Category Archives: Announcements

How Librarian Megan Lotts Turned 1 Trillion Web Pages into an 8-Page Zine

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How do you commemorate the preservation of 1 trillion web pages in a zine? That was Megan Lotts’ challenge when she was contacted by the Internet Archive last summer.

Lotts is an art librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she promotes creativity, play, and makerspaces through her teaching and research. She designs zines (short for magazine), which are self-published, handmade objects that are often copied and shared. It was through Lotts’ involvement with zines at the American Library Association (ALA) conference that she was asked by Internet Archive librarian Chris Freeland to create one for the Internet Archive’s October celebration.

For the project, Lotts collaborated with Louisa Cohen and Drew MacDonald at the Internet Archive on images and text to incorporate. Although an avid user of the Internet Archive, Lotts said making the zine prompted her to take a deep dive and discover all new material. 

“As a librarian, this is a space where you go for history,” she said of the Internet Archive. “I’m a kind of curious, reflective person, but there were collections that I came across that I didn’t know existed.”

The final product is an 8-page zine that Lotts has shared on the Internet Archive, along with a close-up view of the pages. It includes the Wayback Machine logo, icons of various collections, an old Polaroid photo of Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, next to a vintage computer.

The zine was printed and shared with attendees at the Oct. 22 Internet Archive party in San Francisco. Lotts took a week off from Rutgers to help unveil the zine at the festivities. Upon returning to Rutgers, she said it was fun to show students her work and explain the process. They were excited to hear about her experience, Lotts said, and what she learned behind the scenes at the headquarters.

“My students grew up with the Wayback Machine. They’ve used it since grade school,” said Lotts, 51, who remembers first accessing the Archive in college. “If you think about 1 trillion pages in less than 30 years, that’s outrageous. It’s preserving information for posterity.”

Zines need to be preserved, Lotts maintains, along with other art and cultural artifacts.

Librarian and creator Megan Lotts.

“When I give someone a zine, what I’m really hoping is that I’m giving you a moment,” Lotts said, “whether you recognize it or not, to hold this in your hands and get lost from the rest of the world. It’s just a tiny little book … I want people to look at it and think about it. That’s the beauty of the zine.”

Zines can be as elaborate as the one she produced for the Archive, she said, or as simple as creating something with a piece of paper, pen or pencil and an idea. “Those are things that most of us can access and everybody has a story,” said Lotts, who hopes the project inspires people to consider tapping into their creative side to make a zine.

“I’m noticing—as a scholar and as an educator—that people want to engage with the arts. They want to be creative,” said Lotts, who has degrees in fine arts, library science, painting and art history and teaches a class on play. “It’s really powerful for me to see students come alive and think about information and knowledge creation in a playful and exciting way.”

Lotts is the author of two books published by the American Library Association (ALA):  Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement (2021) and The Playful Library: Building Environments for Learning and Creativity (2024).

Check out her scholarship web page and website for more.

EveryLibrary Institute Joins the Our Future Memory Coalition

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The Our Future Memory movement continues to grow, with the EveryLibrary Institute (ELI) formally joining the global coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. ELI’s participation brings a powerful policy-focused perspective to the effort to ensure that libraries, archives, and museums retain the rights they need to fulfill their public mission in a digital world.

EveryLibrary Institute explained its reason for joining the Our Future Memory movement:

By joining the Our Future Memory coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online, the EveryLibrary Institute is hoping to advance a broader conversation that reaches beyond copyright reform alone and asks deeper questions about ownership, stewardship, creativity, and the future of reading in a digital society. We believe that this conversation must include libraries and educators, but also independent booksellers, independent publishers, authors, technologists, policymakers, and readers themselves. The health of the creative economy and our democratic society depends on getting this right.

About the Statement

The Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online aims to safeguard the essential digital activities of libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as “memory institutions”). It urges policymakers and communities to ensure these institutions retain the same rights and responsibilities online that they have historically held offline, including the rights to:

  1. Collect digital materials, including through digitization and lawful acquisition;
  2. Preserve digital works, including repair, backup, and reformatting for long-term access;
  3. Provide controlled access to digital collections for research and public use; and
  4. Cooperate across institutions by sharing and transferring digital collections to strengthen preservation and access.

Want to Learn More?

Interested libraries and memory institutions can learn more about the Our Future Memory coalition and Statement at a free, public webinar on Tuesday, January 27 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Register at https://blog.archive.org/event/protect-our-future-memory-join-the-call-for-library-digital-rights/. 

The Joyful Chaos of the Early Web: A Conversation with Creator Audrey Witters

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Audrey Witters remembers the creativity of the early web.

Audrey Witters

When she was launching her career in the mid-1990s, being online was more about exploring and having fun than figuring out how to make a return on investment. Witters said if you were curious about someone’s web page,  you could simply click to see their code or email them with questions. She enjoyed how accessible the early web community was and the feeling of connection.

Now a business consultant in San Jose, she spoke at the Internet Archive’s Oct. 22 celebration, praising its efforts to save digital content and encouraging innovation through experimentation.

Watch Witters’ remarks:

“Thank you to the Internet Archive for preserving the history of the early web, that time of collective effort and quirky, chaotic creation, so that we can have really fun moments of nostalgia,” Witters said from the stage, “but even more so that the next generation of creators can be inspired to find their own ways to promote exploration, collaboration and joyful expression.”

Witters shared the story of her career and the influence the internet has had on her work before there was much pressure to monetize content. 

Witters’ famous animated GIF

After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Witters built her early career in the tech sector. Witters garnered attention for helping design a small, animated alien GIF at a graphic art software company. Her work was featured in a 1996 book, GIF Animation Studio, by Richard Koman.

In those early days, it was exciting to come into work each morning to see if any new web servers had launched, Witters said. She was on the lookout for new and interesting approaches to digital layout, movement, or  interactivity. She followed a graduate student posting pictures of his daily vegetarian lunch – a forerunner of the food bloggers – and witnessed the beginning of e-commerce. Content was diverse and the web reflected a diversity of voices.

Witters leveraged what she learned to develop an expertise in project management, and said she’d like to see more of that early online creativity carried over to confront today’s challenges.

“Business relies on innovation. Innovation is based on creativity, and creativity comes from fun,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time for fun these days.”

Prioritizing profit without including time for play is not good for individuals, society or businesses in the long run, Witters maintains. As systems evolve, creativity is needed to meet changing demands and unleash new ideas.

For 20 years, Witters worked at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Business, including a decade as the inaugural managing director of online executive programs. Following that role she founded her own company, Learning Impact Advisors, helping higher education clients develop career programs that amplify their mission.

Witters recalls with fondness the “Wild West” days of the early web: “It’s important to preserve that spirit and be inspired by it.”

Fun Library Kiosk and Novel Web-based Display of Millions of Web Pages

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When someone calls up a single webpage in a digital archive, it’s difficult to understand the scope of the collection. To improve the visibility and appreciation of its resources, the Internet Archive Europe partnered with software engineers and the Internet Archive to develop an interactive display that gives users a sense of what all is available at their fingertips.

This fall, an installation was unveiled in the Netherlands and later demonstrated by Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle at the October 22 celebration in San Francisco.

https://display.archive.org/nl

“The idea is to be able to show and play with the breadth that people have accomplished and the depth that we have all built together,” Kahle said. “This is the web we built. This is the web that we want. This is the web we want to make go from 1 trillion to 2 trillion to 3 trillion.”

The initial display included screenshots of more than 85,000 Dutch websites preserved over the past 30 years. Visitors to the National Library in the Netherlands used a physical joystick and buttons to explore a variety of webpages in a game-like experience. With their voices, they can direct the machine to zoom in on specific topics or domains. The screenshots are laid out in a semantic grid, where websites with similar topics appear together in a cluster. Both topics and layout are extracted using AI–based tools (VLM, embeddings).

The idea started with Kai Jauslin in 2020 when he was working with the Swiss National Library to help the public visualize its digital collection. Jauslin, a software engineer and owner of Nextension.com, https://www.nextension.com/ and Barbara Signori, a digital librarian, created an interactive display that went live in 2021, reflecting 80,000 snapshots of archived web pages in the Swiss library collection. (It has since grown to more than 115,000.)

