It stood as either a memorial, embarrassment or in-joke: the promotional website for the 1996 film Space Jam, a comedy-action-sports film starring Michael Jordan and the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes characters.

Created at a time when the exact relevance of websites in the spectrum of mass media promotion was still being worked out, www.spacejam.com held many of the fashionable attributes of a site in 1996: an image map that you could click on, a repeating star background, and a screen resolution that years of advancement have long left in the dust. The limits of HTML coding and computer power were pushed as far as they could go. The intended audience was a group of people primarily using dial-up modems and single-threaded browsers to connect to what was still called The Information Superhighway.

By all rights, the Space Jam site should have died back in the 1990s, lost in the shifting sands of pop culture attention and flashier sites arriving with each passing day.

But it didn’t die, go offline or get replaced with a domain hosting advertisement or a 404.

Unlike a lot of websites from the 1990s, the Space Jam movie site simply didn’t change.

It persisted.

Just as every city seems to have that one bar or restaurant that can trace itself back for over a century, this one website became known, to people who looked for it, as a strange exception – unchanging, unshifting, with someone paying for the hosting and advertising a movie that, while a lot of fun, was not necessarily an oscar-winning cinematic experience. You could go to the site and be instantly transported back to a World Wide Web that in many ways felt like ancient history, absolutely gone.

Years turned into decades.

For those in the know and who paid close attention to this odd online relic, the real mystery was that the site was not actually static – someone was making modifications to the code of the website, the settings and web hosting, to jump past several notable shifts in how websites work, to ensure that deprecated features and unaccounted browser issues were handled. That costs money; that’s the work of people. Somehow, this silly movie site represented the held-out flame that with a small bit of care and dedication, a website could live forever, like we were once promised.

It wasn’t just a clickable brochure – it became a beacon in the dark, a touchstone for some who were just children when the World Wide Web was started, and who grew up with this online world, which has shifted and consolidated and closed and tracked us.

Then the unthinkable happened.

In 2021, the sequel arrived.

It is abundantly clear the abnormally long life of the original 1996 site helped see the sequel through the endless mazes and corridors of Hollywood development turnaround.

Because websites and online presence are the way that movies are now promoted, the very place that spawned this consistent brand through decades had to go. A new Space Jam site was created, using the www.spacejam.com domain.

In a nod to its beginnings, the 1996 website still exists, shoved into a back room; adding /1996 to the URL will give you the old site as it used to appear before this year, and a small note in the corner lets you know you could optionally visit this once-dependable hangout.

But now the site is broken.

Links from around the net to the Space Jam site, to specific sub-pages and specific images, now break. A browser arriving at the spacejam.com page from a link elsewhere will see Just Another Movie Promotion Site, utilizing all the current fads: Layered windows to YouTube videos (which will break), javascript calls (which will break) and a dedication to being as flashy, generically designed and film-promoting as literally any other movie site currently up. Links that worked for decades have been cast aside for the spotlight of the moment.

The word is disposable.

There’s still one place you can see the old site, as it was once arranged, though.

The same year the Space Jam movie and website arrived, another website started: The Internet Archive.

Unlike Space Jam, the Internet Archive’s site did change constantly. You can use the Wayback Machine to see all the changes as they came and went; over half-a-million captures have been done on archive.org.

We have changed across the last 25 years, but we also have not.

The ideas that the Web should keep URLs running, that the interdependent linking and reference cooked into it from day one should be a last-resort change, and that the experience of online should be one of flow and not of constant interruptions, still live here.

Hundreds of webpages that have also survived since the time of Space Jam are inside the stacks of the Wayback Machine, some of them still running, and still looking unchanged since those heady days of promises and online wishes.

And if the unthinkable happens to them, we’ll be ready.

The Internet Archive is bringing more periodicals and scholarly resources to students directly and by working with disability offices in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

As more students with disabilities pursue higher education, demand is growing for books, journal articles and other learning materials to be available in accessible formats. This includes digitizing print materials for people who are blind or have low vision, those with dyslexia or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and people with limited mobility who might have difficulty holding print documents.

The Internet Archive is part of an expanding effort to make it easier for people with print disabilities to access information by digitizing books, periodicals, and microfilm needed to succeed in school and beyond. Once print materials are converted to machine-readable formats, users can listen with a screenreader, text-to-speech software or other forms of audio delivery—starting, stopping, and slowing down the information flow, as well as change the colors of text and background of pages.

With 10 percent or more of students at colleges in the United States requesting accessibility accommodations (Government Accountability Office, 2009, p.37), providing digitized learning materials is critical. Each semester Disability Service Offices (DSOs) on campuses respond to student requests to convert materials into accessible formats—often doing so in silos with limited budgets.

