Author Archives: Jeff Kaplan

Netlabel Day opens applications for independent labels

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M.I.S.T. Records organizes the new version of this musical event, which in its first edition united 80 labels from all around the world, releasing more than 120 albums for free in digital format.

We’re excited to announce that our 2016 call for digital record labels that want to be part of the second edition of the Netlabel Day is now open. From January 15 to February 29, we’ll be receiving emails at contact.netlabelday@gmail.com for all applicants.

The second edition of Netlabel Day has the mission of continuing to showcase the best of the online independent music scene through widespread music releases (EPs, LPs, singles, compilations) on July 14, 2016. Also this year, we’re going to organize some local gigs and record label expos in Argentina, Canada and Chile, amongst other countries to confirm.

netlabelsThis year we have the lovely support of the Internet Archive and Free Music Archive, two of the most important platforms for netlabels around the globe. We are also proud to announce the sponsorship of Creative Commons, who will help organize the correct use and distribution of all the material released this year.

The original Netlabel Day event was created by the Chilean label M.I.S.T. Records in March 2015, organizing a very successful first edition with 80 labels from countries such as Iceland, Poland, Spain, US, Finland, Norway, Russia, Italy, France, and of course, Chile.

“The goal this year is to discuss, debate, promote, and explore the state of musical management in the participant countries”, says Manuel Silva, M.I.S.T. label head and creator of this celebration.

For more details, please visit netlabelday.blogspot.com, or email us to contact.netlabelday@gmail.com.

Our Comments on Copyright Office Recommendations for Mass Digitization: No Extended Collective Licenses, Please

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unlock-orphan-worksThe Copyright Office’s recent report Orphan Works and Mass Digitization contains proposals that could do more harm than good for digitization projects. The basic problem is that the report proposes to set up a similar regulatory scheme to the Google Book Settlement of 2008. The Justice Department, the Copyright Office, libraries, academic authors, public interest groups, privacy advocates, as well as the countries of France and Germany, all objected to the Settlement, and it was ultimately rejected by the court in 2011. Many of the same groups have strong objections to the Copyright Office’s version as well.

The regulatory idea is to set up an “Extended Collective License” system which would establish collective management organizations to monetize and control masses of unclaimed orphan works, along with claimed literary and photographic works. Unlike collective licensing societies such as ASCAP and BMI that artists opt in to, this regulatory regime would apply to works that have no one claiming them–which turns out to be a large percentage of our cultural heritage. These societies would be tasked with collecting licensing fees from nonprofit libraries and website owners. A problem is, most of the owners are nowhere to be found, and so there will be no one to distribute the collected fees to.  Many nonprofit sites wishing to make potentially culturally important materials available have no revenue stream to pay these taxes and would be forced to take materials down. Works that scholars, researchers and the general public may find valuable would go dark, to the benefit of no one at all. This regulatory regime would ultimately become a system for controlling what is in libraries and on websites via taxation, with much of the proceeds going to fund private collecting societies.

For years now, libraries, web communities, and individuals have been posting older works online, and for some commercially viable works, there is a small industry that sends take-down notices. It turns out that a vanishingly small fraction of these older materials are ever objected to. While this system is not perfect, it has allowed for many older cultural materials to join the the valuable and growing resource that is the web.

Internet Archive CommentsAlthough it is encouraging that the Copyright Office is trying to help bring our analog cultural heritage into the 21st Century, this proposal seems detrimental to that goal.

We submitted comments in coordination with Creative Commons and Wikimedia, who will submit their own comments tomorrow. Together, we hope to convince the Copyright Office not to ask Congress for a regulatory regime that inhibits fair use and undermines existing and future freely accessible mass digitization projects.

The first Netlabel Day – Join the event

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The Internet Archive has a large (over 58,000 items) and growing collection of netlabels. Recently we received a message asking to help announce a new global event, Netlabels Day. Please support it if you are part of the netlabels world.

netlabelsThe Record Store Day was created on 2007 to celebrate the record stores on the USA and the rest of the world. In that celebration, independent bands and labels releases music exclusively for that day on vinyl, seizing the revival of that format. This was the base of the Netlabel Day, a sort of distant relative of RSD, that pretends to install a new tradition releasing digital music every 14 July from now on.

This initiative was born in Chile thanks to Manuel Silva, from M.I.S.T. Records, and it reunites more than 50 labels from all over the world. All genres are present: Rock, pop, electronic, noise, ambient and many many more, free and just for you.

We will upload every single release on Archive.org, because we love this platform. We always use it and we’ve never experimented any issues with it. Every album will be available for free on WAV and FLAC via direct download, or torrent as well.

The most important thing is to include everyone in this idea. We will close the call on June 1, so if you have a netlabel and you want to be part of this, please email us to contact.netlabelday@gmail.com. If you are an independent artist without any label associated, you can release your music with us too and be listened by every participating netlabel, so just contact us from May 15 to June 1.

Everyone is invited. Be part of this madness!