[See a demonstration in this You Tube video]

Once Kahle saw the Swiss project, he was interested in developing something similar using the Wayback Machine. In January, Jauslin got the green light to make the project open source so he could reuse everything he’d developed for the Swiss library for the Internet Archive Europe. He then collaborated with a team at the Internet Archive including Jefferson Bailey, director of archiving and data services.

“One of the goals of this project was to be able to show the depth [of the collection] and how big everything is,” Jauslin said.

Bailey extracted the data, made over 1 million screenshots, created formatting to adapt the project framework to feature webpages from the Netherlands collection. The screenshots were used in the interface backed by the Wayback Machine.

“This showcases these collections and makes them more tangible and usable in different ways,” Bailey said. “It’s not just looking at the archive copy of one website, but looking at all of them and searching across categories. You can zoom in and zoom out with functionality that was not available before. It showcases these collections. “

In addition to being a cool tech project, Bailey said, the display has an advocacy element in helping demonstrate the value and scope of digital collections. The display is a good “public engagement” opportunity that lets library patrons interact and grasp the scale of the available resources.

The visibility is a useful tool in making the case to funders and the government to support open resources and library preservation.

At the National Library of the Netherlands, Sophie Ham, curator of the digital collection, said the display shows that life on the internet is worth preserving.

[See story at the Sept. 2025 event in the Netherlands on the display:https://www.internetarchive.eu/2025/09/18/preserving-digital-sovereignty-reflections-on-brewster-kahles-intervention-at-the-kb/]

“We were very enthusiastic about this concept [of the display] because our web archive is very hidden. People barely know it’s there,” Ham said. “We need people to acknowledge the importance of a web archive – but to acknowledge it, you have to make it visible and more attractive.”

The display made the collection visible, she said, and the low-barrier, interactive element has been embraced by visitors.

“It helps us get into people’s mind that web archives are as important as books in collections of national libraries,” Ham said. 

As technology advances, Jauslin said he hopes the project will continue to expand; Bailey added the hope is to customize the display to other national libraries that express interest.

ALA, ARL, and CARL Join the Fight to Defend Our Future Memory

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Three of North America’s flagship library organizations have thrown their weight behind the movement to protect memory institutions’ digital rights.

The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) just joined the Statement on Four Digital Rights for Memory Institutions Online. Together, they represent thousands of public and academic research libraries, as well as three of Canada’s federal and parliamentary libraries. Now, they stand with Our Future Memory’s global coalition of libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations expressing the urgent need to protect memory institutions’ vital role in the digital age. 

In endorsing the Statement, Katherine McColgan, manager of administration and programs for CARL, explained that “[t]he current digital landscape is significantly affecting the knowledge economy in two ways. One is that online materials are on platforms that restrict the collection, preservation, and making available materials for future generations. The second is that, without the ability to digitize and make available important scholarly works online, information is lost to new generations of scholars. It is imperative that memory institutions are able to continue their work in the digital environment in the same way as with print.” 

Indeed, the Statement demands nothing new—only the basic rights necessary for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations to continue their core operations and fulfill their public-serving mission. The Statement calls on policymakers around to world to ensure that memory institutions have the right and ability to:

  • Collect digital materials
  • Preserve digital collections
  • Provide controlled digital access
  • Cooperate across institutions

Building on well over a decade of advocacy by leaders in the library community, “[t]he statement’s principles provide policymakers with a clear roadmap for how to maintain the essential public role of libraries, archives, and museums in the digital age,” said Lisa Varga, associate executive director of ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office. 

It “underscores the importance of protecting libraries’ rights through legislative advocacy and licensing strategies, in an era of increasingly restrictive licensing agreements that threaten essential library functions like building collections, preserving materials, and enabling advanced computational research methods such as AI,” explained ARL’s director of public policy, Katherine Klosek. 

With these new signatories, the global call to protect the rights of memory institutions online gains even further momentum. 

Ready to Join?

Your organization can join the movement and sign the Statement by going to the Our Future Memory website.

Want to Learn More?

Boston Library Consortium Joins Statement Supporting Digital Rights for Memory Institutions

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The movement for Our Future Memory is getting bigger, with yet another library leader endorsing memory institutions’ digital rights.

