Author Archives: David Rinehart

Rubbing the Internet Archive

In July 2017, Los Angeles-based artist Katie Herzog visited our headquarters in San Francisco and created Rubbing the Internet Archive — a 10-foot high by 84-foot wide rubbing of the exterior of the building, made using rubbing wax on non-fusible interfacing. The imposing 1923 building—formerly a Christian Science church and now a library—features an intricate facade that translated well into two dimensions.

The drawing is now adhered to the walls of Klowden Mann’s main exhibition space allowing the to-scale exterior of the Internet Archive to form the interior built-environment of the gallery.

Rubbing the Internet Archive is on view at Klowden Mann, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, California, through October 14th.



Dewey Defeats Truman, Pence Defeats Kaine

dewey

 

Physicist Niels Bohr may or may not have been thinking about The Chicago Daily Tribune’s famously erroneous 1948 “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline when he wrote, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” In a case of déjà vu all over again, history repeated itself last week.

gop

No one expects a political party to provide an objective analysis of a debate, so the Republican party’s verdict on the Vice Presidential debate came as no surprise:

“Americans from all across the country tuned in to watch the one and only Vice Presidential debate. During the debate we helped fact check and monitor the conversation in real time @GOP. The consensus was clear after the dust settled, Mike Pence was the clear winner of the debate.”

What did raise more than a few eyebrows was the timing: gop.com announced the “results” of the debate over two hours before the debate actually began. Although it’s not unusual for party officials to prepare article outlines in advance, what was atypical was the timing of the post. A staffer noticed the mistake and took down the pages touting Pence’s accomplishment, but not before the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved a web capture of the site. It’s a fine example of how our archives serve as timely and unedited historical records.

Pokébarbarians at the Gate

Millions of people from around the world visit the Internet Archive every day to read books, listen to audio recordings, watch films, use the Wayback Machine to revisit almost half a billion web pages, and much more. Lately, though, we’ve had a different kind of visitor: gaggles of Pokémon Go players.

(In case you’ve been living in a cave without Internet connectivity for the last month, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality Internet game. Participants on three different teams band together to find and capture as many types of Pokémon as they can, sending Nintendo a goldmine of personal data in the process.)

composite

It turns out that the stairs of the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters are a PokéGym, a site where players can train their Pokémon and fight with other Pokémon. Fortunately, the Pokémon warriors aren’t rowdy or disruptive; they resemble somnambulistic zombies stumbling around under the control of their glowing smartphone screens.

As Jean Cocteau noted, “Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.” Pokémon will join pet rocks, beanie babies, and chia pets in the annals of popular fads sooner than later. Perhaps then the gamers will take advantage of their Internet devices to discover that the Internet Archive has much more to offer than the ephemeral, pixelated creatures outside of our doors.

News from the Archive 0007: Librivox, Back Forty, It’s a Gas!

No. 7, 15 February 2013

Thanks!

We’re grateful to everyone who helped with our end of the year campaign to get four new Petaboxes; that’s four thousand terabytes of storage. We look forward to filling the fifteen hundred plus hard drives with all sorts of interesting material. Stay tuned!

From the Archive’s Mailbox

I just want to thank you for existing. I suffered a concussion three weeks ago, and your audio books have been a huge blessing as I’m not allowed to do whole lot while I recover, but listening to audio books like Harry Potter is one of the few things I am allowed to do, and those things are so expensive to buy that I could only afford to buy one, fortunately after I finished that one I found you. Anyway being able to listen has kept me sane over these last few weeks and I want to thank you for that.

— Karren

You’re welcome; here’s the entire collection:

http://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio

Picks from the Archive

More Dangerous Than Dynamite

We’ve all had this experience: we’re tired, or just trying to save a few dollars, so we decide to skip a trip to the dry cleaners and clean our clothes with gasoline in the kitchen. Well, it turns out this practice can be dangerous, as this film from the Prelinger Archives demonstrates.

And the special effects are, well, really special.

http://archive.org/details/more_dangerous_then_dynamite

http://archive.org/details/prelinger

 —recommended by Gareth Hughes

Back Forty Live at Founders on January 19, 2013

The band’s Internet site claims that their music combines, “funk, bluegrass, rock, folk, reggae, Irish, jazz, experimentation, blues, and swing elements.” Have a listen and see if you don’t agree.

http://archive.org/details/bk402013-01-19

 —recommended by Sally McDermitt

The English Dance of Death, from the Designs of Thomas Rowlandson; 1903

This book is split into two volumes and was originally published in twenty-four monthly parts (1814-16). The subject beautifully portrays the “necessary end” of us all using superstition, highly artistic engravings and skillfully written poetry: “… but frolic nature will undo, the works of art and genius too …”, “… justice slept, while reason saw the deed and wept …” This is a literary gem that lets any curious reader contemplate their journey to the grave.

http://archive.org/details/englishdanceofde00comb

http://archive.org/details/englishdanceofde01comb

 —recommended by Atlas D. McLamb III


What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof@archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

/ / / / /

To subscribe to this list, please visit:

http://archive.org/account/login.changepw.php

If you don’t already have a free Internet Archive library card, you may get yours here:

http://archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php

There, enter your password into the “Change Your Account Settings” Option, then click on the “Verify” button. That will bring you to your accounts setting page, where you may change your subscription status in the “Change Announcement Settings” section.

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL, breaking the link.

If you’re still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

info@archive.org

/ / / / / / /

David Glenn Rinehart is an artist in residence at the Internet Archive as well as a cartoonist, composer, filmmaker, musician, and writer. His work is at http://stare.com/ and elsewhere.

My adventure in donating bitcoins to the Internet Archive

A Bitcoin Adventure in Four Parts
—by Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian

Part One: The Deposit

I am proud to say I succeeded in donating BitCoins to the Internet Archive, but it took some doing.   For your entertainment, here is my adventure in changing $100 into bitcoins, transferring them to the “wallet” that lives on my laptop, and then contributing them to the Internet Archive.

The first trick was to buy some bitcoins. After poking around, I found that I could use a wire transfer via the mtgox website.  But, now, uh, I don’t recommend this approach.  This is what happened:

To transfer $100, I asked my big bank to wire a hundred dollars to the bank MtGox suggested which is in Japan. Well, my bank cannot send dollars to Japan, only yen. And since I requested dollars, they had first transfer the money to JPMorgan, a bank that can transfer dollars. So far, so complicated.

I then waited the five days that MtGox said to allow for the transfer to conclude, but nope, nothing. I then entered the weird world of MtGox customer support.

After asking what happened to my money, and they have therefore determined that I was a risk, and that they needed to see a scanned passport and/or driver’s license to confirm the money came from an account of the same name.   Even if I had given the scanned ID, it would not have matched the bank account that I had chosen.   But the instruction had said nothing about a scanned ID, so worried this was a scam.    Then this went back and forth several times, and my alarm bells started to go off.

They declined my request to speak with a manager, and repeated that they needed scanned identity documents. That’s when I requested that they return the money. Sure, no problem, as long as I first sent them my scanned passport and/or driver’s license. Creep factor: high and rising. When I asked how long they would sit on a transfer that never made it into any account before they automatically returned the money, they asked for … wait for it! … my full identification.

After wasting all too much time on what should have been a simple deposit, I received a terse message from the “MtGox.com Team”:

“The transfer in question is confirmed and credited to your account.In future if you are not willing to provide ID proof then please never send us any deposit again because we do not accept deposits without proof that it is actually from the bank account owner.”

My lesson: avoid MtGox.

 

Part Two: Installing the Software

I downloaded the bitcoin-qt application to my mac laptop thinking I would install it and create an ID. But this process takes days– and can fail.  And did.

The bitcoin system is very cool—cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer, anonymous, and such—but it means that your computer is a first-class member of the system and that requires quite a bit of computing horsepower. Hours into the installation process, a friend advised me that it could take a day or so to complete.

There’s an small icon on interface that has a tool-tip to monitor progress. My progress was stymied by an error after a day, one with no recommended solution.  Searching, I found a forum post suggesting that I delete some files from the computer’s application directory and start over again.    Another day of processing, and Ready!

 

Part Three: Getting My Bitcoins into My Computer

I think I could have transferred the bitcoins directly from MtGox to the Internet Archive, but would have been cheating. I wanted to have the coins in my virtual pocket and then donate them– seemed more “real”.

The MtGox FAQ had an on-point entry, “How do I withdraw Bitcoin to my own computer?” After following the instructions, the bitcoin application on my computer said withdrawal was in process, but needed to be confirmed. Confirmed?  Since bitcoin is this magic of deep math, it uses other computers in the world to confirm that you have the coins you claim to have on deposit. In an hour or two, my bitcoins were confirmed to be in my bitcoin client on my computer.  Cool.

I wonder what happens when my machine crashes or is stolen, but I was on a roll, so there’s no looking back now.

