Category Archives: Archive Version 2

The Evolving Internet Archive

v2concert

The new archive.org site

The new version of the archive.org site has been evolving over the past 6 months in response to the feedback we’ve received from thousands of our awesome users.

If you haven’t been following along, you can review a little bit of the journey through these blog posts:

Why change the site at all?  The posts above help answer that, but in brief:

  • 35% of our ~3 million daily users are on mobile/tablet devices, and the classic site is not easy to use on small formats.
  • The new tools we want to offer our users would be difficult to implement in the old site architecture.
  • The classic site was built a long time ago, using methods that are outdated.  Finding programmers who have the skills to work in that environment is becoming increasingly difficult, and the ramp up time for new employees is painful.  The redesign has given us an opportunity to start pulling the front end (what you see) apart from the back end, so they can evolve separately.
percent of archive.org users viewing the new site

Blue represents people in classic archive.org (v1), red represents people in the new version (v2)

Currently about 85% of archive.org users are in the new version. Over the next few weeks we will be asking the remaining 15% to try it out.  For the time being, users will be able to exit exitthe new archive.org and return to the “classic” version — but the classic will not always be available or supported, so please give the new version a try and give us feedback if there are things on the site that you don’t like, can’t find, or that seem like bugs.  (When you click “exit” you will have an opportunity to give us feedback.)

We have made several video tours that introduce you to the new site. I recommend starting with the site tour, below.

down-button

The original download button

In the past few months we have received more than 16,000 feedback emails from people using the new version.  The redesign team reads every single one of them.  Some just say, “I love it!” and some immediately say, “I hate it!”  But a great many of you have also taken the time to share a little more – something you missed from the old site, a question about the new tools, concern about accessibility, suggestions for how to adjust things, etc.

Download menu open by default

Download menu open by default

We took that input — along with information from user tests, interviews with some of our power users, chats with partners — and tried to identify areas of the interface that seemed to be working well, and other areas that were not.

The evolution of downloading files from items is a great example of the process we’ve been following.  The original design for item pages de-emphasized download as a feature. Our conversations with users told us that most people wanted to hit a play button, not download a file.

You could still download in the original design, of course, but you had to click a button to get options and then click again if you wanted specific files.

But when we opened the new site up to more users, we got many comments from people who either disliked the extra clicking, didn’t like leaving the page to get individual files, didn’t understand what the options represented, or couldn’t find the download options at all.

The first thing we tried was just opening up the download menu by default.  Instead of just seeing the black download button on the page, you now also saw a menu of options.  More people saw the download, but feedback made it clear that users still had issues.

What if we make it blue?  (Nope!)

What if we make it blue? (Nope!)

We thought perhaps if we increased the visibility of the download options by turning the Download header blue that people would see it faster.  We did an A/B test with 50% of users seeing each option — neither option really won.  And the feedback about this feature continued to be negative.

It became clear that we needed to rethink the design of the download options all together, trying to keep it clean-looking and easy to use while also satisfying the concerns of our most advanced users.

We set some goals for the download changes based on the feedback we had received:

  • must be able to download an individual file without leaving the item page
  • if there is only one file in a particular format, you should only need one click to download it
  • improve the ability to download groups of files (e.g. “just give me all the FLAC files”)

The current version of downloads allows you to consume individual media files without leaving the page and gives you a lot more options for downloading groups of files from an item.  Since we released the new Download Options feature, the negative feedback about this feature has dropped off almost entirely.  So we think we’re on the right track!  We have created a short video tour for the downloads feature if you want to learn more.

New Download Options feature, illustrating how to display individual files

New Download Options feature, illustrating how to display individual files

The download changes are just one example of how much your feedback has helped us identify areas of confusion on the site and understand how to improve things.  Here are a few more examples:

  • A-Z filters available when sorting by title or creator
  • better experience for people with javascript disabled
  • fixes to improve software emulation
  • default search results to List view (instead of image-based Thumbnail view)
  • pull user page images from gravatar if available (if user has not uploaded one)

We have a lot more in store for the new site – better accessibility for sight disabled people, tools for creating your own collections, improved playback for multimedia items, etc.  As these features trickle into the site, we hope you will continue to share your questions and ideas with us – you are truly helping us to make the archive a better place for everyone.