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), comprised of twenty-six research libraries in the New England area, has signed the Statement on Four Digital Rights for Memory Institutions Online. BLC joins more than forty other signatories from around the world, from the Wikimedia Foundation to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). Alongside two other recent signatories, it adds a strong voice to the growing list of libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations that are calling for stronger legal protections to fulfill their public missions in the digital age. 

“BLC is proud to join institutions worldwide in defending our rights to collect, preserve, provide access, and cooperate. Libraries safeguard cultural memory—and online content shouldn’t be an exception.”

Charlie Barlow, executive director, Boston Library Consortium

“BLC is proud to join institutions worldwide in defending our rights to collect, preserve, provide access, and cooperate,” said executive director Charlie Barlow. “Libraries safeguard cultural memory—and online content shouldn’t be an exception.”

In putting its name to the statement, BLC offers further proof that libraries and archives know exactly what they need to keep preserving and providing access to the culture record.

Want to learn more?

Voices Celebrating 1 Trillion Web Pages: Erin Malone on Designing Kodak’s First Web Site in 1994

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Erin Malone, the user experience designer behind Kodak’s first website, looks back on the early web with the story of how she and a colleague built the company’s inaugural homepage in 1994, before most of marketing even knew what the web was.

Fresh out of grad school and self-taught in HTML (as everyone was at that time), Malone helped create a pioneering site that today lives on in the Wayback Machine. Her testimonial highlights just how radical those early experiments were, and why preserving them matters.

“Another person in the design group that I worked in…suggested, ‘Why don’t we build a website for Kodak?’ And since I had done a website, I was like, sure, let’s do it. 

And we asked our boss if that was OK. And he said, ‘Yes,’ because I don’t think he really knew what we were talking about.”

Erin Malone, interaction designer
When I got out of grad school, I started working at Kodak. And in 1994, Mosaic came out. I had just taught myself HTML and another person in the design group that I worked in, his name was Frank Marino, suggested, “Why don't we build a website for Kodak?” 

And since I had done a website, I was like, sure, let's do it. 

And we asked our boss if that was OK. And he said, yes, because I don't think he really knew what we were talking about. And, you know, marketing wasn't really into the web yet. And they didn't have any objections. 

So we built a website that was essentially a big image map with four images coming out of the center. And I think each one linked to, I don't know, a white paper or a page with just some text on it. 

We built that in, I think,'94. I think what the Wayback Machine has is dated from 1996, but it's the same image, the same homepage. And it was pretty radical at the time.

Meet Merrilee Proffitt, Director of Democracy’s Library US

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Merrilee Proffitt

Democracies depend on an informed and engaged citizenry — and in the digital age, that means equitable, reliable access to public information online. To help make this vision a reality, the Internet Archive is building Democracy’s Library, a free, open, online collection of government research and publications from around the world.

To bolster the U.S. component of this effort, the Internet Archive welcomes Merrilee Proffitt as the director of Democracy’s Library, US. Merrilee brings decades of experience in library collaboration, digital initiatives, and open knowledge partnerships that will help shape and scale this growing national collection.

Building an open, digital public resource

As director, Merrilee will guide the expansion of Democracy’s Library in the United States—working with libraries, archives, and civic institutions to make publicly funded information freely available and discoverable online. This work continues the Internet Archive’s long-standing commitment to universal access to knowledge, while supporting democratic engagement through transparency, accountability, and shared understanding.

“Governments have produced an extraordinary wealth of information in the public domain,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “Democracy’s Library helps ensure that this knowledge truly serves the public good.” 

A career dedicated to collaboration and access

Before joining the Internet Archive, Merrilee served as senior manager of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, supporting collaboration among leading research libraries worldwide. She previously worked with the Research Libraries Group and at the University of California, Berkeley, where she managed digital library initiatives that brought rare and unique materials from the Bancroft Library and other collections online.

Throughout her career, Merrilee has been a strong advocate for connecting libraries and archives with the global open knowledge ecosystem. She has deep experience partnering with the Wikimedia community to make library collections more visible and reusable across the web. Drawing on experience advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries and archives, she is committed to building a Democracy’s Library that reflects the diversity of the communities it serves and the many perspectives that strengthen democratic engagement.

When she’s not collaborating to open access to knowledge, Merrilee enjoys cycling (including riding her bike to the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco), and baking sourdough bread.

Learn more: