Author Archives: Caralee Adams

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.”

Library Leaders Forum: Annual Gathering Highlights a ‘Critical Moment for Libraries’

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In the wake of a rapid-fire cyberattack on the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle reassured participants at the 2024 Library Leaders Forum that the organization’s data is safe, and employees are working around the clock to fully restore services.  

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“It’s been a little challenging,” said Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian on being hit on October 8 with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach towards rebuilding and strengthening our defenses. Our priority is to ensure that the Internet Archive is stronger and more secure.”

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is up and running, Kahle told those at the October 17 virtual forum. Other services are progressively coming back online—although some are in a read-only mode for now.

The Internet Archive is not alone in being the target of a malicious cyberattack: The British Library and Calgary Public Library have also been victims, said Chris Freeland, moderator of the forum and director of library services.

“This is a critical moment for libraries, including our own. As a library system, together, we are facing unprecedented challenges with book bans, defunding, and now cyberattacks,” Freeland said.

Still, the Internet Archive staff and community partners remain focused on digital preservation and providing access to needed materials that serve the public interest.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.

Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.

“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”

The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.

The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”

Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.

“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”

The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.

The Archive posted an open letter to publishers in the lawsuit to restore access to the books that have been removed from the digital library. To date, more than 120,000 people have signed, adding heartfelt messages about what the impact of the loss has meant.

“We own these books,” Freeland said. “We just want to let readers read.”

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

To build public awareness and support on these issues, Jennie Rose Halperin is developing a coalition to lobby the U.S. Congress for a commemorative National Public Domain Day. She invited interested parties to join in the effort through Library Futures, the organization where she serves as executive director.

Halperin is also active in pushing for a statement of principles on library ownership of digital books. 

Some independent publishers are selling ebooks directly to libraries through BRIET, a new project of the Brick House Cooperative, David Moore, a writer and technologist, said at the forum.

Halperin is working alongside Charlie Barlow, executive director of the Boston Library Consortium, on Project ReShare to develop an open, standards-based, community-owned set of tools for digital lending.

Barlow has long been an advocate of controlled digital lending through BLC, and just released a report outlining CDL workflows and technologies for responsible sharing, he said at the forum. He also is working on a new consortium toolkit for CDL implementation. The report and resources can be downloaded at www.blc.org/cdl. 

Also at this year’s LLF, Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance, encouraged authors to review the organization’s free legal resource guides on copyright and fair use so they see their work more widely disseminated.

Vanishing Culture: Preserving African Folktales

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The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Selections from Laura Gibbs’ “A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive“

Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.

Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.

Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.

Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.

Helen Nde, author & African folklore scholar

In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.

Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.

“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these [African folklore] texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

Helen Nde, author

These authors can fill in gaps from researchers with a different perspective than those who documented the stories from outside, she said, adding that’s why digital preservation is so important. While many African folklore texts are in the public domain in the United States, much of the anthropological and historical texts with commentary from both African and non-African scholars that provide the necessary context for these folktales are not, Nde said. “In many instances, these important auxiliary texts are out of print, which means access via the Internet Archive is the best way scholars not located in the West might ever be able to access them,” Nde said. “I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

For Gibbs, online access to digitized books is critical to the volunteer work she does since retiring from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma. She compiled A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive, a curated bibliography of hundreds of folktale books that she has shared with the public through the Internet Archive.

Laura Gibbs, author & African folklore scholar, showing a book she owns that is no longer available on archive.org.

“For me doing my work, the Internet Archive is my library,” said Gibbs, who lives in Austin, Texas. “There are books at the Internet Archive that I can’t get at my local library or even in my local university library.  Some of these books are really obscure. There just physically aren’t that many copies out there.”

Being able to check out one digital title at a time through controlled digital lending opened up new possibilities. In her research, she can use the search function with the title of a book, name of an illustrator or some other kind of detail. Now in her digital research, she can use the search function to perform work that she couldn’t do with physical books, such as keyword searches, with speed and precision. The collection also has been helpful in her recent project at Wikipedia to fill in information on African oral literature, such as proverbs and folktales.

“Digital preservation is not only preservation, it’s also transformation. Because when things have been digitized, you can share them in different ways, explore them in different ways, connect them in different ways,” Gibbs said. “So, I connect different versions of the stories to one another, and then I can help readers connect to all those different versions of the stories. But now, because of the publishers’ lawsuit, many important African folktale collections and reference works are no longer available for borrowing at the Archive.”

