Author Archives: junegoldsmith

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco: Fundraiser Benefitting Internet Archive — Friday, December 19, 2014

FerryBldgFromWaterDuskRick 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.


Friday, December 19, 2014
6 pm Reception
7:30 pm Film

300 Funston Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

Get tickets here!


TouristsGGBopening1936ATripDownMarketStreet1906_1This 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;
newly-discovered images of Playland and the waterfront; families living and playing in their neighborhoods; detail-rich streetscapes of the late 1960s; peace rallies in Golden Gate Park; 1930s color images of a busy Market Street; a selected reprise of greatest hits from years 1-8; and much, much more.

As usual, the viewers make the soundtrack — audience members are asked to identify places and events, ask questions, share their thoughts, and create an unruly interactive symphony of speculation about the city we’ve lost and the city we’d like to live in.

The film begins at 7:30 pm and is preceded by an informal
reception that begins at 6:00 pm.

Invitation to Aaron Swartz Day Nov. 8 in SF

Saturday, November 8, 2014
Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave
San Francisco, CA 94119

ASDAY.Poster.Final

The Internet Archive is hosting an Aaron Swartz Day Celebration on what would have been Aaron’s 28th birthday: November 8, 2014, from 6-10:30 pm.

RSVP TO THIS EVENT

EVENT STREAMING AT 7 pm

Although we are looking ahead, rather than dwelling on the past, this year’s theme is “Setting the record straight.”

Now that we have brought people together and shared information with each other, the smoke has cleared a bit, and we can clearly explain to the world exactly what Aaron actually did and did not do.

Reception: 6pm-7pm – Come mingle with the speakers and celebrate Aaron’s accomplishments.

Speakers: 7pm-8pm – The Year in Aaron 2014: A comprehensive update.

Movie: 8-9:45 pm – Watch The Internet’s Own Boy with Director Brian Knappenberger.

Q&A: 9:45 – Audience Q & A with Brian Knappenberger and Trevor Timm (co-founder and Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) after the movie!

Speakers:

April Glaser (EFF, Freedom to Innovate Summit)
The Freedom to Innovate Summit is a collaboration between EFF and the Center for Civic Media at MIT that calls upon Universities to protect students who innovate at the boundaries of the law.

Yan Zhu (Yahoo, SF Hackathon Organizer)
Yan will explain the history, and evolution to the present day, of the Aaron Swartz International Hackathon.

Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive)
Internet Archive has just launched a new set of tools for building collaborative libraries online that were inspired by Aaron’s dreams and visions.

Cindy Cohn (EFF Legal Director – CFAA Reform)
A short and simple update on a very complicated subject: Why most attempts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have largely stalled in Congress.

Kevin Poulsen (Journalist – FOIA case that MIT intervened in)
An update on the most recent batch of documents and video from Aaron’s FBI and Secret Service files that have finally trickled out of the U.S. government over this last year, after undergoing further redactions by MIT.

Garrett Robinson and James Dolan (SecureDrop)
2014 was a big year for Aaron’s whistleblowing submission platform, with 15 new instances including:  Forbes, Greenpeace New Zealand, The Guardian, The Intercept, The New Yorker, BayLeaks, and The Washington Post.

Daniel Purcell (Keker & Van Nest, one of Aaron’s lawyers)
Along with Eiliot Peters, Dan Purcell was hired by Aaron and his family in September 2012 to defend Aaron at his criminal trial, set for March 2013. Dan will talk about Aaron’s defenses to the criminal charges and the expert testimony the legal team planned to present.

The event will take place following this year’s San Francisco-based Aaron Swartz International Hackathon, which is going on Saturday and Sunday from 11am-6pm at the Internet Archive PLEASE CLICK HERE. Confirmed 2014 cities include:  Berlin, Boston, Buenos Aires, Houston, Kathmandu, Los Angeles, Magdeberg, New York, Oakland, Oxford, and San Francisco.

RSVP TO THIS EVENT

On November 8, Pivot is airing Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.  Check local listings.

For more information, contact:
Lisa Rein, Coordinator, Aaron Swartz Day
lisa@lisarein.com

http://www.aaronswartzday.org

Rick Prelinger: NO MORE ROAD TRIPS! – Tuesday, May 13 at 6:30PM

Tuesday, May 13  NO MORE ROAD TRIPS!

 Internet Archive, San Francisco 6:30 reception / 7:30 screening

ADVANCE TICKET PURCHASE HIGHLY ADVISED.  Ticket link here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/671840

This is the second Bay Area screening of Rick Prelinger’s new film, which showed last year as a work in progress at SXSW and the SF International Film Festival.  It’s a dream ride through 20th-century America made entirely from home movies, asking whether we’ve come to the end of the open road.

Have we reached “peak travel”? Can we still find fortune (and ourselves) on the highway? Are we nomads or stay-at-homes?  A journey from the Atlantic Coast to California with a cast of hundreds, made from a collection of 9,000 home movies, NO MORE ROAD TRIPS? reveals hidden histories embedded in the landscape and seeks to blend the pleasures of travel with premonitions of its end. The sound track for this fully participatory film is made fresh each screening by the audience, who’s encouraged to recall our shared past and predict the future.

This is a silent movie meant to be shown to viewers who ask questions, make comments, disagree with one another, and generally act like vocal sports spectators or the rowdies in the pit in front of the Elizabethan stage. A project of Creative Capital.

NO MORE ROAD TRIPS! will also be showing at SF DocFest in June: http://sfindie.com/festivals/sf-docfest/

Watch the 66-second trailer:

Lost Landscapes of Oakland, movie in SF Tuesday April 8

Tuesday, April 8, 2014
6:30 pm Reception
7:30 pm Film

Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

Please RSVP here

LLS-OaklandJoin film archivist Rick Prelinger for the first-ever East Bay-focused presentation in his lauded series of ‘Lost Landscapes’ screenings: a montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing the Oakland of yore, captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen, and industrial filmmakers. Prelinger, the founder of the legendary Prelinger Archives and guest curator for the exhibition Bay Motion: Capturing San Francisco Bay on Film, has become known for annual ‘Lost Landscapes’ screenings that have happened in San Francisco and Detroit. This program combines eclectic content with vibrant discussion and audience participation.

Please come early to reserve your seat.  Seating is limited and available on a first-come first serve basis.

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco: Fundraiser Benefitting Internet Archive Dec 18th

FerryBldgFromWaterDuskRick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco is a movie happening that brings old-time San Francisco footage and our community together in an interactive crowd-driven event.   Showing in the majestic Internet Archive building,  your ticket donation will benefit the Internet Archive, which suffered a major fire in November. Please give generously to support the rebuilding effort.


December 18, 2013
6pm Reception
7:30pm Film

300 Funston Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

Get tickets through Brown Paper Tickets.


TouristsGGBopening1936ATripDownMarketStreet1906_1Lost Landscapes returns for its 8th year, bringing together both 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, this screening includes newly-discovered images of Playland and Sutro Baths; the waterfront; families living and playing in their neighborhoods; detail-rich streetscapes of the late 1960s; the 1968 San Francisco State strike; Army and family life in the Presidio; buses, planes, trolleys and trains; a selected reprise of greatest hits.

As usual, the viewers make the soundtrack — audience members are asked to identify places and events, ask questions, share their thoughts, and create an unruly interactive symphony of speculation about the city we’ve lost and the city we’d like to live in.

 

NSA Comedy Tour with Will Durst! A Night of Comedy, Ethics & Tech on Dec. 11th in SF

NSAcomedyEthicsInTech presents a fun night of Comedy, Ethics & Technology to help protect the Fourth Amendment and our constitutional rights and freedoms. The goal of the event is to entertain, educate and bring to light issues concerning ethical use of technology and how it can help or curtail individual rights and freedoms. This holiday charity event is focused on increasing public awareness through expert panel discussions on how those rights are being violated by the National Security Administration.  “NSA Comedy Tour™” is focused on promoting the issues, causes and challenges that humanity faces as it adopts the ever changing tools and technologies that have taken us by storm.

 

Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Reception 6:00pm
Comedy and Panel 7:00-9:00 PM
Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, 94118

Please buy a ticket, have fun, and support good causes!

Panel Members:

Will Durst, America’s Funniest Political Comedian
Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of Electronic Frontier Foundation
Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of Internet Archive

 Moderator:

Vahid Razavi, Founder of EthicsInTech & BizCloud®

 Speakers:

Inder Comar, WitnessIraq.com
Janet Weil, CodePink.org

A percentage of all ticket proceeds from this event will be donated to organizations & causes below (selection process by ticket buyers):

CodePink
Electronic Frontier Foundation
EthicsInTech
Internet Archive
SF99Percent.org
Veterans For Peace
WitnessIraq.com

 

Arcadia Foundation funding Tape and Disk Preservation

Digital Linear Tape from 2002

We are thankful to the Arcadia Foundation for funding a project derive and evaluate digital tape and hard drive preservation practices.    We have used DLT tapes and offline hard drives for over a decade to cost effectively store video files.   As we bring them online, we need to understand the workflow as well as the frequency of media failures and develop approaches for dealing with failures.

We intend to bring hundreds of

320GB Hard Drive from 2006

terabytes of video data from offline storage to online disk storage and then post our experiences this as a kind of case study.   As one can imagine, most data comes back flawlessly, but it is the failures that take time and care.

Online data storage machines used by the Internet Archive

Again, we thank the Arcadia Foundation for seeing this is a big issue in large digital library efforts, and we hope we can help others as they come to grapple with the same issues.

 

“Many Libraries: As the world’s books go online, we must resist centralization” Technology Review, published by MIT

The Internet has put universal access to knowledge within our grasp. Now we need to put all of the world’s literature online. This is easier to do than it might seem, if we resist the impulse to centralize and build only a few monolithic libraries.

Centralization can lead to price controls, censorship without due process, lack of reader privacy, and resistance to innovators. We need lots of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers—and lots of libraries. If many actors work together, we can have a robust, distributed publishing and library system, possibly resembling the World Wide Web.

The courts struck down as monopolistic an attempt by top libraries and Google to build a massive e-book collection. They proposed a collective licensing system, the Book Rights Registry, that would have the right to license exclusively to Google any book not claimed by an author or publisher. It would have limited options for readers. Now some proponents of the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are encouraging legislative action that we fear might lead to a similar collective licensing approach (see “The Library of Utopia.”)

We could be helping nurture the seeds of a distributed library and publishing system—seeds that have already been planted.

All libraries could lend e-books, just as they lend physical books, avoiding a dependency on centralized databases. Libraries are already buying as many e-books as they can, and even small libraries can offer large collections: a single hard drive can hold over 150,000 books (as searchable color PDFs) and their catalogue data. It is not difficult to lend books digitally, as technologies used by Netflix and Amazon show.

Patrons of thousands of libraries can already borrow over 200,000 purchased and scanned e-books free from the Internet Archive. Most large publishers have recently banned e-book sales to libraries, but we hope this restriction is temporary. Even as we acquire current e-books, we need to scan existing ones, but again, this work is already under way. We scan 1,000 books a day at 31 libraries in seven countries with funding from libraries and foundations.

Scanning centers such as those at the Boston Public Library and the Library of Congress digitize hundreds of books a day. Libraries working with the Internet Archive have already put over two million public-domain books online for free downloading and lending, and for use by people unable to read printed books.

Now is our chance to build an online library accessible to all. To equal the Boston Public Library or university libraries like those at Yale or Princeton, we need 10 million books. These could be acquired in four years for approximately $160 million. The DPLA, with its broad support, can help build this library system, or it could end up building an overly centralized library by using collective licensing systems like the Book Rights Registry. If we work together, we can achieve universal access to knowledge by building on the positive lessons of the Internet and World Wide Web.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, and filmmaker.

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/40261/