Libraries are being called into action to coordinate the delivery of accessible instructional materials. Doing its part to improve access to knowledge for all, Internet Archive is collaborating with others to share its collection and streamline the search process.

A level playing field

“There is a need for a fast turnaround with materials. Students [with print disabilities] need a level playing field,” said John Unsworth, dean of libraries at the University of Virginia. “The library is not just here for the able-bodied.”

UVA is working with the Internet Archive, BookShare, and the HathiTrust to reduce duplication of efforts across the country to convert text materials to accessible formats. Together, they are participating in the Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education (FRAME) project funded with a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Since 2019, the partners have established Educational Materials Made Accessible (EMMA), a hub and repository for digitized materials. The pilot includes six other universities: George Mason University, University of Virginia, Texas A&M University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Northern Arizona, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Vanderbilt University.

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“When looking at the intersection between copyright and civil rights…civil rights win every time”

– John Unsworth, university librarian, University of Virginia

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EMMA provides DSO staff (on behalf of students) with a central place to retrieve—and library staff re-deposit—machine-readable texts from the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Bookshare. It provides a searchable database to locate materials requested by students more efficiently. Users can filter by repository, format and accessibility features—which will become more valuable as texts are remediated. The project relies on the Internet Archive as a large digital repository to provide a federated network of storage and delivery, as well as technical expertise.

Unsworth said the goal of EMMA is to speed up access to materials and help DSOs avoid duplication. If faculty tinker with a syllabus and add a book at the last minute, students with print disabilities need to be able to have a copy they can use at the same time their peers do. “It’s the nature of education that what you need to read changes during the semester,” Unsworth said. “[Students with print disabilities] can’t get materials at the last minute when everyone else has had it for two weeks.”

Often, libraries are not involved in collecting, cataloguing, or preserving educational materials for people with disabilities on their own campus, or making them discoverable to others. EMMA is designed to connect DSOs and libraries on the same campus — and with other institutions. Once materials are remediated, DSOs put them in a drop box that the library validates with the new metadata and uploads it.  “Libraries shoulder the burden of sharing—and by doing that, they help fulfill their mission,” Unsworth said.

Despite publisher warnings about what DSOs can do with their remediated content, Unsworth said concerns are not supported by law. “When looking at the intersection between copyright and civil rights…civil rights win every time,” Unsworth said. “Libraries are used to pushing back on publisher claims. Libraries bring a willingness to stand up to appropriate use rights.”

A coordinating hub for materials was desperately needed and, Unsworth said, something DSOs have been waiting to have for years.

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“Everyone should have the same shot at succeeding”

– Angella Anderson, disability specialist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Based on a student’s syllabus, Angella Anderson, a disability specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, arranges for needed accessible materials for students at all levels—from undergraduates to law students to doctoral students. “We have several students who—without this service—would have had significant challenges being successful in their programs.”

Now, with EMMA, if a book or journal article a student needs is already shared on the hub, the DSO can download it and save time. Anderson estimates it has cut her time searching for learning materials by half. “The problem we’ve all had over the years is that we are converting the same book at the same time. That’s a huge resource drain,” Anderson said, noting the potential benefit of EMMA. “Everyone should have the same shot at succeeding at whatever it is they want to do, so I feel this will be extremely useful to a lot of schools and a lot of students.”

Canadian efforts advance

In Canada, the Internet Archive supports work of the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE), a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries. At the Internet Archive digitization center at the University of Toronto, staff digitize on demand and prioritize requests received by ACE from students who need materials for accessibility. The turnaround used to take weeks, but Andrea Mills, digitization program manager, said the system has been improved and students with print disabilities now can get materials digitized often in less than two days. 

Mills said requested materials most often include non-fiction research books and novels, often printed between 1990 and 2010—before e-books were widely available. Elsewhere in Canada at the University of Alberta, another Internet Archive scanning center provides the same service, through their Accessibility Resources office, to students who have qualifying perceptual challenges.. 

“Sometimes people not part of the mainstream are forgotten,” Mills said. “It may only be a handful of users who have this need, and not represent a high number of downloads or uses, but these are people who truly need assistance.”

Learn more

Librarians: Join our free program to qualify your patrons to access the Internet Archive’s resources for users with print disabilities. Individuals can gain access by having a qualifying authority like the Vermont Mutual Aid Society enroll you in their program.

Like campuses across the country, Howard University in Washington, D.C., shut down last March when COVID-19 hit. Most of its nearly 6,000 undergraduate students have been remote learning ever since.

Without access to the physical library, demand for e-books has increased.  The university recently joined the Open Libraries program to expand the digital materials that students can borrow. Through the program, users can check out a digital version of a book the library owns using controlled digital lending (CDL).

Amy Phillips, head of technical services for Howard University Libraries, learned about the opportunity last fall through the Washington Research Library Consortium. Howard is one of nine D.C.-area libraries in the nonprofit consortium, which recently collaborated with the Internet Archive to do an overlap analysis of its shared collection. When the digital materials became available to use for free through the consortia, Howard decided to join, too.

After Alisha Strother, metadata librarian, ran an analysis of books in the Howard collection by International Standard Book Number (ISBN), it was discovered that more than 14,000 books matched a copy that the Internet Archive had acquired and digitized. Howard decided to join the Open Libraries program in January. This means that students can now check out these Howard books from across the country as they engage in online instruction.

“I see this as being an important resource for students to be able to access materials from anywhere,” Phillips said. “And I think it will have value and be heavily utilized even when we are back on campus.”

Howard is one of nearly 100 historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the United States. One of Howard’s most important entities is the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which is recognized as one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and cultural of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas and other parts of the world. Portions of its materials are also now available for digital borrowing through the Open Libraries program. The collection will now have greater exposure since it had previously only been accessible onsite for researchers who scheduled appointments. 

“This opens up a premier collection to public usage. From a scholarly and cultural point of view, this material is very much in demand,” Phillips said. “Looking forward, we think it will get a lot of traffic.”

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected people of color, prompting Howard to be cautious and extending online learning into the spring semester for most all students, Phillips said.  The university is doing all it can to connect students with resources and its libraries have been investing more in digital items. But budgets are limited and licensing agreements curb the library’s ability to broadly lend e-books.

“The Internet Archive has been an important way to open up more library materials to students,” said Phillips, adding that it’s new and just beginning to be promoted to students and faculty. “We’re excited and we know this will have a positive impact on student success and scholarship.”

Sometimes they arrive tied up in string because their binding is broken. Others are in envelopes to protect the brittle pages from further damage.

Aging books are sent from libraries to the Internet Archive for preservation. Thanks to the careful work of the nearly 70 people who scan at digitization centers in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, the books get a second life with a new audience.

Scanners sometimes call these “Last Chance Books” and they take pride in restoring them. As they turn the pages one at time to be photographed and digitized, they develop a daily cadence—but it must be adjusted with fragile materials.

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“We do our best with the flaking or cracking pages,” said Andrea Mills, digitization program manager for the Internet Archive stationed in Toronto, Canada. “You have to be really cautious that the flake doesn’t fall off and cover a word. It’s almost like a puzzle.”

Some books that land at the Internet Archive digitization centers date back to the 1700s. They are fiction and nonfiction, journals and pamphlets covering a range of topics. And, it can be surprising to learn what reviving the material means to patrons.

“We chuckled when we digitized a book on sea captains. We thought – who will care? And then a year later, it had hundreds of views,” said Elizabeth MacLeod, senior manager of satellite digitization services who manages remote operations out of Wilmington, North Carolina.

Digitization helps preserve materials that are no longer in circulation at their holding library because they are falling apart. It also gives new exposure to books that are out of print that may otherwise be forgotten.

Both Mills and MacLeod began working for the Internet Archive more than 10 years ago as book scanners – also known as Scribe operators. Mills has an arts degree in jewelry design and teaching; MacLeod studied biology. They were both drawn to the mission of the Internet Archive and share a passion of connecting people with resources.

Over the years, Mills and MacLeod have worked closely with librarians and archivists around the world to digitize their collections, learning more with each project. They now manage digitization and support sites with training and best practices, many embedded in libraries, in 10 countries and upwards of 30 locations. Digitizing is a somewhat solitary task and some people “get in the zone” while scanning; others are very chatty or listen to music, Mills said.

Many employees have worked together for nearly a decade and there is a friendly, collaborative vibe at the centers. “We have all sorts of people—artists, printers and photographers. They are people who are meticulous and love books,” Mills said. A recent viral video shared on the Internet Archive’s Twitter account features Scribe operator Eliza Zhang, who has worked at the Archive for more than ten years. Book conservators from larger institutional partners also offer additional training for Internet Archive operators on best practices for handling their unique collections.

MacLeod says the scanners are all committed to providing a service to readers and it’s satisfying to help people with disabilities connect with books, “It’s energizing to be part of an organization that is thinking outside the box,” she said. “I want people to be able to have more access to whatever they are trying to find.”

Added Mills: “I’m an information junky. I love the search and the hunt and the finding the answer. The power of the internet and digitization is that you can find that answer faster. It just sort of opens up the possibilities of what you can do.”