 

Part Four: Making a Donation to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive’s Donate page features a magic number, the bitcoin address needed to transfer the bitfunds. I cut and pasted that into the “Send Coins” tab in my bitcoin client program, labeled it for future reference as the Internet Archive, and pressed “Send.” I was hoping for that whooshing sound that iPhones make when sending mail, but nope, just silence.   Not sure if I should celebrate, I stayed cool.

The next day, I asked June Goldsmith—the Director of Administration at the Archive who runs the Archive’s bitcoin client—if she had received it, and indeed she had. My donation made it!

Last year, we received a few thousand dollars in bitcoin contributions. So far this year, Internet Archive supporters have donated 186 bitcoins worth U.S. $2,400 at the current exchange rate.

I am rather proud of succeeding and now kind-of like the adventure.   I feel like I am a member of a club and want to go buy something or donate some more.

If you find yourself similarly inclined, please visit the Internet Archive’s Donate page to support the world’s fastest growing library with bitcoins, dollars, time, books, and anything else.

Thanks, in advance, for your continued support.

—brewster

 

 

News from the Archive 0006: New Petabox, Decoding, and Balloons

No. 6, 14 December 2012

One down, three to go!

With help from a generous, anonymous donor who’s matching other donations three to one through the end of the year, we now have enough funding to buy a new Petabox! We now have only seventeen days left to get the three more we’ll need in 2013.

These massive servers are the backbone of the Archive, and critical to our continued growth. To all of you who’ve contributed to our fundraising drive, thanks from all of us here at the Internet Archive. If you can help us reach our goal by making a tax-deductible donation, we’d be grateful.

https://archive.org/donate/

Thanks for your support!

Books in Browsers presentations now online

In October, the Internet Archive hosted the Books in Browsers conference, which covered achievements in moving books to the web, vending and lending, the design and effective deployment of ebooks and reading experiences for web environments, the portability of books and bookshelves, reader application interoperability, storage and transmission security (including encryption and caching), the legal and user consequences of book licensing versus purchase, and ramifications for user privacy and data protection.

Peter Brantley, director of Bookserver at the Internet Archive, provided an insightful summary of the two-day event: the new publishing doesn’t care about formats, it cares about story-telling. It is neutral about content-types, because all content-types can be manipulated on the web. That may seem prosaic, but it is actually revolutionary. We’re used to seeing tools that add video to textual narratives, or synchronize audio-based playback. But when you invent tools for the web, you can manipulate a vast array of content within the browser, and an author’s ability to integrate the reader into the experience of the story has few constraints. Indeed, one can expect those constraints to continue to yield under the pressure of increasingly flexible representations. Once technology liberates vision, it is only a matter of imagination becoming real.

If you’d like to learn more, the presentations are online:

http://archive.org/details/BooksInBrowsers2012Videos

From the Archive’s Mailbox

I have been watching the Pathé films with tears in my eyes, and here is why. You don’t show the film credits, but if you look at them you’ll see the film editor in chief is Leonard C. Hein, my dad. I believe he was president of his local union #707 in New York City. He worked for Pathé news for over 25 years, right up until the bankruptcy auction which he attended. Thank you for preserving this work!
http://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Pathe%20News%22

—Donald Hein

Picks from the Archive

Decoded: An essay towards the reconciling of differences among Christians

A while back, I scanned a book with a ton of shorthand notes, thought to be written by Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island.

http://archive.org/stream/essaytowardsreco00will#page/n13/mode/2up

It has since been confirmed that the handwriting is his, a discovery made possible through the availability of our high-quality online version. The book itself is pretty fragile, and would not stand up to constant reading, as well as the digital images are easy to zoom in on for further study. Most of the code is quite small. Still, the Internet Archive’s scan of the book provided researchers the raw data needed to examine and ultimately decipher Williams’ code.

http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/04/brown-university-students-crack-roger-williams-code/6n1B9sLy812OyfOwWdIHvM/story.html

I find it so very cool to have been the one to put this book online and help in some small part to a better understanding of my state, and indeed nation’s history. A hurrah for the studious use of a book’s digital version.

— recommended by Xephyr Inkpen

Balloons

This unimaginatively titled, low-quality film documents Joseph Kittinger’s parachute jump from space in 1959.

https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.li.111-dd-301-59

The record held for decades until Felix Baumgartner recently broke it. Wow.

— recommended by Jilly Dybka


What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof@archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

/ / / / /

To subscribe to this list, please visit:

http://archive.org/account/login.changepw.php

If you don’t already have a free Internet Archive library card, you may get yours here:

http://archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php

There, enter your password into the “Change Your Account Settings” Option, then click on the “Verify” button. That will bring you to your accounts setting page, where you may change your subscription status in the “Change Announcement Settings” section.

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL, breaking the link.

If you’re still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

info@archive.org

/ / / / / / /

David Glenn Rinehart is an artist in residence at the Internet Archive as well as a cartoonist, composer, filmmaker, musician, and writer. His work is at http://stare.com/ and elsewhere.

News from the Archive 0005: BBC Visit, Rocketship X-M, and Alice

No. 5, 31 October 2012

A BBC film crew visited the Internet Archive; here’s their story.

In addition, the San Francisco Chronicle did a nice profile of our work:

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Brewster-Kahle-s-Internet-Archive-3946898.php

From the Archive’s Mailbox

I’ve just downloaded an image file (various galaxies in their vast array) from your NASA Images pages to use on the jacket of my new SF novel for preteens, The Calling.

http://archive.org/details/nasa

I appreciate your open policy of not copyrighting these images but allowing people to use them with a simple acknowledgement (which I have added).

—John Peace

We’re glad to help, but the availability of NASA imagery is determined by the space agency.

http://nasaimages.org/Terms.html

Selected Collection: Crap from the Past

This is a pop music radio show for people who already know plenty about pop music. Hosted by Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber, it’s broadcast Friday nights from 10:30 to midnight on KFAI, Minneapolis. This collection of over twelve-hundred recordings goes back two decades, a millennium, or “since the days of DOS,” depending on how you slice it.

http://archive.org/details/crapfromthepast

Other Picks from the Archive

Rocketship X-M (1950)

Rocketship X-M landed on the red planet over sixty years before NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover touched down there recently. Hollywood years, that is. Rocketship X-M is the story of five astronauts (played by Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., and Hugh O’Brien) who blast off to explore the moon but end up on Mars instead. Stay tuned for the ending …

http://archive.org/details/RocketshipXM 

— recommended by Emilio Conseco

Through The Looking-Glass (and what Alice found there), Lewis Carroll

This is a first edition “Presentation Copy” of the followup to Alice In Wonderland. Not only is this a personal favorite that blew my mind when I first read it some years ago, but this is a first edition copy in excellent condition with fifty of the original illustrations by John Tenniel. I don’t need to describe the impact this book had on literature, but what makes this copy so fascinating to me is that inside the front cover is a note in the authors own hand, “Emma Vine, with the author’s kind regards. Christmas 1871.” There is also a penciled-in note saying that Emma Vine was Lewis Carroll’s nursemaid. This was very exciting for me to discover and I can’t believe I was able to see something like this with my own eyes, a real literary treasure.

http://archive.org/details/throughlookinggl01carr

— recommended by Gemma Waterston

Music That’s Better Than It Sounds

This collection of thirty-four pieces (songs?) by Forty0ne really is better than it sounds.

And the liner notes aren’t bad either!

http://archive.org/details/csr041

— recommended by Helen Temnesen


What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof@archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

/ / / / /

To subscribe to this list, please visit:

http://archive.org/account/login.changepw.php

If you don’t already have a free Internet Archive library card, you may get yours here:

http://archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php

There, enter your password into the “Change Your Account Settings” Option, then click on the “Verify” button. That will bring you to your accounts setting page, where you may change your subscription status in the “Change Announcement Settings” section.

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL, breaking the link.

If you’re still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

info@archive.org

/ / / / / / /

David Glenn Rinehart is an artist in residence at the Internet Archive as well as a cartoonist, composer, filmmaker, musician, and writer. His work is at http://stare.com/ and elsewhere.

10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes archived!

Ten Petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of cultural material saved!

On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive’s massive collections.

We also announced

Computer Science legend Don Knuth played the Archive’s organ to open the program.

The only thing missing was electricity; the building lost all power just as the presentation was to begin. Thanks to the creativity of the Archive’s engineers and a couple of ridiculously long extension cords that reached a nearby house, the show went on.

Video of the show thanks to Jonathan Minard:

 

News from the Archive 0004: Petabytes, Recap, and Ramadan

No. 4, 5 September 2012

Another Day, Another Petabyte

Did you wonder where the Internet Archive stores millions of books, movies, recordings, and 150 billion web pages? Not in some conceptual cloud, but on our custom-designed Petabox servers, that’s where. This week, we’re installing another petabyte of storage; that’s a thousand terabytes or a million gigabytes.

Each Petabox is comprised of ten racks; each rack holds thirty-eight three-terabyte hard drives, two of which are used for the operating systems with the remainder used for data.

Here’s what one of the racks looks like fresh out of the shipping container …

And when the racks are assembled into Petaboxes …

Brewster’s Report

I’m especially interested in the Recap collection because it is huge, useful, and an interesting example of an archive that builds itself. This set of court filings–in electronic form–are from the U.S. government’s Pacer database. When lawyers file documents in federal court, they submit them in electronic form such as a PDF, a Microsoft Word document, or a scanned paper printout. The documents that can be made public go into a database called Pacer, which is freely available to the public.

Well, not quite free. The government sells access to these public documents for ten cents a page, with a document cap of three dollars. This seems to be a fair price for someone who just needs a few documents, but the cost is prohibitive for someone who needs lots and lots of data for their research.

And that brings us to Recap (Pacer spelled backward). A group of academics and activists thought of an ingenious scheme to make wholesale access available court documents for free as well as benefit the individual users that make the project possible.

They created a Firefox browser plugin that notices when a visitor searches the Pacer site. If the court filing the user is looking for is available from the Internet Archive’s Recap collection, the document may be downloaded for free. If the researcher pays for and downloads a court filing from the Pacer site, it’s automatically added to the Recap collection.

As a result, the Internet Archive hosts a large database of over 700,000 public court cases. This collection of millions and millions of documents, in a publicly accessible archive, can be freely used in bulk for research purposes.

This automated insertion into the Internet Archive was a new use of our S3-like interface; it required patience and debugging as the Princeton programmers and the Internet Archive staff worked out the kinks. As a result of meticulous work, the system has been running almost unattended for three years. The most popular case at the moment involves the Apple Computer and Samsung trademark dispute; it’s been downloaded 1,100 times in the last week. The most popular filing has been downloaded almost 35,000 times.

We are excited about building independent archive support into computer applications, and offering bulk access to materials for all sorts of uses beyond what was imagined by the original database builders.  We hope more services become “Archive aware.”

Congratulations to Ed Felton, Aaron Swartz, Sam Stoller, Harlan Yu, Tim Lee for making a new type of automated archive service work.

—Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian

From the Archive’s Mailbox

Since you use a gazillion hard drives, which brands are the best? Which brands should I avoid?

Thanks in advance,

— Nancy Miller

In our experience, they’re fungible. Hard drives all fail sooner or later, so we buy whatever’s the best value when it’s time to add another terabyte. We duplicate (backup) the data, and replace the drives that die, which they generally do under warranty. Take care of your data and don’t worry about the fallibility of hardware.

Selected Collection: The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library was started in 2006 as a collection of automotive information including various forms of media (audio, video, and text) at CarsAndRacingStuff.com

It is a large collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

http://archive.org/details/crittendenautomotivelibrary

Other Picks from the Archive

Too Late for Tears (1949)

It’s part of the film noir collection for a reason.

Without giving away the plot, here’s a relevant bit of dialogue:

Jane, Jane, what’s happening to us—what’s happening? The money sits down there in an old leather bag and yet it’s tearing us apart.

Enjoy! (Or not.)

— recommended by Seth Johannsen

Bathhouse Row Adaptive Use Program, The Fordyce Bathouse: Technical Report 5 (1985)

This particular Bathhouse Row report is interesting for several reasons. One, its pictures show us about what the interior and exterior of some historic bathhouses in the present day should look like, as well as what they looked like on the inside when they were operational. Two, the exterior drawing plan of the Fordyce Bathhouse is oh so intricate and lovely. Three, all the materials we are currently scanning relate to national parks, so it is neat to find an area in the National Park System where natural resources, like hot springs, were used rather than preserved in their natural state. And fourth, we are fortunate enough today to reap the benefits of what replaced the bathhouse movement of centuries ago, which is spas and personal baths.

http://archive.org/details/bathhouserowadap00nat5

— recommended by Sarah M. Lohmann

Ramadan 30, 1433 ~ Madeenah Tahajjud Audio

Ramadan ended a few weeks ago, an observance that went largely unnoticed outside of the Muslim community. These recordings document an aural environment literally unheard of by most people in the western world, and have the same resonance as a recording of a Kansas preacher might have for a Bedouin nomad.

http://archive.org/details/Ramadan301433MadeenahTahajjudAudio

— recommended by Boulaye Trevore

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof@archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

/ / / / /

To subscribe to this list, please visit:

http://archive.org/account/login.changepw.php

If you don’t already have a free Internet Archive library card, you may get yours here:

http://archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php

There, enter your password into the “Change Your Account Settings” Option, then click on the “Verify” button. That will bring you to your accounts setting page, where you may change your subscription status in the “Change Announcement Settings” section.

