How do you commemorate the preservation of 1 trillion web pages in a zine? That was Megan Lotts’ challenge when she was contacted by the Internet Archive last summer.
Lotts is an art librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she promotes creativity, play, and makerspaces through her teaching and research. She designs zines (short for magazine), which are self-published, handmade objects that are often copied and shared. It was through Lotts’ involvement with zines at the American Library Association (ALA) conference that she was asked by Internet Archive librarian Chris Freeland to create one for the Internet Archive’s October celebration.
For the project, Lotts collaborated with Louisa Cohen and Drew MacDonald at the Internet Archive on images and text to incorporate. Although an avid user of the Internet Archive, Lotts said making the zine prompted her to take a deep dive and discover all new material.
“As a librarian, this is a space where you go for history,” she said of the Internet Archive. “I’m a kind of curious, reflective person, but there were collections that I came across that I didn’t know existed.”
The final product is an 8-page zine that Lotts has shared on the Internet Archive, along with a close-up view of the pages. It includes the Wayback Machine logo, icons of various collections, an old Polaroid photo of Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, next to a vintage computer.
The zine was printed and shared with attendees at the Oct. 22 Internet Archive party in San Francisco. Lotts took a week off from Rutgers to help unveil the zine at the festivities. Upon returning to Rutgers, she said it was fun to show students her work and explain the process. They were excited to hear about her experience, Lotts said, and what she learned behind the scenes at the headquarters.
“My students grew up with the Wayback Machine. They’ve used it since grade school,” said Lotts, 51, who remembers first accessing the Archive in college. “If you think about 1 trillion pages in less than 30 years, that’s outrageous. It’s preserving information for posterity.”
Zines need to be preserved, Lotts maintains, along with other art and cultural artifacts.
Librarian and creator Megan Lotts.
“When I give someone a zine, what I’m really hoping is that I’m giving you a moment,” Lotts said, “whether you recognize it or not, to hold this in your hands and get lost from the rest of the world. It’s just a tiny little book … I want people to look at it and think about it. That’s the beauty of the zine.”
Zines can be as elaborate as the one she produced for the Archive, she said, or as simple as creating something with a piece of paper, pen or pencil and an idea. “Those are things that most of us can access and everybody has a story,” said Lotts, who hopes the project inspires people to consider tapping into their creative side to make a zine.
“I’m noticing—as a scholar and as an educator—that people want to engage with the arts. They want to be creative,” said Lotts, who has degrees in fine arts, library science, painting and art history and teaches a class on play. “It’s really powerful for me to see students come alive and think about information and knowledge creation in a playful and exciting way.”
Audrey Witters remembers the creativity of the early web.
Audrey Witters
When she was launching her career in the mid-1990s, being online was more about exploring and having fun than figuring out how to make a return on investment. Witters said if you were curious about someone’s web page, you could simply click to see their code or email them with questions. She enjoyed how accessible the early web community was and the feeling of connection.
Now a business consultant in San Jose, she spoke at the Internet Archive’s Oct. 22 celebration, praising its efforts to save digital content and encouraging innovation through experimentation.
Watch Witters’ remarks:
“Thank you to the Internet Archive for preserving the history of the early web, that time of collective effort and quirky, chaotic creation, so that we can have really fun moments of nostalgia,” Witters said from the stage, “but even more so that the next generation of creators can be inspired to find their own ways to promote exploration, collaboration and joyful expression.”
Witters shared the story of her career and the influence the internet has had on her work before there was much pressure to monetize content.
Witters’ famous animated GIF
After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Witters built her early career in the tech sector. Witters garnered attention for helping design a small, animated alien GIF at a graphic art software company. Her work was featured in a 1996 book, GIF Animation Studio, by Richard Koman.
In those early days, it was exciting to come into work each morning to see if any new web servers had launched, Witters said. She was on the lookout for new and interesting approaches to digital layout, movement, or interactivity. She followed a graduate student posting pictures of his daily vegetarian lunch – a forerunner of the food bloggers – and witnessed the beginning of e-commerce. Content was diverse and the web reflected a diversity of voices.
Witters leveraged what she learned to develop an expertise in project management, and said she’d like to see more of that early online creativity carried over to confront today’s challenges.
“Business relies on innovation. Innovation is based on creativity, and creativity comes from fun,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time for fun these days.”
Prioritizing profit without including time for play is not good for individuals, society or businesses in the long run, Witters maintains. As systems evolve, creativity is needed to meet changing demands and unleash new ideas.
For 20 years, Witters worked at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Business, including a decade as the inaugural managing director of online executive programs. Following that role she founded her own company, Learning Impact Advisors, helping higher education clients develop career programs that amplify their mission.
Witters recalls with fondness the “Wild West” days of the early web: “It’s important to preserve that spirit and be inspired by it.”
When someone calls up a single webpage in a digital archive, it’s difficult to understand the scope of the collection. To improve the visibility and appreciation of its resources, the Internet Archive Europe partnered with software engineers and the Internet Archive to develop an interactive display that gives users a sense of what all is available at their fingertips.
This fall, an installation was unveiled in the Netherlands and later demonstrated by Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle at the October 22 celebration in San Francisco.
“The idea is to be able to show and play with the breadth that people have accomplished and the depth that we have all built together,” Kahle said. “This is the web we built. This is the web that we want. This is the web we want to make go from 1 trillion to 2 trillion to 3 trillion.”
The initial display included screenshots of more than 85,000 Dutch websites preserved over the past 30 years. Visitors to the National Library in the Netherlands used a physical joystick and buttons to explore a variety of webpages in a game-like experience. With their voices, they can direct the machine to zoom in on specific topics or domains. The screenshots are laid out in a semantic grid, where websites with similar topics appear together in a cluster. Both topics and layout are extracted using AI–based tools (VLM, embeddings).
The idea started with Kai Jauslin in 2020 when he was working with the Swiss National Library to help the public visualize its digital collection. Jauslin, a software engineer and owner of Nextension.com, https://www.nextension.com/ and Barbara Signori, a digital librarian, created an interactive display that went live in 2021, reflecting 80,000 snapshots of archived web pages in the Swiss library collection. (It has since grown to more than 115,000.)
Once Kahle saw the Swiss project, he was interested in developing something similar using the Wayback Machine. In January, Jauslin got the green light to make the project open source so he could reuse everything he’d developed for the Swiss library for the Internet Archive Europe. He then collaborated with a team at the Internet Archive including Jefferson Bailey, director of archiving and data services.
“One of the goals of this project was to be able to show the depth [of the collection] and how big everything is,” Jauslin said.
Bailey extracted the data, made over 1 million screenshots, created formatting to adapt the project framework to feature webpages from the Netherlands collection. The screenshots were used in the interface backed by the Wayback Machine.
“This showcases these collections and makes them more tangible and usable in different ways,” Bailey said. “It’s not just looking at the archive copy of one website, but looking at all of them and searching across categories. You can zoom in and zoom out with functionality that was not available before. It showcases these collections. “
In addition to being a cool tech project, Bailey said, the display has an advocacy element in helping demonstrate the value and scope of digital collections. The display is a good “public engagement” opportunity that lets library patrons interact and grasp the scale of the available resources.
The visibility is a useful tool in making the case to funders and the government to support open resources and library preservation.
At the National Library of the Netherlands, Sophie Ham, curator of the digital collection, said the display shows that life on the internet is worth preserving.
“We were very enthusiastic about this concept [of the display] because our web archive is very hidden. People barely know it’s there,” Ham said. “We need people to acknowledge the importance of a web archive – but to acknowledge it, you have to make it visible and more attractive.”
The display made the collection visible, she said, and the low-barrier, interactive element has been embraced by visitors.
“It helps us get into people’s mind that web archives are as important as books in collections of national libraries,” Ham said.
As technology advances, Jauslin said he hopes the project will continue to expand; Bailey added the hope is to customize the display to other national libraries that express interest.
In the early days of the HIV-AIDS crisis, journalist John-Manuel Andriote was struck by how the gay and lesbian community mobilized, and how many in the general public responded with an outpouring of volunteerism and support.
He wrote about this pivotal time in his book, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1999 and updated in 2011.
“The LGBT community was organizing to save their lives and allies supported and joined them,” said Andriote, a journalist and author based in Atlanta. “This community-level organizing literally built the LGBT equality movement.”
Recognizing the relevance of lessons learned from this unique period in history to readers today, Andriote decided to make the book available to all. Twenty-six years after its release, Victory Deferred is now an open access book—free to anyone as a digital download.
“AIDS taught us about our own power to create change, to stand up for ourselves, and not only demand change, but to bring that change about,” said Andriote, 67, who is gay and has been living with HIV since his 2005 diagnosis. “We learned how to do it under duress. Those are really important things to know—about an individual’s ability to accomplish things on our community’s behalf.”
By making the book open access, Andriote said he hopes to keep alive the stories of the early activists and build awareness about the ongoing challenges for equal rights.
“There’s no other book that is a journalistic history drawing from hundreds of first-hand, original interviews with people on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic,” he said. “It makes the connection between the community organizing and the national political movement.”
The book won a Lambda Literary Award (Editors’ Choice Award), and was a finalist for the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards and the New York Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.
Recognizing the historical importance of Andriote’s work, the Smithsonian Institution has preserved his research as part of the nation’s record. In 2008, the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., archived his notes and recordings for the book, as well as all correspondence between Andriote and his editor at The University of Chicago Press. All of his work products are available for scholars and researchers to review. The crisis prompted many people to be public about their sexuality and become politically active, Andriote said, and preservation of those stories is important.
“Our stories are fully equal pieces of American history.”
John-Manuel Andriote, author of Victory Deferred
“The reason I started writing about AIDS grew very much out of my personal sense of full equality,” he said. “Writing about gay men and how it’s affecting my community grew out of my sense that our stories are human stories. Our stories are fully equal pieces of American history. They are part of what makes up this country—and the fact that the Smithsonian recognized this just felt great.”
Andriote was introduced to the idea of open access publishing through an editor at University of Massachusetts Press. He had secured the copyright for Victory Deferred in 2008. He formatted the book for open access publication and worked with the University of Chicago Library to publicize it, and with the Internet Archive to host the open access version.
Andriote is also the author of “Stonewall Strong: Gay Men’s Heroic Fight for Resilience, Good Health, and a Strong Community” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
One trillion! There was no mistaking the number that was center stage at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on October 22.
“We are celebrating a major goal of one trillion web pages…shared by people all over the world, wanting to make sure that what they know is passed on,” said Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “It’s a fantastic, phenomenal success story.”
Watch the livestream:
Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been saving the digital history of the internet. In October, it surpassed the threshold of preserving one trillion web pages—a fact that was met with enthusiastic applause each time it was mentioned at the party held at the non-profit research library’s Funston Avenue headquarters in San Francisco.
People should not take for granted the important role that libraries, including the Internet Archive, have played in compiling accurate information and making it accessible to all, said California State Senator Scott Weiner, who presented a Certificate of Recognition from the State of California Senate to the Internet Archive. “We’re seeing now in this country people trying to rewrite history and come up with alternative facts,” he said at the event. “What the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine does is to make clear that everything is there. I am so deeply grateful.” [watch remarks]
California State Senator Scott Weiner. Photos by Brad Shirakawa, October 22, 2025.
In a video message, Vint Cerf, creator of the Internet and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, said the one-trillion-page mark is an incredible milestone. “[The Internet Archive] has preserved an enormous amount of history over the course of their data collection, something which I feel is absolutely essential,” he said. “In the absence of what they have done, the 22nd century will have no clue what the 21st Century was all about.”
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
The program included a glimpse back at early days of the web and a hopeful vision for the future.
“There was this dream of an internet that was made for us, by us, to be able to make us better people,” Kahle said. “Yes, using technology. Yes, having games with lots of different players and winners—a fun and interesting world, and that is very much still within our grasp.”
Audrey Witters, creator and community builder
Audrey Witters, a veteran of the early web, brought the audience back to 1994—when all existing websites could still fit on a single “What’s New” page. Reflecting on her early days at NCSA and her creative experiments on GeoCities, Witters shared the story of how a small animated alien GIF she helped create became an unlikely icon of the early web. “It’s so important for us to remember that context, that spirit, that joy of creation—what happens when you give people the tools and invitation to publicly and exuberantly celebrate themselves,” she said. Thanking the Internet Archive for preserving that era’s spirit of discovery and collaboration, Witters urged the next generation of creators “to look for new opportunities to promote exploration, collaboration, and joyful expression. Here’s to the next trillion!”
Lily Jamali, BBC News
Lily Jamali, an investigative journalist with BBC News, said she appreciates the Archive’s public service mission and tools that are “absolutely fundamental” to hold the powerful to account. “They help us journalists fact check claims,” she said from the Great Room stage. “They help us see how companies and governments may have selectively edited online materials, or even deleted statements or social media posted that they would rather that the public didn’t see.” [watch remarks]
Journalists can no longer rely on their news outlets to store their work, Jamali said, so many turn to the Wayback Machine to access past articles and inform their reporting.
In a highly entertaining segment full of Wikipedia screen shots and laughs, Annie Rauwerda, creator of Depths of Wikipedia, spoke about the crucial partnership between Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. She highlighted how archived pages make citations stronger and more durable by ensuring that even when the original source disappears, the evidence remains. “If Wikipedia is worth anything at all, it’s because of the citations,” Rauwerda said.
Annie Rauwerda, Depths of Wikipedia
CEO of National Public Radio Katherine Maher offered her congratulations via video for the event. “One trillion web pages. That’s one trillion artifacts and snapshots of our interconnected world,” she said. “It’s a testament to the Internet Archives’ unwavering commitment to safeguarding the integrity of the open web and its history, ensuring that this vast digital record remains free and open for everyone.”
NPR and the Internet Archive share a deep commitment to providing access to information, a dedication to public service and a belief in strengthening societies through information and dialog, Maher said. “We live today in an era in which information is unstable. It emerges suddenly, decays rapidly, disappears instantly,” she said. “In this moment, the Archive’s role in preserving news, public discourse and our shared stories is more critical than ever.”
With Wayback Machine, ‘Knowledge Will Not Be Lost’
Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine
When the U.S. government websites started going offline after the change in presidential administrations earlier this year, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, said he wasn’t panicking. Why? Because since 2004 the Internet Archive has collaborated with many partners to save federal web pages, through the End of Term Web Archive effort. Since last fall, Graham described efforts to preserve more than 400 million web pages, 2 million videos and hundreds of thousands of data sets—all published by the U.S. government, and therefore available to the public. [watch remarks]
With the Wikimedia Foundation, the Archive has identified and fixed more than 28 million broken links from Wikipedia. It also added more than 4.2 million links to books and papers available from www.archive.org. Graham announced the new partnership with Automattic Inc. to make it easy for WordPress operators to automatically find and repair broken links with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer.
The Internet Archive faces challenges with the advent of AI. More services are blocking access, Graham said, making it harder for memory institutions, like the Internet Archive, to do their jobs—yet, the team remains diligent in its efforts.
“We’re going to keep on building the library that the world deserves, one that remembers, one that connects us, and one that ensures no matter how much the web changes, that knowledge will not be lost,” Graham said.
The Path Forward
Luca Messarra, cultural historian, Stanford University
Luca Messarra, a humanities scholar and educator at Stanford University, said preserving webpages is important because the past is always shaping the present moment. “History is essential because it helps us understand how our own lives came to be. But more importantly, for me, history helps us understand how our lives can be made different,” he said. “The past tells us that the present does not need to be the way that it is.” [watch remarks]
Messarra said he has used resources from the Internet Archive to write conference papers, recover his old chat messaging history and recover a favorite family biscuit recipe.
“The Wayback Machine has tended to one trillion seeds that will nourish our future. All that remains is for us to harvest and use them,” Messarra said. “One trillion pages are one trillion opportunities to change our present moment. That requires that we look at the past not with nostalgia, but with initiative.”
The largest repository of internet history ever assembled is possible thanks to thousands of donations to the Internet Archive and 200,000 unique donors, said Joy Chesbrough, director of philanthropy. At the event, she announced a new campaign that encourages individuals to create their own fundraising teams to support the Internet Archive. See https://donate.archive.org/1t [watch remarks]
It was the largest gathering for the Archive’s annual party in years, said Chris Freeland, director of library services, and he hoped the gathering fostered a sense of connection.
“It was a nostalgic throwback, but it also showed people a path forward for a web that we want,” Freeland said. “I hope people come away with this sense of optimism and a thought that this is our web, and we can be in control of it again.”
Jeremy Modell (right) explains how library materials are packed and shipped. Photos by Brad Shirakawa, October 21, 2025.
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.
Brewster Kahle gives a tour at the Physical Archive.
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.
“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.
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.
Elizabeth MacLeod demos the Scribe book scanning station.
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.”
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.”
Autumn Armstrong (seated), film prepaper and metadata creator, talks with a guest at the Prelinger Archives stop on the Physical Archive tour.
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.”
After Johannes Grenzfurthner began working on a new documentary in 2020, he soon realized that his original storyline was much more complicated than he first envisioned.
The 50-year-old Austrian filmmaker started researching what he thought was a valiant tale of hackers in Colorado who helped craft medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic for people across the Four Corners region (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona), including many members of the Navajo Nation. But as he learned about the disparate impact of the health crisis on the Native American people, he felt compelled to include elements of the United States’ colonial past in the film.
Hacking at Leaves is a 108-minute documentary that incorporates both story lines into an innovative film that Grenzfurthner said “does not fit into a tidy box.”
As an unconventional documentary, he said, it was difficult to land a distributor. So, after a year of trying and failing to secure a commercial release, the filmmaker took a completely different approach: on August 29, 2025, Grenzfurthner published the documentary on the Internet Archive for free public viewing and download.
“It’s free and open, and everyone can see it,” he said. “I have the Internet Archive on my side. At least now I know it will be online. It won’t be deleted, and it will not be censored.”
Having completed and successfully distributed three horror films, Grenzfurthner knew how to find distributors. Unfortunately, he said, the task is more challenging with documentaries, which don’t have a built-in genre fan base.
Initial reviews and audience feedback on Hacking at Leaves was encouraging.
In Europe, it premiered at the Diagonale Film Festival in Austria in April 2024 and was featured at the Ethnocineca film festival in Vienna. It debuted in the U.S. at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City in July and was screened at the Internet Archive in March 2025.
Yet, Grenzfurthner didn’t have luck getting it shown at big-name festivals, such as Sundance, which hurt its chances with distributors. Many, he said, are looking for stories with an uplifting story arc and his film didn’t align with that formula.
“There are no heroes in this story. There are only victims,” Grenzfurthner said. “If you have a documentary without a clear hero, without an invigorating, positive story that gives people a little bit of hope, certain film festivals and certain distributors are not interested in it anymore.”
Still, he was determined for audiences to see his art. After a frustrating year of trying to sell Hacking at Leaves, Grenzfurthner decided to release it for free on the Internet Archive. Having received a grant from the Austrian government to make the film, the project’s costs were covered, which helped with his decision.
Since the 1990s, Grenzfurthner has published under the label he started – monochrom – which has been a foundation for his artistic and activist work. He’s produced in many mediums, but Grenzfurthner said he’s found film to be the most accessible and emotional way to get his messages out. Ultimately, in opting for free streaming via the Internet Archive, Grenzfurthner said he wanted the film to be viewed by as many people as possible.
The decision to release on the Internet Archive was made in collaboration with the film’s editor, Sebastian Schreiner, and co-producers Jasmin Hagendorfer and Günther Friesinger.
Not only was the Archive the film’s eventual distribution platform, it was also a source of materials when Grenzfurthner was researching the documentary. He used it to find reviews of old films and historical items about the Navajo Nation to feature in his work. Grenzfurthner said he values the resources available and the service it provides for digital preservation.
“People believe that the internet doesn’t forget things, but it forgets stuff all the time. You have to take active care that your stuff is out there,” Grenzfurthner said. In his creative process, he says it’s enormously helpful to have past cultural artifacts to learn from and build upon.
“The Internet Archive is growing and growing with petabytes of data and it’s an important institution,” Grenzfurthner said, “because it tries to guarantee the possibility to get your hands on culture that you can’t find anywhere else.”
He added: “I know having my film on the Internet Archive also means it will be around as long as the Internet Archive is around.”
Louis Brizuela says managing the microfiche digitization center for Democracy’s Library gives him a sense of pride. “I feel like I’m making a difference,” said the 28-year-old who lives in the Bay Area. “We’re scanning and preserving all this really cool content.”
Brizuela and his six-person team are currently digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s. The documents are stored on microfiche cards, a flat, film-based format commonly used from the mid-20th century for preserving and accessing paper records, which requires a specialized reader for viewing—making the information contained on the cards difficult to access. “It’s useful for law students or anybody – and it’s free to use without borders,” he said. “Also, it’s valuable for the sake of archiving so information doesn’t get lost.” Next, Brizuela said he’s looking forward to receiving a donated collection of microfiche with images of Sanskrit Buddhist tablets.
Anyone can watch the crew in action on a livestream of the microfiche scanning operation (https://www.youtube.com/live/cxoCM5JXwyg?si=IVoSfefcmru_lUGe). Activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm and 4:00pm-midnight U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays. Mellow lo-fi music plays in the background during working hours and continues with various video and still images from the Internet Archive’s collections rotating on the feed when the digitization center is closed.
During the livestream, one camera is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera; another other provides a close-up view of the material. Each page is processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections. Researchers and readers can easily access and download the documents freely through Democracy’s Library.
Brizuela said the staff has embraced the public window on their work. He joined the Internet Archive in February and hired people who were willing to be on camera and understood the potential benefit of the exposure. “It’s not like ‘Oh, Big Brother is watching’,” he said, noting the employees have fun with the situation. “We’re not robots. We do show our characters. We’re human.”
The team is leaning in, Brizuela said, suggesting they dress up in costumes for Halloween and maybe wearing elf hats at Christmas to add a festive touch to the project. They also answer questions in a live chat with viewers.
Brizuela comes to this position from a varied career working in the military, medical fields, retail and web development. He’s long had an interest in photography, particularly shooting and developing his own 35mm film. So, Brizuela said, it was not hard to pick up how to operate the custom-built scanner and oversee the digitization process.
Louis Brizuela stands in front of a custom-built microfiche scanning workstation.
Every morning, the team huddles up in the small digitization center to talk about the previous day’s completed pages and map out the upcoming work. Brizuela watches over and QA’s the scanning done by the team. Depending on the type of collection, each scanner can scanhundreds of cards a day.
Brizuela describes the vibe in the microfiche digitization center as pretty relaxing, with staff members chatting and interacting while they work. Often, they have headphones to listen to an audiobook or podcast. “If they are listening to music, sometimes they bust a dance move, or bob their head to get in the groove. People enjoy seeing that,” Brizuela said.
Setting up a livestream is more complicated than just turning on a camera. That’s why the Internet Archive tapped into the expertise of Sophia Tung, a software engineer and online content creator, to help create the livestream for its microfiche scanning center, which launched May 21.
The 29-year-old garnered international media coverage for her livestream of robotaxis parked in a depot just below her San Francisco apartment as they jostled and honked – sometimes in the middle of the night.
“I put it up just sort of as a meme to get some attention. If I couldn’t do anything about it, then I might as well make the best of it,” Tung said of the livestream she posted on YouTube with Lo-fi music in the background. “People became fans of it and Brewster [Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian] reached out to see if I could do something similar with the Internet Archive.”
An avid user of the Internet Archive for years, Tung said she was eager to visit its Funston Avenue headquarters and work with the staff on the project. As a sign of our tech-connected times, it’s become popular to have a mesmerizing scene with mellow music playing on a second monitor as people work. Tung said she could envision a relaxing, but informative, feed showing the preservation process.
Sophia Tung
Tung met with the team who take microfiche – flat sheets of film that hold miniaturized documents – and turn them into digital images that can be accessed online. The team is now digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s.
After assessing the space with five active microfiche digitization stations,Tung decided on a three-camera setup for the livestream. One is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards under a high-resolution camera that captures multiple detailed images. Another is an up-close look of what actually happens on the machine. A third wide-angle camera covers the entire room and is blurred for security, but still conveys motion.
All team members are open to being on camera as they work, but Tung said she recognized privacy concerns may arise. She devised a pause button to be installed to stop the feed, momentarily dimming the “on air” sign in the room. Although initially concerned that employees might not like being on camera, Tung said staff were hired who agreed to the concept and they are on board with the livestream as a mixed media project.
Live activity with the scanners occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays. Ambient Lo-fi music plays continuously. After hours, other Internet Archive content runs on the video feed including silent films, lost landscape footage from everyday life, and public domain photographs from NASA and other sources.
The project has required a combination of engineering to make the infrastructure work 24/7, plus physical design integrating signage and broadcasting lights, which Tung says she enjoyed. Her goal was two-fold: to recreate the excitement of her last livestream and to shine a light on the individuals working behind the scenes at the Archive.
“I always thought about the Internet Archive as just some mysterious entity, trying to preserve what we as individuals cannot. It’s an invaluable tool for journalists and, basically, everybody,” Tung said. “Now, preservation is more important than ever. I think people just assume that it happens. Actually, it takes money, effort, machinery and people. I think it’s important to highlight all the people-hours that go into it.”
Tung produced an explainer video about the microfiche livestream project on YouTube. “The reception has been great so far,” said Tung, who is working on more features and possible additional channels to add to the stream. “I hope the stream brings awareness to the effort it takes to preserve all this important material. If we don’t preserve it now, we are going to lose it.”
All microfiche materials are added to Democracy’s Library, the global project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications.
For many years, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) maintained a large library of books on drug use and policy at its New York City headquarters. As researchers shifted to working online, DPA’s Jules Netherland said she noticed fewer people coming into the office to use the collection.
“It became clear if we really wanted people to benefit from our resources that digitization was the way to go,” said Netherland, managing director of the Alliance’s Department of Research and Academic Engagement. It was also an opportunity to add to the growing collection of the Substance Abuse Librarians and Information Specialists (SALIS).
DPA donated its book collection to the Internet Archive to be digitized and made available for lending and for the print disabled. A team was sent to New York to pick up the books, which were packaged onto three pallets and shipped to a facility for scanning and storage.
Now, the digital version of the DPA library, with 2,260 items, is available to the public at https://archive.org/details/dpa. It is part of the larger SALIS collection of 8,647 items on alcohol and substance abuse digitized by SALIS.
The public has responded with curiosity. In January, 10,000 items were accessed in the digitized collection. Rosenberg speculates the audience is likely researchers, historians, healthcare providers, and policymakers.
In the rapidly evolving field of drug policy, which spans many disciplines, Netherland said it’s important to provide evidence-based information to the public. The hope is to enhance advocacy efforts with easier access to the organization’s collection. DPA developed a resource guide to encourage its use on the Internet Archive.
In donating its collection, DPA helped build the Internet Archive’s SALIS collection. Since 2008, SALIS has helped preserve thousands of items from physical libraries with research from drug and alcohol fields that have closed, said Andrea Mitchell, SALIS executive director.
About 30 years ago, there were approximately 95 libraries, clearinghouses, and resource centers around the world devoted to collecting, cataloguing, and disseminating information concerning alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, Mitchell said. However, today the majority of those libraries or databases have closed. The U.S. government has also shut down collections, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, whose library went back to 1935. “We’re losing important resources and knowledge,” Mitchell said.
This leaves a void in access that has been filled, in part, by digitized collections online. Mitchell said The SALIS Collection includes materials that go back to 1774 and books from medicine, sociology, psychology, economics, law and policy, criminal justice, and other fields. In addition to books, there are government documents, grey literature, and newsletters.
The DPA collection was one of the larger libraries in the U.S., Mitchell said, and its donation to the Internet Archive is significant and welcome.
The Internet Archive is interested in receiving more curated collections like DPA’s on specific subject matters, Rosenberg added. “These really valuable books for research and resources are often not preserved when funding is lost at the library that houses them,” she saidTo find out more about the physical item donation process, go to the Help page for details.
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