Links:
http://netlabelday.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/netlabelday
http://www.twitter.com/netlabel_day

Internet Archive and CADAL Partner to Digitize 500,000 Academic Texts

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The Internet Archive and the Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL), are pleased to announce that 500,000 English-language, academic books will be digitized through a partnership that leverages strengths from both organizations. This furthers an initiative begun in 2009, The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project, seeking to bring one million texts into the public domain.

“We are working together with a valuable global partner, CADAL, to create a digital library of high quality, academic, eBooks for use in China, North America and the world at large; I couldn’t be happier!” Robert Miller, General Manager of Digital Libraries for the Internet Archive, remarked on the collaboration.

The Chinese Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a consortium of over 70 Chinese University Libraries. CADAL will provide access to a leading set of libraries, the technical resources to display, and share the books inside China, as well as the staff needed for digitization. The Internet Archive will select the books, and provide equipment and processing resources. Both organizations will offer access and discovery tools for both scholars and citizen-scholars. Together, CADAL and the Internet Archive are contributing to a growing, global digital library.

Chen Huang, Digital Librarian and Deputy Director of Administrator Center for CADAL, shared the vision for the project: “We are pleased to be working with the Internet Archive. Together, we have developed a program that will allow Chinese university students to have access to materials that will enhance both specific knowledge, and exposure to broad trends and ideas.”

This phase of the partnership will last about 3 years and involve teams in the US, Shenzhen, China and ZheJiang University in Hang Zhou, China.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library with over 6 million texts online and a popular global website, with 34 million downloads a month. Their mission is “Universal Access to All Knowledge” – https://archive.org/

Contact Robert@Archive.org for more information.

The China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) is a long term project of the Ministry of Education of China. The consortium aims to construct an academic digital library with high-level technology and abundant digital resources that are multidisciplinary, multilingual, and categorically diverse. http://www.cadal.cn/

Contact service@cadal.cn for more information.

Sharing Data for Better Discovery and Access

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The Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are pleased to announce a joint collaborative program to enhance sharing of collections from the Internet Archive in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

ia-logo-220x221The Internet Archive will work with interested libraries and content providers to help ensure their metadata meets DPLA’s standards and requirements. After their content is digitized, the metadata would then be ready for ingestion into the DPLA if the content provider has a current DPLA provider agreement.

The DPLA is excited to collaborate with the Internet Archive in this effort to improve metadata quality overall, by making it more consistent with DPLA requirements, including consistent rights statements. Better data means better access. In addition to providing DPLA compliant metadata services, the Internet Archive also offers a spectrum of digital collection services, such as digitization, storage and preservation. Libraries, archives and museums who chose Internet Archive as their service provider have the added benefit of having their content made globally available through Internet Archive’s award winning portals, OpenLibrary.org and Archive.org.

“We are thrilled to be working with the DPLA”, states Robert Miller, Internet Archive General Manager of Digital Libraries. “With their emphasis on providing not only a portal and a platform, but also their advocacy for public access of content, they are a perfect partner for us”.

Rachel Frick, DPLA Business Development Director says, “The Internet Archive’s mission of ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge’, coupled with their end-to-end digital library solutions complements our core values.”

Program details are available upon request. Please contact:
Rachel Frick – DPLA Business Development Director, Rachel@dp.la
Robert Miller – General Manager of Digital Libraries, robert@archive.org

$4 Million Available for Digitization in 2015 Application Deadline is April 30th Let’s Apply Together!

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Internet Archive wants to partner with you to bring your ‘Hidden Collections’ into the public domain and become part of a global digital library!

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has launched Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.

This competition will award up to $4 Million to institutions, consortia and collaborative groups to digitize and provide access to collections of rare and ephemeral material with high scholarly value.

CLIR endeavors that “Digitizing Hidden Collections will enhance the emerging global digital research environment in ways that support new kinds of scholarship for the long term,ensuring that the full wealth of resources held by institutions of cultural memory becomes integrated with the open Web” (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/about-the-program).The focus of these grants is to bring entire collections into the public domain,while promoting strategic partnerships and best practices for ensuring preservation and accessibility that is both stable and enduring.

Grants of between $50,000 and $250,000 for a single-institution project, or between $50,000 and $500,000 for a collaborative project may be sought for work beginning between January 1st and June 1st, 2016 and be completed by May 31st, 2019. (http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants)

How Can the Internet Archive Digitization Team Help?

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Let’s Cooperate on Your Grant Together – marry your great content with our end-to-end digitization skills to get your content up online safely and inexpensively.

We offer a Total Digitization Solution. Starting with non-destructive image capture, to storage and preservation, and ending with online discovery and access, our digitization solution saves you from having to worry about these details.

Translatable Metadata. Our existing relationship with Digital Public Library of America provides a possible route for your materials to join DPLA’s growing national collection.

Our Global Team Digitizes over 1000 eBooks and items every day. No need to reinvent the wheel. With our experience, training and engineering skills, we supply an end-to-end solution that allows our library partners and content contributors to focus on developing their collections, not on the back end details. For those new to digitization, we have the skills to help you avoid the common and costly mistakes of starting up a project.

We Don’t Just Digitize Books! Over the last decade, our format capabilities have expanded to: archival finds/ ephemera; microfilm and microfiche; audio; film and video; TV News; software and web. Let’s also apply together for grants to digitize other formats!

Many of Our Partnerships Have Been Consortial. We are proud to have driven projects for the Boston Library Consortium (BLA), LYRASIS, Consortium of Academic Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), Biodiversity Heritage Library and Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), among others. This means collections can be contributed by more than one institution, with funding issued centrally and distributed locally.

Far-flung Collections Come Together With Internet Archive. Our collections gather material from international contributors in one place; in the public domain. In some cases this has meant repatriating material digitally across great distances. Highlights include collections from the Medical Heritage Library, Biodiversity Library and Genealogy (in collaboration with FamilySearch).

Preparing Your Grant—What can Internet Archive Do?

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Large and Small-Scale Digitization Capabilities. Take advantage of our experience working with collection sizes – ranging from hundreds of thousands of items to unique collections with only dozens of one-of-a-kind monographs.

We Can Tailor The Project to Your Needs. Having worked with over 1275 content providers during the last decade, our processes can be adjusted to meet your requirements.

Our Equipment and Software has been tested and Proven. Our non-destructive digitization process can be done inside your library by IA staff, or in one of our regional centers. The images can even be captured by you! We have a new Table Top Scribe system that can be purchased if your institution wishes to do the image capture in-house. It is portable, easy to use, and uploads material directly to archive.org. Our service package provides the technical back-end processes including preserving and ‘future-proofing’ your digital data 25 years, AND organizing your collections online so they can be discovered and used for scholarly research.

Our Digitization Specifications Have Become the De Facto Library Standard. Over 1,500 global libraries have used our services to digitally preserve, and importantly, make their material accessible. Our partners include 25 of the top 30 largest research and national libraries in North America.

Our Staff is located in 33 Locations, Including 26 Sites in North America. With this geographic footprint, your materials don’t have to travel far if you choose to have it digitized in one of our specialized digitization centers. This also provides opportunities to submit a grant proposal where the content might be located in 2 or 3 different libraries.

Let’s think big and make collections vital for scholarship and cultural heritage available to the world!

Want to know more? Attend the the upcoming webinars for applicants on February 4th and March 4th, 2015 from 2-3pm Eastern Time. (https://clir.adobeconnect.com/_a960001693/hiddencollections/)—looking forward to the resulting conversations, and we hope to see you there!

For more information about working with Internet Archive, contact Robert Miller.

NEW! The Internet Archive Store is open

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The Internet Archive Hat

The Internet Archive Hat

In the navigation bar on our blog is a new link, Internet Archive Store. We often receive requests for Internet Archive gear such as shirts, hats, etc. So, we decided to make it available to all the folks that want it. At store.archive.org you’ll find hats, sweatshirts, mugs, buttons and other items. We expect to add some new items in the coming weeks. Your purchases will, of course, be the envy of all your archive-want-to-be friends but you will also be helping the Internet Archive. Shipping is free on all items. And, you can even use bitcoins!

Internet Archive Coffee Mug

Internet Archive
Coffee Mug

Please visit the store.archive.org and maybe pick up a few things for the archivist in you.

Thank you.

The Internet Archive team

LibriVox Free Audiobook Project Receives Generous Mellon Support for Upgrade

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LibriVox.org, the world’s largest producer of free public domain audiobooks, and the Internet Archive are pleased to announce a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, on the heels of a recent landmark achievement: 100 million downloads of the over 5,000 free LibriVox audiobooks from the Internet Archive.

The Mellon grant will go towards rebuilding LibriVox’s technical infrastructure, and improving accessibility of the LibriVox website.

“It’s fantastic to get this support from the Mellon Foundation,” said LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire. “It will be put to good use, helping our hard-working volunteers create many more free audiobooks.”

LibriVox, a volunteer project of the Internet Archive, gets volunteers from around the world to make audio recordings of public domain texts, and gives those recordings away for free. All LibriVox audiobooks are hosted at the Internet Archive.

Founded in 2005, LirbiVox has to date produced 5,371 free audiobooks, in 31 languages. Popular audiobooks include “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” by Arthur Conan Doyle, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, and “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë. In addition to novels, the LibriVox collection includes numerous texts of importance from philosophers such as Kant, Descartes, and Hume, political documents such as the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and scientific texts including Einstein’s “Relativity,” and Darwin’s “Origin of the Species.”

“The LibriVox collection is one of the most popular on the Internet Archive,” said Brewster Kahle, Founder and Director of the Internet Archive. “100 million downloads is awesome. LibriVox is an integral part of our commitment to making important texts available to the world in the best format for people, and we are thrilled at the support from the Mellon Foundation.”

Cori Samuel, a long-time LibriVox volunteer, who has recorded some of the project’s more popular books, was in shock at the numbers. “It’s hard to believe that what started out as a small project among some passionate people on the web has turned into something so big. It’s incredible to imagine that we could have touched the lives of 100 million listeners.”

For more information, please contact Hugh McGuire, LibriVox founder: hughmcguire@gmail.com.   Job posting.