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL, breaking the link.

If you’re still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

info@archive.org

/ / / / / / /

David Glenn Rinehart is an artist in residence at the Internet Archive as well as a cartoonist, composer, filmmaker, musician, and writer. His work is at http://stare.com/ and elsewhere.

News from the Internet Archive 0003: BitTorrent, Radiators, and The Atom Strikes!

No. 3, 7 August 2012

Brewster’s Report

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.

For more information, read the full story.

—Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian

From the Archive’s Mailbox

I really appreciate the work that you’re doing, most notably, in the approach that you’re taking to digitizing historic books. The high quality reproductions of the illustrations in these titles are incredibly valuable for the research and writing that I’m doing. There’s a lot of material  I wouldn’t have if not for the Internet Archive. Further, there’s quite a bit more where I’d have something, but of much lower quality, if not for your work.

—Christopher Busta-Peck
http://www.clevelandareahistory.com

Selected Collection: Global Lives Project

The Global Lives Project is collaboratively building a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations, and people outside of our own communities.

For example, this recording documents one day in Edith Kaphuka’s life. We see the thirteen-year-old student from Ngwale Village, Malawi fetching water, cleaning the dishes, and gardening. For those of us who don’t understand Chichewa, Malawi’s national language, many details are lost. In a way, the mystery is part of the charm of this glimpse into what for most of us is a very different way of life. And because of the work’s Creative Commons license, there’s nothing to prevent anyone from adding subtitles in another language.

Other Picks from the Archive

The Atom Strikes! (1945)

This film by the US Army Signal Corps Pictorial Service was filmed months after the first atomic bomb was used in warfare sixty-seven years ago yesterday.

For the most part, The Atom Strikes! looks like an engineering film examining the effects of the bomb on different types of structures. It’s almost surreal in that there are very few references to any human injuries. A German Jesuit in Hiroshima at the time was interrogated to find out how the Japanese people reacted to the attack(!). He explains, ” … we began to admire the skill of the Americans, and especially since the majestic B29s appeared over Tokyo, practically every Japanese admired the technical skill of the Americans.” The film contains actual footage of the nuclear explosion  over Nagasaki, apparently filmed from the B29 that dropped the bomb.

Of course, no one would expect dispassionate objectivity from military filmmakers months after the end of WWII. Similarly, you’ll find equally heavy-handed propagandizing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: What People Experienced. Fast-forward through the first twenty minutes of punditry from 1985 and you’ll discover deeply disturbing imagery (you were warned) of radiation poisoning and worse from 1945.

— recommended by Roger Petersen

Half Hours in the Far North, Life Amid Snow and Ice

Dodd, Mead and Company published Half Hours in the Far North, Life Amid Snow and Ice in 1870. With arctic wildlife chock full of industrial pollutants and Greenland’s ice sheet melting at the fastest rate in recorded history, this book is even more distant than the chronological years would suggest. It also features great engravings from the days before photographic reproduction was commercially viable.

— recommended by Kathleen Hansen

Radiators Live at Parrish Room on 21 April 2006.

If there’s such a thing as the New Orleans sound, it might be described as a mashup of the hear blues, jazz, Zydeco, soul, swamp rock, swing, with perhaps s splash of gospel. That’s also a fairly accurate description of what the New Orleans band the Radiators played for a third of a century. The group disbanded last year, but this 2006 recording captures them in fine fettle.

http://archive.org/details/Rad2006-04-21.sbd.flac

— recommended by Sarah Jefferson

What are your Archive favorites? Please suggest a link or two and a few words about why you appreciate your recommendation to:

bestof@archive.org

—David Glenn Rinehart

/ / / / /

To subscribe to this list, please visit:

http://archive.org/account/login.changepw.php

If you don’t already have a free Internet Archive library card, you may get yours here:

http://archive.org/account/login.createaccount.php

There, enter your password into the “Change Your Account Settings” option, then click on the ”Verify” button. That will bring you to your accounts setting page, where you may change your subscription status in the  Change Announcement Settings section.

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL, breaking the link.

If you’re still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

info@archive.org

/ / / / / / /

David Glenn Rinehart is an artist in residence at the Internet Archive as well as a cartoonist, composer, filmmaker, musician, and writer. His work is at http://stare.com/ and elsewhere.