Brewster Kahle accepting the “Project Owl”, which he was awarded by the Dutch Wikipedia community. Telderszaal, Academiegebouw (Leiden). Vera de Kok, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Internet Archive was recently honored for its valuable contribution to the Dutch-language Wikipedia community at an event at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle accepted the 2024 Project Uil award at a March 18 gathering of prominent figures in the Dutch open knowledge movement including librarians, archivists, scholars, and representatives from national cultural institutions.
The WikiUilen awards have been given out since 2015 on behalf of the Dutch Wikipedia community in recognition of hardworking Wikipedia volunteers and organizations. Candidates in eight categories (project, writer, editor, newcomer, etc.) are nominated and voted on by fellow Wikipedians. The Internet Archive received the project award and a small replica of an ancient Greek owl sculpture. (“Uilen” in Dutch translates to “owls” in English.)
“The owl is a symbol of wisdom,” said Ronald Velgersdijk, organizer of the Dutch awards, in presenting the statue to Kahle. “We give this project award because the Internet Archive is very important for sharing knowledge and it is very important for Wikimedia. We use it a lot to cite our sources and find information.”
In a concerted effort to ground the information ecosystem in facts, Kahle explained how the Internet Archive has prioritized obtaining and digitizing books referenced in Wikipedia. Since 2016, the Internet Archive has identified and fixed more than 22 million broken links in over 200 language editions of Wikipedia. By pointing readers back to archived web pages in the Wayback Machine and digital books available online, the aim is to increase the credibility of Wikipedia with reliable links and sources, he said.
“The partnership between Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is very strong and growing,” Kahle said.
Watch the Wiki Owl presentation to Internet Archive
Jos Damen, a librarian at Leiden University, helped host the event, which drew nearly 100 attendees. An advocate of open access publishing and a Dutch Wikipedian with over 1 million edits, Damen said he admires the work of the Internet Archive and leans on its resources.
“First and foremost of value is the presence of websites in the Wayback Machine,” Damen said. “As librarians, we all know that links that you access now will be gone in two to five years. It’s important to see these links frozen in time in the Wayback Machine, and then being able to have that reference in Wikipedia.”
Damen said it’s critical to not only fix links to books, but also to add images and attribution for photos on Wikipedia. For instance, a photograph of small copper stones in the pavement in several European countries, signifying the last place where Jewish people lived before they were taken to concentration camps, is a powerful image that can make a page more engaging, he said. (See Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein)
Kahle’s remarks covered the history, evolving support, and challenges facing libraries. He spoke about the mission of the Internet Archive to provide universal access to all knowledge, and gave an overview of Internet Archive Europe – which has a somewhat different focus.
“The idea [of Internet Archive Europe] is to try to build our collective intelligence using all sorts of interesting tools so we can have better decision making,” Kahle said.
Last November, Beatrice Murch was named Program Manager of Internet Archive Europe. She is working to find open knowledge champions in Europe interested in making information in a variety of languages translated and available in new ways.
“The hope is that Internet Archive Europe can use AI tools to bring collections to life and make them more interesting to the public,” Murch said. “We are trying hard to find the right message to engage partners and make data on the Internet Archive accessible to more people, including those with disabilities.
”The Wiki-Uil in the Netherlands is modeled after the German example, started in 2014. Learn more about the Dutch Wiki Uil awards.
The following discussion between writer Caralee Adams and book historian Allie Alvis is part of ourVanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Like many in the early days of Instagram, Allie Alvis shared what they had for dinner or funny things they encountered on their personal account. It was in Edinburgh, Scotland, when pursuing their master’s degree in book history that they were inspired to post about the university’s incredible book collection, library and items from the used and antiquarian bookshop where they worked.
“To my surprise, people really, really enjoyed it,” said Alvis, of videos and photos they curated of delicately paging through rare books. “I started getting questions from friends and family. And then it just sort of picked up steam with institutions and bookish colleagues following me. I have no idea how I ended up at 255,000 followers now.”
The self-described “pink-haired book historian” mainly posts on Instagram (@Book_Historia), but also is active on TikTok, X, Bluesky, Tumblr, Threads and Facebook. Alvis aims to share something new at least once a week, in addition to working as curator of special collections at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware.
Alvis said they never set out to become a super popular influencer, but they enjoy sharing their passion for rare books and educating the public.
“It’s been a crazy ride that my followers have grown to such an extent,” they said. “It really has been a grand experiment.”
Among the most popular items they’ve recently shared: a French sample book of foil ornaments from the late 19th century. “It’s just delicious—sparkly, metal. It’s just to die for,” they said.
Alvis’s posts are filled with descriptive narration and an authentic reverence for the historic books they present. They maintain that there’s more to a rare book than what’s on its pages. There’s history behind the author who wrote it, the place where it was made, and the materials used to make it.
“Because that history remains, you want to preserve it,” Alvis said. “You want to keep it in the best possible condition so other people can learn from it.”
Having materials online means that people from all parts of the world can view them without having to travel, which is good for the environment. It’s also useful in knowledge sharing and teaching to have access from beyond your local library, said Alvis, who has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Kansas, a master’s of science in book history at the University of Edinburgh and master’s of science in information management from the University of Glasgow.
“I approach digital initiatives from an access standpoint,” Alvis said. “I love that digitization and the Internet Archive gives more people access to materials—and that helps to preserve it.”
Whether putting together scholarly articles or a social media post, Alvis turns to many sources in their research—including the Internet Archive. They especially appreciate the ephemeral material that it has preserved, digitized and made freely available, along with the vast collection of books.
“I have my library reference books at home and in the office, but sometimes that one book you need that one page from is just out of reach,” Alvis said. “The short-time lending option on the Internet Archive has saved me so many times.”
In their work curating decorative arts and art history, some objects are easier to capture through scanning than others. For example, it can be challenging for digital preservation to reflect the dimensionality of button samples, metal ornaments, or perfume labels. But it is useful with wallpaper samples or other flat objects. There are also limits because of the sheer volume of material and limited resources.
Alvis said librarians, academics, booksellers, and book collectors are embracing digitization and social media as tools to both further knowledge and highlight collections. Many also now understand that access is an important part of preservation.
“It would be amazing if everything could be scanned—but there is just so much of it,” Alvis said.
Still, as a librarian, Alvis said, much has been saved—and for that, they’re thankful: “It is only because previous generations have preserved this material—to the extent that they have—that I have work.”
Lila Bailey gives the keynote address at Georgetown Law’s iPIP Clinic Celebration.
Libraries, now more than ever, need innovative, dedicated champions to help them meet the needs of the public in the digital age. Internet Archive’s Lila Bailey said she sees hope in the talents of Georgetown University law students working at the school’s Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic (iPIP).
Bailey, Internet Archive’s senior policy counsel, was the keynote speaker at iPIP’s fifth anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C., on March 27. She praised the clinic for providing quality research and creative work products on projects that have helped the Internet Archive promote awareness of the public domain, controlled digital lending, and other issues related to the public interest mission of libraries at a challenging time.
“Libraries are at the forefront of using technologies of the day to serve the informational needs of their communities. And they do it without trying to sell you anything, and without selling any data about you either,” Bailey said. “Right now, libraries—whether they are digital, or brick and mortar—are under threat.”
Between moves to ban books, defund institutions, and dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, libraries are facing perilous times. Publishers have simply stopped selling digital books to libraries, forcing them to use commercial platforms that come with terms and conditions that restrict how those materials may be used, Bailey explained. The iPIP clinic had a hand in drafting a paper on the topic, she noted, called, “The Publisher Playbook.”
Today, libraries need lawyers, yet most don’t have in-house counsel, Bailey said. That makes the contributions of student law clinics so vital at this juncture.
“Clinics play an important role in the library and public interest tech community by expanding our capacity to tackle these existential threats and to pursue opportunities for positive changes,” Bailey said. “[iPIP’s Founder] Amanda Levendowski has built a truly outstanding clinical program in these five short years.”
Bailey explained under copyright law, a library can lend out a book it owns to as many people as it wants to, for as long as it wants to. It can also preserve a book for the long term, and make it available long past when a publisher may sell it. The law also allows libraries to make copies of a book in an accessible format for patrons who are blind or have other print-disabilities, and participate in interlibrary loan arrangements, so that patrons of other libraries can access books they don’t have in their own collections. Yet, Bailey said, under these licensing models with publishers, none of those practices is allowed.
“These market-based threats are a completely new kind of challenge that require creative legal and policy interventions,” Bailey said.
In her remarks, Bailey described how her interest in the field began nearly twenty years ago when she chose to go to law school at University of California Berkeley, in part because of its Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “[The internet] was new. I was optimistic to democratize access to information and saw it as a revolutionary force,” she said. Bailey’s first client at the clinic was the Internet Archive, working on a project that would eventually become the TV News Archive. She later became a teaching fellow at the clinic, and joined the Internet Archive staff in 2017.
Since iPIP’s first semester in 2020, Bailey said she has worked closely with student teams that exceeded her expectations, delivering materials to advance the needs of the Internet Archive, and the wider library community.
“The iPIP Clinic has become an indispensable partner to me as I do my work as an advocate for libraries working to build a healthier digital information ecosystem,” Bailey said.
Amanda Levendowski, associate professor of law and the founding director of the iPIP Clinic, credited Bailey and her willingness to work with students as a reason the clinic has been successful in tackling cutting-edge issues at the intersection of technological advancements and social justice.
“Library lawyering work is an exercise in imagination,” Levendowski said. “A sense of play and creativity around the law has never been more important, because that’s going to be how we get out of the moment we’re in.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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, 1968The unknown photographerThe 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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 theUniversity 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.”
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 TheWashington 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.
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.
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