolution of government policies and decisions.

More questions? Visit https://eotarchive.org/ to learn more about the End of Term Web Archive.

Efforts Underway to Preserve Historic Images of 1960s San Francisco and Find the Mystery Photographer Who Shot Them

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Bill Delzell is trying to track down who took thousands of high-quality photos in the late 1960s in San Francisco and left the vast collection abandoned in a storage unit. The images include protests of the Vietnam War, the music scene with Jerry Garcia, and young people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In.

Muhammad Ali, 1968
The unknown photographer
The Grateful Dead, 1967

A commercial photographer himself, Delzell became interested in the mystery two years ago. Today, he is championing an effort to identify the person behind the camera and share the work broadly, including providing public access to the collection through the Internet Archive. He launched a Kickstarter campaign, “Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed” to help uncover clues and locate the photographer. Photographs shared on social media have attracted over 1.5 million views and the Kickstarter effort is advancing to its $49,000 goal. “It’s been quite a ride,” he said. “I think of myself as an advocate for this unknown photographer.”

So far, about 5,700 photos from 1966 to 1970 on black-and-white film and color slides have been developed ; another 75 rolls of 35mm film remain unprocessed. The images were discovered in the 1980s and passed hands through several dealers before Delzell was introduced to them through a friend.

“After turning a few pages in the collection, I had this overwhelming sense of loss,” said Delzell, 67, who worked as a photographer for over 30 years in San Francisco and now runs SpeakLocal.org, a nonprofit in Sacramento. “The idea that a person could devote five years of their life capturing so much of such an iconic era, and then to have become separated from it … my mind was spinning. I left with an awareness of the importance of the collection and preoccupied with how we could reconnect the photographer with their work.”

Now, his dream is to raise enough money to complete the restoration and uncover the mystery of the gifted photographer. The images would be of great value to educators, he said, teaching about that tumultuous time in American history.

“There is historical significance of the work,” Delzell said, who went to protests in the 1960s with his activist parents. “The idea of a community coming together to search for the identity of this individual, as well as individuals in the photograph, is what appeals to me. We’re still at a time where a lot of the people in those images are alive, and they can share their stories.”

Resources
– Kickstarter campaign: Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed
– Reddit: /WhoShotMe

Delzell has involved young people through his nonprofit organization dedicated to project-based learning. They are helping to scan the images and create a database through paid internships or school credit. The aim is to develop an interactive tool, and perhaps a book or documentary about the photos and quest for the photographer.

Once the work is shared with backers, Delzell wants it to be available to all on the Internet Archive. His plan is to preserve the collection and make it accessible with the public interest in mind.

Delzell credits the enthusiastic response to the project to the phenomenal era when the photos were taken. 

“If you think about any moment in the history of humankind, there’s probably never been a time that has had such a transformational impact on culture as the 60s,” he said. “To be able to dive into 8,000 images – all captured through the eye of one individual – is unique. Educators can add the images to their curriculum when they’re talking about subjects like the Civil Rights movement or the Summer of Love or the counterculture movement. It just really represents a great opportunity.”

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Forgotten Music

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The following interview with singer-songwriter Elliott Adkins is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Elliott Adkins has a passion for recording old songs that have largely been forgotten. The 23-year-old musician was inspired after finding boxes of sheet music in his parents’ basement when they moved from his childhood home in Atlanta last year. 

“I thought it would be cool if somebody took the time to record these obscure pieces of music that had never been recorded…so I did,” Adkins said. “I put it online really not expecting much of it, but it took on a life of its own.”

Most of the collection of more than 1,000 pieces of music, which were his late grandmother’s, are old enough to be in the public domain. That allows him to remix, record and share the music. Adkins records himself singing and playing the songs on guitar, posting the never-before recordings online. His video of the 1927 song, “Yesterday,” went viral on Instagram and propelled his social media presence.

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy,” Adkins said. “There are people who had great ideas in the past, but the way our copyright system is set up, it’s hard to expand on those ideas. The public domain allows you to have a certain amount of time to make as much money as possible…then it becomes something greater than yourself. It removes the ego from art.”

Adkins said he’s drawn to these vintage tunes, in part, because he “naturally craves mystery” and likes the challenge. It’s a stretch to figure out the music, understand the lyrics, and put his own twist on the songs, he said. He unpacks the history of the songs and often shares some of their backstory in his videos. 

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy.”

Elliott Adkins, singer-songwriter

“I find the [old] songs to be a lot more sophisticated than popular music today, with their chord progressions and harmony,” Adkins said. “There’s a blend of genres – early jazz and forms of classical music – that’s very interesting.”

In October, Adkins was invited to perform at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration in San Francisco. He made musical history singing “Tell Her I’ll Love Her,” an English sea song from the early 1800s. It was the first time the song had ever been recorded. Adkins was the closing act for the event, playing his guitar and singing before a live audience—and getting the crowd, which surpassed 400 people, to sing along.

“It was great. I could tell the audience was primed for anything I was going to throw at them,” said Adkins. “It was nice to have such an attentive audience. There was an ideology attached to what I was performing, a mission behind it, and those people were very much ready for that.”

Tell Her I’ll Love Her (audio)
The audio version of “Tell Her I’ll Love Her” is available under CC0, meaning you can “copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” DOWNLOAD NOW

Adkins, who also writes original alternative country and Americana music, said he’s become fascinated with the community of music preservationists he’s encountered since venturing into this niche of music. He’s met people old and young, online and in the Atlanta area who are committed to reviving forgotten songs.

To research music, Adkins uses the Internet Archive and the Discography of American Historical Recordings Database from UC Santa Barbara.

Staff at the Internet Archive spotted Adkins on Instagram and reached out to invite him to participate in the October event. Since much of his material he uses is in the public domain, he’s said he’s a “big fan” of the Archive and was happy to collaborate on the project.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

A few songs were considered before the decision was made to go with, “Tell Her I’ll Love Her.” Adkins worked on the arrangement, wrote new lyrics, and said he practiced it for 30 minutes every day leading up to the performance in San Francisco.

The feedback after the performance has been overwhelmingly positive and Adkins said he’s picked up new followers on social media as a result of the event. 

“It’s a way to get in touch with the past,” Adkins said. “Most people, especially my age, are so unaware of what music sounded like 100 years ago. It’s really cool to see what songs did make it, what songs didn’t.”

Adkins said he enjoys thinking of new ways to present the old tunes.

“I see music as something that is constantly trying to be pushed forward,” he said. “I think you can grab a lot more people if you adjust it for the modern audience.”

At the end of his Internet Archive performance, Adkins led the audience in singing additional verses to the sea song that he wrote just for the event:

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
So, celebrate with us, speak of days of yore
Here we all are gathered to maintain what came before
So, it isn’t just my ghost that can visit this sweet shore

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
‘cause some will remember though the world may forget
Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
(So, thank y’all very much for singing right along)

Congratulations to Nick Norman for Award Recognizing Digitization Work

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Nick Norman

The Internet Archive’s Nick Norman has won a 2024 Anthem Community Voice Award in the category for Best Use of Technology. The Anthem Awards honor mission-driven individuals, companies and organizations worldwide, inspiring global change.

Read Norman’s submission essay, “Scanning the Past to Empower the Future.” Learn more about the award.

Norman began volunteering with Internet Archive’s Open Library in 2019, where the Tennessee native took on a variety of responsibilities, including the communications lead in Open Library’s Fellowship program. Now he is a digital technician, assisting on a variety of digitization projects. He has scanned documents from the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Library, the Graduate Theological Union and others.

Making vital documents available to the public is a privilege, he said, and provides important clues about the past that can inform future decisions.

“It’s like breadcrumbs,” Norman said of the knowledge he helps share with users. “Each piece we scan is a breadcrumb, a fragment of a story. People can pick them up, follow the trail, and discover something meaningful — and that’s what I want to do: help people pick them up and see where they lead.”

Norman, whose parents are both librarians, said he was drawn to the work because of his interest in learning and commitment to accessibility of knowledge for all.

“I think about all the materials out there that we get to touch through digitization,” Norman said. “The ability to make significant change or have a profound impact is right at our fingertips.”

Norman considers the documents he has digitized through the course of his work. Some of the materials were given out at meetings or in boardrooms and filed away for safekeeping in places out of reach. He says digitization cracks the knowledge in these materials open again and ushers in new potential.  

“It simply takes pulling up a chair at the computer, looking at [the materials] and seeing how I can harness or leverage this to fill in gaps of information that people didn’t even know was out there,” Norman said. “We’re doing something that can make the world a better place.”

Norman hopes the award shines a spotlight on the Internet Archive’s mission to make knowledge accessible to all, adding: “My goal is to use my expertise in community engagement and building partnerships to draw attention to meaningful work, such as what we’re doing here.”

Vanishing Culture: Q&A with Philip Bump, The Washington Post

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The following Q&A between writer Caralee Adams and journalist Philip Bump of The Washington Post is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post based in New York. He writes the weekly newsletter How To Read This Chart. He’s also the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.

Caralee Adams: What does it mean for an individual journalist to have their work preserved? Why is it important to have easy access to news stories from the past?

Philip Bump: One of the nice things about my career has been that I’ve worked for outlets that I feel confident are doing their own preservation, like The Washington Post. I’m not particularly worried about losing access to my writing. However, it’s less of a concern for me than it is for other outlets, unfortunately. It is unquestionably the case that I find the Internet Archive useful and use it regularly for a variety of things—both for its preservation of online content and collection of closed captioning for news programs.

Any recent examples of when you’ve found the Internet Archive particularly useful?

I use the search tool on closed captioning more than anything else. The other day I was trying to find an old copy of a webpage. I was writing about Donald Trump’s comments on Medal of Honor recipients. As it turns out, there is not an immediately accessible resource for when Medals of Honor were granted to members of the military. You can see aggregated—how many there are—but you can’t see who was given a medal and when they served. I actually used the Internet Archive to see how the metrics changed between the beginning of Trump’s presidency and by the end of it. I was able to see that there were medals awarded to about 11 people who served during the War on Terror, three who served in Vietnam, and one during World War II. Then, I was able to go back and double check against the Trump White House archive, which is done by the National Archives, and see the people to whom he had given this award. That’s a good example of being able to take those two snapshots in time and then compare them in order to see what the difference was to get this problem solved.

Why is it important for the public to have free public access to an archive of the news for television or print?

It’s the same reason that it’s important, in general, to have any sort of archive: it increases accountability and increases historical accuracy. The Internet Archive is essential at ensuring that we have an understanding of what was happening on the internet at a given point in time. That is not something that is constantly useful, but it is something that is occasionally extremely useful. I do a lot of work in politics and get to see what people are saying at certain points in time, which are important checks and accountability for elected officials.  The public can know what they were saying when they were running in the primary as compared with the general [election]. The Archive allows anyone to be able to get information from websites that are no longer active. If you’re looking for something and you have the old link to Gawker or the old link to a tweet, you can often [find] it archived.  The Internet Archive doesn’t capture everything—it couldn’t possibly do so. But it captures enough to generally answer the questions that need to get answered. There’s nowhere else that does that. There are other archiving sites, but none that do so as comprehensively, or none with an archive that goes back that far.

Download the full Vanishing Culture report.

Has any of your journalism vanished from the public? Do you have any examples where you’ve been looking for something and it’s been missing?

Yes. One of the challenges is that multimedia content has often, in the past, been overlooked. There are old news reports that I’ve been unable to find because they’re on video in the era before there was a lot of accessibility and transcripts. Therefore, yes, there are certainly things like that which come up with some regularity. Also, particularly in the era of 2005 to 2015, there were a lot of independent sites that had useful news reports—particularly since we’re talking about the cast of political characters that have been around in the public eye at that point in time. It’s often the case that it’s hard to track those things down. Or if you’re trying to track down the original source or verify a rumor, you might need to dip into the Archive. There are a lot of sites from that era of “bespoke” blogs that the Internet Archive often captures. 

How does limited access to historical data or previous coverage impact you as a journalist?

It is hard to say, because relatively speaking, I am advantaged by the fact that I live in this era.  If I were doing this in 1990, [I’d use] basically whatever was at the New York Public Library and on microfiche. It is far better than it used to be, but the amount of content being produced is also far larger. It is both a positive and a negative that it is far easier to do that sort of research here from my desk at home than it would possibly have been 30 years ago. In fact, I was working on a project where I relied heavily on a local newspaper in a small town in Pennsylvania that wasn’t available online. I literally had to hire someone in the town to go to the library, find [coverage from] the particular date and the local paper and to get the scans done. It cost me hundreds of dollars, but that was the only way to do it. You can see how getting these things done is problematic and challenging.

