Internet activist and founder of Public.Resource.org, Carl Malamud is launching a national campaign to free millions of court documents in PACER–Public Access to Court Electronic Records–the technologically backwards federal electronic system that charges Americans 10 cents per page to access court files in the public domain. This Friday, you can come by the Internet Archive “polling place” at 300 Funston Avenue., San Francisco from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to “cast your vote” for free court records. Carl will be on hand with inspiring postcards addressed to Chief Judge Thomas of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. By sending His Honor hundreds of handwritten postcards asking him to grant a PACER fee-exemption, we can save tax-payers millions of dollars, while freeing court documents crucial to understanding and interpreting the law.
This is just one prong in a multi-faceted campaign to free PACER. Carl outlines Friday’s strategy in a memorandum of law called, “Yo, Your Honor.” His request of us:
May 1 is Law Day, and I’m asking people to come in and write a brief postcard about why you think that access to PACER is important. More specifically, you’ll be writing a postcard to Chief Judge Thomas of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in support of my request that the Court grant us free access to PACER for several courts in the Ninth Circuit. It would be a really big deal if the Court said yes, we’re trying to show public support in a way the judges can relate to.
You can also send your postcard directly if you can’t make it to the Internet Archive on Friday:
Clerk of the Court
Attn: Docket 15-80056
United States Courts of Appeals
James Browning Courthouse
95 7th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
In 2008, Aaron Swartz downloaded millions of PACER documents, and worked with Malamud to make them accessible for free on the Internet Archive through the RECAP Project. This is just one more step toward providing everyone with free access to all knowledge–the great promise of the Internet and our mission at the Internet Archive.
As part of their 
Candidates for the Internet Archive Work Transition Program are men and women from BARM who have completed a 12-month sober living, drug counseling or domestic abuse crisis program and are ready to re-enter the job market. This group often lacks relevant job skills, recent work experience, interpersonal and work relationship skills, self-confidence and, a résumé that a national or local employer would find compelling enough to grant an interview. The curriculum for the Internet Archive Work Transition Program lasts 9 months and focuses on ‘Learning-to-Work’. This three-phase program was based on lessons learned from the 600+ staff that the Archive has hired over the past 8 years. From these lessons, a program of progressive responsibility, constant feedback and a merit badging system was built to meet this challenge. Miller notes that this is not a make-work program. The work is substantive and needs to be completed to help get content online to share with the global community. “The Internet Archive 
To ‘grease the skids’ for the Work Transition Program graduates, Hammack and Miller contacted local companies, explaining that the program was not a handout and they weren’t looking for charity. They simply asked for a commitment from employers to grant the graduate an interview. Upon reviewing the program goals and expectations, local businesses including UPS, San Francisco Public library, Costco and others signed on. The first class graduates in February 2015, but already two of the candidates have secured part-time employment.
Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco is back for one final performance this year! Now you can catch this perennially sold-out show and your ticket donation will benefit the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library which hosts the Prelinger Collection. Please give generously to support the effort.
This year’s LOST LANDSCAPES brings together familiar and unseen archival film clips showing San Francisco as it was and is no more. Blanketing the 20th-century city from the Bay to Ocean Beach and the Presidio to Bayview, this screening includes San Franciscans at work and play; early hippies in the Haight; a highly privileged walk on the unfinished Golden Gate Bridge;
When the personal record collection of music producer Bob George hit 47,000 discs, he knew something had to be done. “I wanted to give them away, but they were mostly punk, reggae and hip-hop,” he recalled, “and no established library or archive was interested.” The only thing to do, it would seem, was to turn his collection into a non-profit archive in New York called the 
Powered by teams of volunteers, the two archives are partnering to digitize CDs and LPs and then use audio fingerprinting to match tracks with metadata from catalogs and other services. Using Internet Archive scanners, the ARC is digitizing its books and photographs at its New York facility. When complete, this music library will be a rich resource for historians, musicologists and the general public.
Since 1985, George, the ARC’s co-founder and director, has run the organization in Tribeca, New York City, supported by friends in the music industry including Paul Simon, David Bowie and Nile Rodgers. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards endows a collection of blues and R&B recordings there. Filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme stop by when trying to track down hard-to-find songs. Yet for most of its almost three decades, the ARC has been a decidedly “analog” experience: records, CDs and cassette tapes line its walls; to experience a song you usually have to drop a needle into a pristine vinyl groove. The collaboration with the web-based Internet Archive represents a new direction. “We feel that our primary mission, to collect and preserve this material, is near completion,” said Bob George. “Now we are seeking ways to allow greater access to this incredible collection.”
And here is our welcome to Flickr’s Common Post: