The Internet Archive is proud to announce that the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) will receive the 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award for their leadership in preserving local news online.
The Internet Archive Hero Award recognizes individuals and organizations that have demonstrated leadership in making information available to people around the world. The Poynter Institute, a 50-year-old nonprofit that works to strengthen journalism and train journalists, and IRE, a member-driven nonprofit that has spent 50 years helping journalists do better investigative work, have made preservation a vital part of their work.
Local journalism is the first draft of history, and often the only record of what happened in a community. But as news increasingly moves online, that record is at risk. Stories can disappear when a newsroom closes, a website changes platforms, or digital archives are neglected. At the same time, major news publishers and media organizations are restricting access to web archiving tools like the Wayback Machine, making it harder to preserve the journalism being published today.
Poynter and IRE are taking a different approach. In partnership with the Internet Archive, they are helping newsrooms understand the importance of digital preservation and giving journalists the tools and training they need to protect their work for the future.
Through the national initiative Today’s News for Tomorrow, the three organizations are working to train hundreds of newsrooms in digital preservation and provide access to Internet Archive’s web archiving and preservation services. The program recognizes that preserving local journalism cannot be left to chance: The people creating the news need to be part of preserving it.
The Internet Archive Hero Award is an annual award that honors those who have exhibited leadership in making information available for digital learners all over the world. Previous recipients have included Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the island nation of Aruba, public information advocate Carl Malamud, copyright expert Michelle Wu, and the Grateful Dead.
The 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented during the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 21 in San Francisco. Join the celebration either in-person or online.
Ryley Walker says he’s flattered when people tape his live performances and post them on the Internet Archive. If he knows ahead of time, the 37-year-old singer-songwriter often puts their name on the guest list and invites them early for a sound check.
“I love when people come — either as a hobbyist or a professional — to record the show and make it available for everybody else to hear,” says Walker of his experimental/folk music. “My live shows have always been a bit dynamic with a lot of improvising. So, there’s different approaches every night to the music, and it’s cool that’s documented.”
Walker has 95 shows preserved on the Internet Archive dating back to 2017. The recordings are part of the Live Music Archive, a collection built over the past 20 years by volunteers and Internet Archive staff that now tops 300,000 recordings from more than 9,000 artists.
“I don’t think taping the show and putting it on the internet for someone to listen to for free is like a lost sale or anything,” Walker said. “It’s been a net positive.” Indeed, the Los-Angeles based musician said the online exposure has attracted new fans.
“It’s amazing what the Internet Archive is able to do. I’m really encouraged by people using it to get the music out there — and it’s all a labor of love,” Walker said. “I hope the trend continues to grow.”
In his own creative process, Walker said he’s found the resources on the Internet Archive useful — whether reviewing his own performances or listening to shows by his favorite artists.
“I’ve discovered there’s a lot of great recordings from tons of different artists,” Walker said. “It’s just a treasure trove that never really stops.”
Walker said he’s gotten to know the personality of the different tapers and recording engineers and admires their work. “They’re real music fans. They keep it alive,” he said. “I’d rather the music get distributed in that way than through some company with a bunch of investors.”
Music is a passion for Walker, he said, and he isn’t bothered by someone freely sharing his work. “I don’t believe in stopping anybody from doing what they want to do to express themselves creatively,” he said. “This is a form of creative expression to show up at a show and tape it.”
Over his 15-plus-year career, Walker has released more than a dozen albums on various labels. He has a new single, “Carrier” coming out September 29 on AD 93, a record label based in London. Walker said he uses computers now to make his music, and the song is a departure from his earlier work. “It’s a very different sounding record, and I’m ecstatic about it,” he said. “It’s a welcome pivot in my creativity.”
The single is from a record that will be announced later in 2026.
In August, Walker performed a virtual concert for the Internet Archive at their staff meeting and relayed his gratitude for the organization and its mission.
Through the Internet Archive, music can be preserved for people to enjoy it in all parts of the world, Walker said: “I can play a show in Fort Collins, Colorado, and somebody in Saint Petersburg, Russia, could hear it the next day. I really appreciate it.”
Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. One recent change: we rewrote the message you see when a request is blocked with a 429 error — the HTTP code that means “too many requests.”
Those protections sometimes catch real people by mistake. If that’s happened to you, we’re sorry, and we appreciate your patience while we work to reduce the errors.
We’re getting better at telling abusive bots apart from the people who depend on the Wayback Machine every day. If you think you were blocked in error, email info@archive.org with your operating system, browser, and IP address, and we’ll look into it.
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area.
“We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental sound collage record, which eventually sold 15,000 copies. “We were shocked that people were interested in something so strange.”
Hosler started the group with David Wills and Richard Lyons, but the Negativland lineup has changed, and the range of its work expanded over 46 years.
The multimedia collective has produced more than 30 albums and EPs, as well as fine art, books, radio and live performances that mix found and original material. The band came up with the phrase “culture jamming” to describe its approach to layering art from various sources..
Negativland continues to innovate and perform, collaborating remotely. Its live show, Over The Edge: Significantly Less Deceptive, at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters on September 16, will combine sound, music, radio, humor, and sonic experimentation. Hosler, who lives in North Carolina, will be on stage with San Francisco’s Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), a collaborator with the band since 1985, while Wills contributes by phone from his home in Seattle.
Negativland has been influential in the remix space. It has challenged conventions around media, copyright, and artistic freedom. Hosler said the band wanted to carve a space to talk back to power through its audio collage art.
“The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture,” Hosler said. “It’s our perceptions of power, money, capitalism, who runs things, who’s in control and how the media works. We are creating this alternate, weird, parallel universe version of reality as we perceive it.”
Fair Use and Preservation
The group was thrust into the limelight when it released a record poking fun at, and sampling from, the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The Irish band and their label sued Negativland for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and defamation of character in 1991 and, with Negativland’s “U2” record having been released by the label SST Records, the group reluctantly settled.
Negativland used the episode and attention from the media to highlight the need for copyright reform. It shared the story of its legal battle and argument for the right to make new art out of corporately owned culture in the 1995 book, Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral Two. The book led Hosler to give more than 140 lectures about appropriation, corporate ownership and the intersection of art and law at schools and universities around the world.
In 2015, the Internet Archive partnered with Negativland to preserve and provide free public access to more than 4,000 hours of Over The Edge, the group’s legendary weekly freeform radio program that has aired since 1981. Don Joyce, a collaborator with Negativland for years until his passing in 2015, was a driving force behind the program. It is now hosted by Leidecker (“Wobbly”) at KPFA in Berkeley. The first 34 years of radio shows are archived and freely available at the Internet Archive to listeners around the world.
The members of Negativland have been fluid over the years and most balance their contributions with day jobs. They don’t include photos with their faces on albums. “We really want to direct attention to our work, not to us as personalities or individuals,” Hosler said. In addition to the core group, there are people who help with videos, website design and other aspects of the art that are integral to the work, he added.
Hosler said the band always knew its audience would be small, but the members were motivated to invent something out of the box. He said he assumes fans are thoughtful, curious and have a sense of humor.
“When we perform shows, a lot of our audience seems like people who don’t even fit in with the people who don’t fit in,” Hosler said. “That’s cool. Our live shows are sort of a safe space for people who are just real oddballs.”
Negativland’s work encompasses sampling music, but also photography, visual arts, graphics, art shows and live, improvisational performances. Its work has adapted to the evolving technology of the past four decades. Hosler said a creative impulse drives the collaborators to keep innovating and sharing their work with the public.
“For many years when critics would write about Negativland, they just couldn’t describe it very well. From a marketing standpoint, that’s bad,” Hosler said. “But from a creative and artistic standpoint, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic. If critics can’t figure out how to talk about the work, maybe it means we actually are doing something a little bit different.”
Five years after Eliza Zhang’s book-scanning video reached millions of people, the Internet Archive’s page-by-page approach to digitization is capturing attention all over again.
In February 2021, a video of Internet Archive book scanner Eliza Zhang turning the pages of a book went unexpectedly viral. It reached 7.7 million people in its first 48 hours and became one of our most widely seen social posts ever.
Five years later, it happened again.
As renewed attention to the way books are digitized brought new questions about our own scanning practices, people once again discovered Eliza, the Scribe, and the decidedly hands-on process behind the digital books in our collections:
A big thank you to Eliza, and to all of the book scanners, digitization staff, librarians, engineers, archivists, and volunteers who spend their days caring for the physical record and making it accessible in digital form.
Beginning in January 2025, we witnessed an unprecedented removal of material from U.S. federal websites — documents related to education, health, science, and more, gone from public view almost overnight. Dozens of articles appeared on this topic, including this one from IEEE Spectrum, published in February 2025, shortly after the beginning of the new presidential term. The author, Gwendolyn Rak, like many other doing research in this area, noted that not only did individual web pages change or vanish almost overnight, but that the web presence of entire agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) disappeared from view. Moments like this are exactly why libraries have collaborated to build the End of Term Web Archive.
The Internet Archive has participated in the End of Term (EOT) Archive since 2004, working alongside partner institutions to capture US government websites at every presidential transition. Over time the scope has grown, but the purpose remains the same: to preserve government information and civic memory at critical moments of democratic change.
What the End of Term Archive Captures
Project partners participate in different ways. Some carry out web archiving, while others lead in compiling lists of sites and pages that should be included, and others conduct research on findings. The crawl is carried out in distinct phases, including a pre-election capture, captures during the election, and finally captures pre- and post-inauguration.
Lessons from the 2024/2025 Crawl
When asked to reflect on what the team learned from the 2024/2025 crawl, Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine said, “We always learn that no matter how much planning we always wind up missing material that should have been included and in scope. To do a thorough comprehensive crawl is a daunting task and we have gaps. More funding and access to resources would help us do a better job. Many people expect that this work is done by the government, but it is not. It needs to happen with trust and integrity, and we provide that.”
“Another challenge is that so much government information is now published through commercial platforms, for example X and various Meta properties. This presents both operational and policy issues around archiving these materials. Widespread Akamai and Cloudflare implementation has, I think, unintended consequences for web archiving of all sorts.”
“Here is an example of important materials that are hosted on social media platforms that came into sharp focus after the wrap up phase from the 2024 crawl, when the US State Department announced they were going to remove social medial posts from prior administrations, including accounts of representing embassies and officials.This caused the team to go back and look at that area in particular. We identified and captured information from more than 700 accounts on the X platform alone. While we worked quickly to archive before deletion, some slipped through the cracks. For the first time we are considering a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. If successful, we may use that to fill in the blanks.”
I also asked Mark to share what he is most proud of in this work. “I’m grateful that we have the opportunity to do this, along with participating partners and the support of funders. We have ample experience to carry this work out, and we have gotten better at this over time. We have seen the evidence and value of this work reflected in what has become a national conversation when so much material was removed from public access starting in January 2025. Because we have done the work, we have evidence about the removal of fundamental documents related to education, health, science and the like, and millions of web pages and web sites deleted abruptly. We’ve seen over 1000 news articles cite this work specifically.”
The End of Term Web Archive is Democracy’s Library in action. Working with the right partners, the right infrastructure, and sustained commitment, it is possible to safeguard the public record for the people it belongs to.
Yesterday, the Internet Archive experienced a power outage that took some of our services offline and degraded others. The power outage at one of our datacenters was caused by damage to the power feed, necessitating PG&E to repair it.
We are still bringing up the upload feature, but otherwise we are live and kicking. Please enjoy the old stuff.
PG&E crews arrived and worked until 4 a.m., alongside our infrastructure staff, to restore power. By 4:15 a.m., our fans, network, and servers were coming back online in sequence.
A big thank you to the PG&E crew and our staff for working through the night to restore services and get the Internet Archive back online.
Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation Wednesday, October 21, 2026 Internet Archive, San Francisco REGISTER: In person | Virtual
Democracy invites participation; democracies require it.
At the Internet Archive, we believe libraries can help make that participation possible by preserving knowledge and providing the tools to explore and build upon it. This year, our annual celebration, “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation,” will showcase the many ways people can participate through the Internet Archive—from saving and contributing materials to exploring government records, researching history, and building new tools with our collections and APIs.
We’ll celebrate the Wayback Machine and the many other Internet Archive tools that help people preserve, explore, share, and build knowledge together.
We’ll also spotlight partners and creators who are building on top of the Internet Archive’s data and infrastructure, demonstrating how shared library resources can become a foundation for discovery and collaboration. In person and via livestream, we’ll explore what happens when a library doesn’t just preserve knowledge, but gives people the tools to use it, build with it, and participate in creating what comes next.
Celebrate with us!
Our annual celebration is a hybrid event, with an in-person street party at Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco and a livestream for those joining from afar.
In person: Wednesday, October 21, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco. REGISTER NOW
Virtual: Join the livestream from wherever you are. REGISTER NOW
Go behind the scenes at the Physical Archive
Doors Open: Go Behind the Scenes at the Physical Archive Tuesday, October 20, 2026 Physical Archive, Richmond, California REGISTER: In person
The celebration begins the night before with a special opportunity to peek behind the doors of the Physical Archive in Richmond, California.
Join us on Tuesday, October 20, from 6–8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes tour of the physical collections of books, music, film, and video.
This special insider event offers a look at the lifecycle of physical materials—from donation and preservation to digitization and access. We’ll also have samples from generous donations and acquisitions of books, records, microfiche, and more on display.
What does it mean to preserve culture in an age of disappearing websites, platform-controlled media, and fragile digital memories? In the final episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, Future Knowledge hosts Dave Hansen and Chris Freeland sit down with musician and series host Vida Vojić and producer Alice Bridgwood to reflect on the conversations, ideas, and lessons that emerged throughout the series.
Looking back on discussions about cookbooks, queer archives, African folklore, Papiamento, and more, Vida and Alice explore the common threads connecting seemingly disparate forms of cultural preservation. They reflect on how culture is shaped not only by institutions, but by communities and individuals who choose what to remember, share, and pass on. The conversation examines the challenges of living in an “age of platforms,” the risks of relying on technology and corporations to steward cultural memory, and the growing movement toward community-driven preservation efforts. Along the way, the group discusses what surprised them most, how the series changed their own habits and perspectives, and why they remain hopeful that people everywhere can play an active role in keeping culture alive. Rather than ending on a note of loss, the episode offers a hopeful reminder that culture survives when people care enough to preserve, share, and reimagine it together.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.
News publishers have a real problem: AI companies are sending aggressive, anonymous bots to scrape websites at a scale that strains servers and drives up infrastructure costs. It’s happening not just to publishers, but also to Wikipedia, libraries and to the Internet Archive itself. We all have a stake in finding workable solutions.
But not all bots are bad. Long before AI, automated tools, which many people colloquially call “bots,” such as web crawlers have helped preserve the web, support research, improve security, and power investigative journalism. Libraries use them to archive disappearing websites. Researchers use them to study the web and test security. Journalists use them to uncover how powerful companies and institutions operate online. These are some of the good bots that power the online infrastructure that helps keep us safe and hold the powerful accountable.
As EFF explains, New York’s Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act risks killing off the good bots along with the bad in an attempt to prohibit abusive AI scraping. The law, now sitting on Governor Hochul’s desk, would require every operator of an automated access tool to disclose their identity, affiliation, purpose, as well as all potential uses of the public news content they access. It would also let any news publisher demand that any anonymous tool unmask itself, and pursue court orders to force that disclosure, without first showing any evidence of wrongdoing. This mandatory identification would allow websites to block or engage in other forms of retaliation against archivists, journalists, or researchers that use these tools for the public good. Further, because the law only applies to news websites, it would do nothing to help Wikipedia and other knowledge repositories that are burdened by aggressive crawlers.
The problem isn’t anonymous bots. The problem is excessive, harmful scraping. We need targeted solutions for abusive AI practices, while actively protecting the rights of libraries, researchers, journalists, and readers alike. That’s why the Internet Archive has joined EFF and other civil liberties organizations in asking Governor Hochul to veto the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act. It’s important to stop bad actors from straining news sites, but a law written for this purpose shouldn’t hand corporations a tool to dismantle crucial civic infrastructure. Let’s work together to solve the real problem without undermining the tools that preserve knowledge, enable journalism, and support democracy. Read the full letter here.