When Paramount deleted the MTV News Archive in June, there was a lot of dismay, but some say it was frivolous, disposable, and kind of meant to be thrown away. How do you feel about that?

My first writing gig online was at MTV News in college, so that actually had a personal resonance for me. I was at Ohio State in the early to mid 1990s, and I got this little internship with MTV News. I wrote one piece about this band called The Hairy Patt Band. It ended up on the MTV News website. I was very excited. I haven’t seen that in 30 years. It’s one of those things where I wondered what ever happened to that story or if it exists anywhere, in any form. So, that [news] actually had resonance. It’s a bummer. Is it as important to maintain the archives of MTV News as it is The Washington Post? I’m biased, but I would say, no. But it is still a loss of culture—and it is a unique loss of culture. This was a unique and novel form of information that was emergent in the 1990s and now is lost. In the moment, its very existence captured the culture in a way that is worth preserving.

How do you feel about the future of digital preservation of news, data, and information?

I’m more pessimistic than I used to be. I came of age with the internet. When it was new, I used to describe it as the emergence from a new dark age. We had all this information and there was no more going back. All this existed. Everything was online, and we had archives. Now, we see, in part because the scale has increased so quickly that economic considerations come into play, and all of a sudden… the internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore. There are very few places that are doing what libraries do to capture these things on microfiche or store books for the public’s benefit. There is so much of it and that becomes the problem.

Why is it important to pay attention to this issue and preserve journalism for future reporters?

It is obviously the case that we are creating information, culture, and benchmarks for society faster than we can figure out how we’re going to make sure they’re preserved. I think that’s probably always been the case, except that what’s different now is that we are more cognizant of the process of preservation and the challenges of preservation. We expect there to be this thing that exists forever. We don’t yet know how to balance the interest in having as few things be ephemeral as possible, versus the value in doing that… maybe it’s not even possible to preserve everything in the way that we would want to at scale. We have created a process by which it is possible to record and observe nearly everything, and now we’re realizing that that is potentially in conflict with our desire to also store and preserve all this information indefinitely.

Anything you’d like to add?

I think it’s worth noting that preservation is one of the few areas in which I think artificial intelligence bears some potential benefit. One of the things that I’ve long found frustrating is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets, have enormous storehouses of information—not all of it textual. The New York Times must have, in its archives, photos of every square inch of New York City at some point in time over the course of the past 100 years. Artificial intelligence is a great tool for indexing and documenting. We now have tools that allow us to go deeper into our archives and extract more information from them, which I think is a positive development, and is something I’ve advocated for a long time publicly. Only with the advent of artificial intelligence does large-scale preservation become something that seems feasible. One can go through the National Archive and extract an enormous amount of information that is currently stored there in an accessible form, which saves someone from having to stumble upon a particular image. I think that is beneficial. I don’t think that necessarily solves the storage at scale issue, but it does address the fact that so much information is currently locked away and inaccessible, which is another facet of the challenge.  

About the author

Caralee Adams is a journalist based in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a graduate
of Iowa State University and received her master’s in political science at the
University of New Orleans. After working at newspapers and magazines, she
has been a freelancer covering education, science, tech and health for a
variety of publications for more than 30 years.

Internet Archive Puts Out Welcome Mat for Community Gatherings

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Public event and book talk for author Nathan Schneider’s latest publication, Governable Spaces.

Libraries are a cornerstone for civic engagement. The Internet Archive is carrying on that tradition by hosting in-person gatherings at its Funston Avenue headquarters in San Francisco, including candidate forums and public interest events.

“Our goal is to connect with folks who are related to the mission: the universal access to all knowledge,” said Even Sirchuk, community and events manager for the Archive.

This fall, the Internet Archive opened its doors to the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, Mission Local, and SFGovTV to hold forums with candidates for the San Francisco District 1 Board of Supervisors, San Francisco sheriff and an event on politics and money, explaining the funders behind propositions on the California ballot in the November election.

“It’s great to have a funky building that can host us. And it introduces people to a venue or service they might not actually have been exposed to—educating people on what the Internet Archive does.”

Danielle Diebler, volunteer for the League of Women Voters of San Francisco

At a moment when the public is seeking information and connection, libraries are institutions that provide access to resources, programs and public spaces for all members of a community, according to the American Library Association (ALA). As one voter engagement PDF guide from ALA highlights, “Libraries are nonpartisan, but they are not indifferent.”

The Internet Archive wants its building to be more than space for books and servers—to also serve as a community resource, Sirchuk said. By opening its doors to nonprofits for free and providing needed tech support, organizations can host these events in person, which many could not otherwise afford to do.

Danielle Diebler, a volunteer with the League of Women Voters of San Francisco for nearly a decade, said she was pleased to find the Internet Archive as a venue. It is conveniently located, near public transportation, outfitted with the technical support needed to live stream and record—and free to the nonprofit.

“It’s great to have a funky building that can host us,” Diebler said. “And it introduces people to a venue or service they might not actually have been exposed to—educating people on what the Internet Archive does.”

Indeed, the Archive has been a resource to the League, helping digitize its historical documents.

With an in-person gathering, Diebler said, citizens have the opportunity to walk up to candidates and ask questions—something that is not possible over Zoom.

“It’s such a big election this year with so much on the ballot,” she said. “It’s even more important to have accessible resources and understand where candidates stand on important issues.”

Emily Capage, organization administrative associate with the ACLU in San Francisco, who partnered with the League on the forums, said it was important for voters to have a place to learn about the candidates.

“People don’t often get to see them face to face. It’s our right to be able to learn and be educated,” she said. “Local politics matter. It affects our day-to-day lives more than larger national policies.”

For the money and politics event in October at the Internet Archive, Joe Rivano Barros was invited to speak. He is a senior editor of Mission Local, an independent news site based in the Mission District, and has been tracking who is funding the various ballot initiatives. “People just don’t know or get information from the campaign itself,” he said. “We shine more light on money and politics.”

There’s something about an in-person event, where people make an effort to attend, that elevates the quality of the conversation, he said. “The Internet Archive is great because it’s vast and has the tech all set up,” Barros said. “They’ve been very generous.”

In the newsroom, Barros said he regularly taps into resources available through the Internet Archive, such as archived campaign websites, and he also submits materials to be preserved. “It’s a wonderful tool for journalists,” he added.

Sirchuk added that the Internet Archive is focused on preserving written knowledge, but it also values oral history. “That information doesn’t get spread if there isn’t a forum for that knowledge exchange,” he said. “And what’s cool about the forum as a format is that you can compare knowledge in real time, listen to four or five responses to see which connects with you and then do more research.”

The events at the Archive are recorded, backed up and added to the online collection for anyone to access at their convenience for free.

Anson Ho, production supervisor for SFGovTV, live streamed and recorded the fall forums at the Archive building. He appreciated the good audio, lighting and infrastructure provided.

“It’s such an amazing opportunity that they have the community space,” Ho said. “San Francisco is very dense and sometimes it’s hard to find public spaces that big to have people come and gather.”

Capage of the ACLU added that, as a nonprofit operating on a tight budget, it’s hard to find affordable venues for events. She’s grateful to partner with the Internet Archive, she said, and hopes to use the facility again in the future.

Supporters Stand Strong with Internet Archive at Annual Celebration

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The Internet Archive hosted the celebration, “Escaping the Memory Hole,” on October 23, with leaders showing resilience—and finding support—to carry out their work, despite recent attacks.

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian, praised the hard work of staff to restore services following a cyberattack in early October. That hit came on the heels of a court decision limiting the library’s ability to lend hundreds of thousands of books, while another lawsuit from the recording industry looms.

Watch the recording:

“Libraries are under attack,” Kahle said. The pushback—including book banning, defunding, and publishers’ refusal to sell ebooks to libraries—makes it difficult for the library system to evolve and serve new generations of users, he said.

“We need to assert the rights of digital libraries to do our work, to take these bad news situations and secure our support within the legislature and the judiciary,” Kahle said, encouraging audience members to get involved.

The eclectic gathering at the non-profit’s Funston Avenue headquarters, a former church converted to library and community space, expressed confidence in the organization and its vital role in providing access to knowledge.

Supervisor Connie Chan presents Brewster Kahle with a San Francisco Board of Supervisors Certificate of Honor celebrating the Internet Archive at the library’s annual event on October 23, 2024.