What would it mean to lose digital access to these folktales?  “It would be the end of my work,” said Gibbs. “My whole goal is to make the African folktales at the Archive more accessible to readers around the world by providing bibliographies, indexes, and summaries of the stories. But now the publishers are shutting down that public access.” 

“The stories were embodied in the traditional storytellers and in their communities, and the continuity of that tradition over time has been so disrupted,” Gibbs said. “The loss is just staggering. The stories that were recorded are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of stories in the hundreds of different African languages…We can’t afford to let this kind of loss happen again in the digital world.”

Gibbs adds that just as museums are repatriating artifacts from colonized countries, the original stories of African countries need to be made available to their communities. “Digital libraries like the Internet Archive are a crucial way to make these stories available to African readers.”

Preservation of African folklore is not just important for research purposes, but also for self-exploration and reflection. When examining African folklore, Nde often asks: “What can these stories tell me about myself?” she said. “Speaking from my own experience, African folktales are an underexplored resource for understanding the cultural history of African peoples,” Nde said. “Mythology and folklore are how people make sense of themselves as people on this planet.”

Saving Modernist Houses with the Help of the Internet Archive

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George Smart is on a mission to save mid-century modern houses. He believes the structures are works of art that people should respect—if they only realized their significance and knew how to preserve them.

George Smart, founder and chief executive officer of USModernist

Smart relies on the Internet Archive to maintain his open digital collection of modernist residential homes along with back issues of architectural magazines. He uses the Wayback Machine to find architectural firm websites and search for vintage publications.

“I find the Internet Archive is great…curated in a certain way and very organized,” Smart said. “They are trying to innovate all the time and figure out ways to archive different kinds of materials.”

About 10 years ago, Smart launched USModernist Archives, a nonprofit dedicated to chronicling the work of notable architects and educating the public about their masterpieces built roughly from 1945 to 1969. Its Architect and House Archives includes the life work of 150 architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and John Lautner, and details of 21,000 houses, including photos, address and renovation histories.  

1954 Catalano House, Raleigh NC.  Designed by Eduardo Catalano.

The USModernist’s Architecture Magazine Library features nearly 5 million scanned, searchable, and downloadable pages from Architectural Forum, Progressive Architecture, and others. Smart said digital access to these legacy publications is critical for those researching how to preserve Modernist houses. Beyond the articles, the ads for doors, windows, tile and even door knobs provide clues for homeowners trying to renovate.

Listen now

To get the word out, Smart also has a podcast, USModernist Radio, that has featured 650 guests from all over the world on more than 350 shows.

Smart, who is founder and chief executive officer of USModernist, said he uses Internet Archive several times a week in his research. He said he appreciates the ease of access and marvels at the wide range of information available.

“The internet is vast and the Internet Archive is archiving it frequently over the course of a year,” he said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

Because the Internet Archive has been so useful to building USModernist, Smart said he wanted to support the library as a donor. Joining the Monthly Giving Circle, he said, is convenient and ensures his continued support.

The Bunker House, Concord MA. Designed by Walter Gropius.

By combining his organization’s resources and those of the Internet Archive, Smart said he’s able to discover and document materials useful for historic preservation. “For me, it’s a thrill. We’re finding houses that have been off the radar for sometimes as many as 70 years,” he said. “The Internet Archive is helping us find the missing pieces.”

Smart’s vision? “To have a complete record of the mid-century modernist movement with profiles of the houses and architects—and everything that was ever published about these houses.” 

The Monthly Giving Circle reflects our commitment and collective drive to defend Universal Access to All Knowledge. In addition to sustaining our work, Monthly Giving Circle members enjoy exclusive events, benefits, and discounts! Join George Smart and over 16,000 members by making a recurring monthly donation to the Internet Archive today.

Author Explores ‘The Secret Lives of Elizabethans’ with Help from Internet Archive

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After 34 years as a successful commercial real estate attorney, Dorothea Dickerman is spending her second act writing about the Elizabethan era. She’s long been fascinated with the English literary renaissance—the politics of the time and the whole cast of characters, including William Shakespeare.

Author Dorothea Dickerman

As she works from her home office, Dickerman often relies on the Internet Archive. While she enjoys paging through rare books at the Folger Shakespeare Library or Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Dickerman said it’s more convenient to go online. Also, the digitized materials allow her to enter keywords to refine her search and save time.