“Our democracy and our humanity all count on your support for Internet Archive,” said San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who took the stage to make a surprise Proclamation supporting the library. “Please continue to celebrate them today and every day.”

In the recent publisher lawsuit against the Archive, author Maria Bustillos said the courts got it wrong when it protected profits over the interests of society as intended in copyright law. She is a founding editor of The Brick House, a cooperative of writers and artists who support publishers selling ebooks to libraries.

“I became a writer for the chance to be part of a literary tradition many centuries old, a literary tradition protected by libraries,” Bustillos said. “I make money by my writing, but I don’t want money that comes at the expense of the values that made me a writer in the first place.”

Editor and writer Maria Bustillos.

Attacks on the Internet Archive and other libraries are strikes against freedom of information, she said, calling on the public to fight for the future of libraries. “It falls to people with conscience and brains and a sense of history to rise up to protect libraries. That is our task now,” Bustillos told the crowd. Encouraging her fellow authors, Bustillos implored:

“Writers: RAISE HELL! Let’s work together to make sure that all publishers will sell, not rent, our ebooks to libraries. That way, libraries will stay libraries.”

The celebration included honoring the island nation of Aruba with the Internet Archive Hero Award, 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.

“This award is significant encouragement for us to continue preserving our cultural identity and history together. We are not only safeguarding our heritage but also empowering our community, both here and abroad.”

Xiomara Maduro, Minister of Finance and Culture, Aruba

Earlier this year, the nation launched Coleccion Aruba, a digital heritage portal that provides free global access to its historical materials and cultural treasures. Aruba was the first nation ever to partner with the Internet Archive to provide long-term preservation of its entire national archives. The digital materials are stored on a server that will be kept on the island.

Mrs. Xiomara Maduro, Aruba’s Minister of Finance and Culture, accepted the award in San Francisco, alongside librarians and archivists from the country involved with the digitization project.

From left: Peter Scholing, Edric Croes, Xiomara Maduro, Aruba’s Minister of Finance and Culture, Astrid Britten, and Raymond Hernandez.

“This award is significant encouragement for us to continue preserving our cultural identity and history together,” Maduro said. “We are not only safeguarding our heritage but also empowering our community, both here and abroad.”

The recognition serves as a spark to motivate other nearby islands to digitize their collections, she added—something that would not be possible without the technical support of the Archive.

“It means a world of difference to us,” said Peter Scholing, information specialist/researcher at BNA (the national library in Aruba), of the Internet Archive’s backing. “It is not about just giving us a digital platform but also now, with this award, people can see and read about Aruba and our history and language.”

The Internet Archive partners with several countries to preserve government materials and make them publicly available. At the event, Loren Fantin staffed a table to promote Democracy’s Library, with 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006 with more than half a million documents.

People were drawn to the celebration to learn more about the organization that they’ve relied on over the years in a variety of ways.  

While he’d never been at the Archive’s headquarters, Joe Dummit said he is a huge fan and has spent many hours online downloading its resources—particularly its film collection. He and Emily Giddings, who recently moved to San Francisco, used vintage film clips when making music videos (including “I Can Dance”) for their Indie pop rock band, Zigtebra.

“We are happy to support it because the archive of culture is so worth preserving, the weirdness and uniqueness of people,” Giddings said.

Sage Ryan of San Francisco said he also uses archival video from the collection to make video collages, and uploads his music for preservation online. He recently toured the Funston Avenue headquarters and came back to the event to find out more for a possible documentary project on the Internet Archive—who uses it and how it affects people’s lives.

Revelers danced in the street at the annual celebration.

Robert Anderberg came from San Jose for the celebration. He’s a game developer who said he enjoys accessing old video games preserved by the Internet Archive that don’t exist anywhere else. 

Anderberg said he was also motivated to attend to learn more as he’s building a decentralized social network in his spare time. “In order for people to build communities online, they have to give up all of their agency to companies,” he said. “I want to build something where people are in control of their own communities.”

The Internet Archive has been a valuable learning tool, said John Fuqua of South City, who uses it to look up old magazines, websites and other resources. He added: “The Internet Archive is an incredible place doing an incredible mission of saving things. Information wants to be free!”

Appreciation for Preservation at Physical Archive Event

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Brewster Kahle, at left, guides celebrants through a tour of the Physical Archive in Richmond, California.

“Welcome to the Physical Archive!”

On a tour October 22, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, shared his enthusiasm for the industrial building in Richmond, California, that serves as a forever home for millions of items donated for digital preservation. He walked curious visitors through the life cycle of books and media being collected and scanned as part of the mission to provide universal access to knowledge.

“We wanted to go and digitize everything, ever, and make it as available to everybody as we possibly could. How hard could it be?” Kahle said. After setting out to get one digital copy of everything published, the Archive found donors often didn’t want the physical copies back. That meant finding a secure location to fill shipping containers with the materials including books, music, videos, periodicals, magazines, microfilm, microfiche, CD-ROMs, and interactive laser discs.

The annual tour highlighted the storage space, film preservation lab and demonstrations of sorting and scanning processes. The free event also included exhibits of rare books, vintage records and technology from the vast collection.

“I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s just mind-blowing,” said Klein Lieu, an engineering manager for a software company in Oakland who attended the event. “You walk through the shipping containers and it’s like the modern-day Library of Alexandria. You don’t want it to burn down.”

Lieu, 34, is a monthly donor who said he’s used the Internet Archive since he was 8 years old—randomly looking up old blogs and websites he made of his favorite cartoons as a kid, and later for academic purposes. In the film lab, he marveled at footage of New York City from the 1950s that was being digitized. “I’m in awe of the entire experience,” he said. “Millions and millions of these stories, art works, and code that is all preserved is actually very touching.”

Jen Mico, a film scanner, described the importance of the archival process to visitors at the event.

“It’s really important to have an actual human here being the bridge between the film, which was created 70 years ago, and creating this digital file, which will be disseminated to whoever wants to see it. It’s pretty great,” Mico said.

From left: Tanya Zeif, Sierra Watkins and Alice Tsui celebrate preservation at the annual event.

For Natalie Orenstein, the event was a chance to see up close a resource that she uses regularly as a journalist in Oakland. She said she turns to the Internet Archive for local historical information and to see whether a group has sneakily changed its website or materials. Covering the recent election and tracking campaign financing, she said it’s also been useful to watch the political TV ads the Archive has preserved.

Orenstein said it was striking to see the archive of physical materials—especially since she thinks of Internet Archives as primarily a digital organization. “I respect that they value the original product, as well as its digitized form,” she said. “It’s only worth preserving if you value what it was originally.”

Indeed, for many, seeing the tangible artifacts makes archiving more real and motivates them to explore more of the collection.

Zoli Bassoff of San Rafael said he had not heard much about the Internet Archive before coming to the event but likes the idea of having access to a variety of media. “I was interested in how they receive it, process, and get it on the internet. I wanted to learn about the process,and that was just as interesting as the actual media itself,” he said.

Party-goers watch a film from the Prelinger Archives that has been preserved and digitized.

In the special collections exhibit at the open house, Jennifer Waits, a podcaster and writer from  San Francisco, was drawn to the old records and audio paraphernalia. She is involved with a project to curate a college radio collection as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Waits is reaching out to college radio stations to digitize playlists, program guides, the Journal of College Radio and other materials. Instead of going to individual campuses, this centralized digital collection will be a useful resource for historians and scholars.

“It’s amazing to be able to offer to scan materials and provide this long-term back up,” Waits said. “We have things from a number of radio stations, so you’re starting to see college radio in the context of others from the same period of time to see what they have in common. I hope the collection grows and grows.”

“I knew in principle [the Physical Archive] existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”

John Skinner, Wikipedian and party attendee

The Wayback Machine provides a nostalgia trip for Jen Osgood of Oakland, who likes to look up old blogs and websites from when she was in college. The Internet Archive is also a good resource for art projects, too, and one of the few places she can find old botanical illustrations, she said. Touring the physical archive, she said, gave her a new appreciation of the collection. “It’s an amazing wealth of knowledge,” she said.

John Skinner said he comes from a family of librarians and works as a technologist creating websites so the event was an intersection of his interests. Spending much of his time editing Wikipedia pages, he said he frequently uses the Internet Archive for research and citations.

What was his impression of the physical archive? “It’s astonishing,” Skinner said. “I knew in principle it existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”