“I regard Internet Archive as an ever ready and highly patient librarian who is there for me,” Dickerman said. “I can go back as many times as I want, and it is open 24 hours a day.’

Many of the books she wants are out-of-print and hard to find in their original version. When text has been updated through the lens of an editor, she said, the language is sometimes changed to be more relevant to contemporary readers. Dickerman is often searching for historical primary sources – sometimes materials from the 1500s (letters, court records, diplomatic reports) that have been preserved by the Archive. “For that purpose, the Internet Archive is amazing,” she said.

Since retiring in 2017, Dickerman has been immersing herself in the Elizabethan era and sharing what she’s learned. She recently created a website (Dorothea Dickerman.com), writes a blog, Secret Lives of Elizabethans, and is active on Instagram. Dickerman is a guest lecturer, sometimes giving talks about places where Shakespeare set a play, such as Italy. She also speaks at conferences as a Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. On the monthly podcast, the Blue Boar Tavern, she is a panelist discussing all things Shakespeare, which appears on YouTube. 

Her long-term project is a series of historical novels looking at the lives of women at the time, without whom there would be no Shakespeare. Dickerman said she likes examining the layers of Shakespeare’s stories, including the political satire and underlying messages that she finds through details such as pseudonyms and book dedications. Dickerman said she searches for lost and hidden stories of the era to weave into her novels. Rather than inventing tales about the Elizabethan court, she wants her stories to be firmly grounded in fact.

“I regard Internet Archive as an ever ready and highly patient librarian who is there for me. I can go back as many times as I want, and it is open 24 hours a day.”

Author Dorothea Dickerman

Although she is not a trained scholar, Dickerman said she uses her legal research skills and curiosity to look for direct or circumstantial evidence to confirm information. When she makes a discovery or identifies a pattern in a document: “It’s a thrill!” Reading an historical account of a feast in 1575, for instance, provides her with rich details for her to write an accurate scene in her novel. Many of those ah-ha moments are thanks to the Internet Archive.

 “Almost anything I am looking for is there [in the collection]. That’s what’s so terrific about the Internet Archive,” Dickerman said. “The world has gone on to the web and everyone from children to serious scholars need to be able to find the material and read it for themselves to make their own decisions.”

TV Historian Relies on Internet Archive for Teaching and TikTok

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Whether Taylor Cole Miller is assigning a project for his communication studies classes or putting together a video for TikTok (@tvdoc), this TV historian says he appreciates tapping into vintage video and audio material from the Internet Archive.

The vast collection of old radio and television shows available at archive.org has allowed his students to analyze the early days of broadcasting and inform their work, says Miller, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. While the wide variety of materials help students understand the breadth of media history, one item in particular has become an indispensable part of Miller’s curriculum: On September 21, 1939, CBS affiliate WJSV was asked by the National Archive to record an entire day of radio programming — a gem now for students to get a glimpse at 19 hours of news, soap operas, and commercials that aired.

Listen to Complete Broadcast Day (1939) at the Internet Archive

“What you get is basically everyday radio, which you wouldn’t normally have access to,” Miller said of the resource available through the Internet Archive. “It’s a real opportunity for my students to listen and get a sense of what broadcasting was like.”

What his students hear that day is Franklin Roosevelt addressing the U.S. Congress about the proposed revision to the country’s Neutrality Act in WWII. Students are exposed to racism in the dramas, and ways advertisers were influencing people to buy products from Alka-Seltzer to Mounds candy bars. 

At the time, federal regulations mandated and enforced balanced coverage of news — rules like the Mayflower Doctrine and its predecessor the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan eliminated in 1987. This provides an important lesson in navigating today’s media landscape. “Getting them to experience what news was, in order to understand what news is, is also broadly useful,” said Miller, who is director of the university’s Communication and Media Lab. 

Just as an English professor needs books to teach, Miller said, he relies on the artifacts at the Internet Archive to show his students different samples of media over time. Miller’s students review episodes of The Shadow and listen to War of the Worlds to discuss media literacy as the supposed panic from the fictional radio show about a Martian invasion was more likely newspapers perpetuating a myth to delegitimize radio news.

Miller also teaches digital media production, where students make their own podcasts, and the historic audio can demonstrate techniques of storytelling, the power of sound effects, and the influence of advertising on the process. Students choose events to research and make their own radio dramas or TikToks.

Miller said he finds students invest more time in the research and production of assignments that are posted for the public since they know they will be seen by a wider and more critical audience.

That reach is also why Miller himself has been active on TikTok since 2021. As @tvdoc, Miller regularly creates 3–6 minute videos about everything from coverage of the O.J. Simpson car chase to behind-the-scenes tales from the classic sitcom, Bewitched. Miller said he likes to introduce viewers to publicly available resources so they can discover more about TV history on their own.

“The Internet Archive provides opportunities for amateur researchers to make a difference in our understanding of media history — and that is so critically important, particularly for local or syndicated television,” Miller said.

Miller’s TikTok audience includes other academics, fans of early TV, and the public at large.

“I think of it as an extension of my teaching,” Miller said. “I’m providing an opportunity to show the nuance of media history as it relates to American cultural history.”

Miller hopes his efforts bring needed attention to the role of preserving and analyzing media history. He was recently asked by the U.S. Library of Congress and its National Radio Preservation Task Force to promote the work of scholars in this field.

“Teaching the public is not only rewarding, personally, but it’s important for helping expand media literacy,” Miller said.

Eyeing the Future: Harkness Eye Institute’s Ophthalmology Journals Preserved at Internet Archive

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When the decision was made to move the Harkness Eye Institute in New York City from its home of nearly 90 years, no one knew what to do with its vast collection of academic journals. Dr. Daniel Casper, Columbia University professor emeritus of ophthalmology, found himself tasked with the job.

Dr. Daniel Casper, Columbia University professor emeritus of ophthalmology

The Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Department of Ophthalmology had operated the Institute on Manhattan’s 165th Street in Washington Heights since 1933. Its stately brick building was possible thanks to a $5 million gift from philanthropist Edward Harkness. In 1922, NY-Presbyterian Hospital announced that the current location would be demolished to create a new cancer center, and the Eye Institute would be relocated to other locations on the Medical Center campus.

The move meant emptying the 9-floor Institute, including the John M. Wheeler Library. The collection consisted of a rare book collection; more than 160 ophthalmology journals (7,000 volumes) published in English, French, Japanese, German, and Spanish, dating back to the 1800s; ophthalmic textbooks; and a collection of ophthalmic and medical memorabilia. For many years, the library maintained a small museum with antique ophthalmic instruments and other memorabilia on the first floor of the Eye Institute. In the 1950s the space was converted to clinical use so most of the museum artifacts were placed in storage. With its recent move, the department could accommodate the rare books and memorabilia, but not the large collection of journals and some textbooks—leaving the fate of the remaining items in the air.  

E. S. Harkness Eye Institute, circa 1933.

It was the end of an era for Casper, who has worked at the Institute since 1986 and was a frequent user of the library’s resources. He said he felt somewhat responsible for saving as much of the library contents as possible. “The Wheeler Collection really was on the brink of a landfill,” said Casper. 

He spent his first year of retirement looking for a suitable home for the library contents. Recognizing the unique historic value of many of the journals, he approached the National Library of Medicine, the National Eye Institute, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology Museum, among others, all of whom replied in a similar manner—they had neither the space nor the resources to maintain the collection. 

Casper had no luck finding a place to rehouse the sizable donation, until he reached out to the Internet Archive. Soon after making contact, an Archive staffer in New York came to take measurements to ship the remaining Wheeler Collection to the Archive. A few days later, a truck arrived and 23 pallets of journals and books were loaded. The items will be safely stored in a physical archive and scanned so the public can have digital access online.   

“The preservation and electronic dissemination of this collection is truly a dream come true,” Casper said, who appreciates that the donation process was seamless, with no charge to the university, and the journals will live on for future generations in a more accessible format.

“I did not realize the Internet Archive would take a collection like this. People spent huge amounts of effort putting these works together. It would have been unfortunate to just throw it all away.” Dr. Daniel Casper, Columbia University professor emeritus

Tracking older print articles that have never been digitized can be time consuming for researchers, and many previous studies are overlooked because they can be difficult to identify and locate, Casper said. With digital access to journals, researchers can avoid reinventing the wheel in their research and build on past scholarly evidence more easily, he said.

“I did not realize the Internet Archive would take a collection like this,” Casper said. “People spent huge amounts of effort putting these works together. It would have been unfortunate to just throw it all away. That would imply the collection is worthless, but it has value.”

Casper hopes the digitization of the Wheeler Collection leads to an acceleration of advances in science as researchers will eventually have free, online access to this invaluable collection of knowledge.

“I’ve become an Internet Archive booster. It saved us,” he said. “The Internet Archive is an incredible resource.”