This project receives support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.

What’s new with v2

As many of you have already seen, we are working on the next generation of the archive.org web site, which we call Version 2.0 (v2). It’s in beta right now, so go check it out!

trybeta

Version 1 (v1) showing the banner to try the BETA Version 2 (v2)

We get a lot of feedback from the people who have elected to try out v2, and we read ALL of it. As themes emerge about what people are having trouble with, we make changes to the design and then we pay attention to subsequent feedback to try to gauge whether we solved the problem (or not).

volumes

Volume prepended to title

The goal of this redesign is to make the site more inviting and easier to use. Right now our work is focused on how the site looks and how things are organized on the page. For the most part, everything that is available to you in Version 1 (v1) of the site is available to you in v2 – but those things may be in different places!

Rights information displayed in About tab

Rights information displayed in About tab

We have a lot of long-time users of the site, and we know that any major changes will cause them to have to relearn where things are and how to accomplish the things they already know how to do on v1. This kind of major change can be very annoying, so we’re working hard to make sure you only need to relearn things once. While we will be adding more features as time goes by, we expect those changes to be incremental and not to affect the basic layout of pages.

If you’ve been using v2, you’ve probably noticed some changes over the last few weeks. I’ll discuss some of those changes here, and some of them are highlighted in the included images.

about

The collection About tab contains a longer description, info about contributors, and stats for reviews, forums, views and items

Volume information.  We have a lot of journals and books with Volume information that was not showing in search, collection or account pages. The volume information is now prepended to the title for easier visual scanning within a collection.

Live Music. Rights information for a collection is now displayed on the About tab. We also changed the way shows are described in band collections to list the date and venue before the band name, making it easier to visually scan the items in a collection.

Mobile. On most mobile devices we decreased the initial number of search results from 50 to 25 in order to lighten the page load time.

Collections Page

Go to list view for a collection and click the "Show details" checkbox

Go to list view for a collection and click the “Show details” checkbox

Collection description. The description area for the collection at the top of the page has been shortened. We encourage collection builders to add useful descriptions, and you can see the additional information in the new About tab.

Click to see additional collections for an item

Click to see additional collections for an item

About tab. The About tab replaces the Contributors tab. We wanted to have a place for all of the information about a collection, and “Contributors” didn’t cover it. The new About tab contains the longer description for a collection, rights information (when it exists), data about how many reviews and forum posts are in that collection, and the content from the previous Contributors tab – the collection creator, people who have added to the collection, and charts for Views and Items over time.  You will also find related collections listed on the About tab below the graphs. Parent collections and subcollections still show up in the Collections tab, since they are part of a collection’s direct hierarchy.

The See All Files page

The See All Files page

Collection tab. The Collection tab has a few changes as well. In list view, you can now “show details” for each item if you want to see more information.

Item Pages

Additional collections. If an item belongs to more than one collection, you can choose to view those additional collections.

Upload tile on user account page

Upload tile on user account page

Stream only. When an item is not available for download, you will see a “Stream Only” notification where the “Download” button normally appears. We made some visual changes to this notification to make it seem less button-like.

Favorites list sorted by Date Favorited

Favorites list sorted by Date Favorited

See All Files. In the “see all files” view, “playable” media files are pushed to the top, just under the “all files” options for torrent and zip. Files are grouped logically, with the original first and bolded and the derivative files listed below.

User Account Page

uploadicon Uploads. Your Uploads tab has a new “Upload” tile in it, just to make uploading easier to find. You can still upload from anywhere on the site by clicking the upload icon at the top of the page, of course.

Favorites. Your Favorites list (called bookmarks in v1) will now display your favorites sorted by “date favorited” so that you can see your most recently favorited items first.

Tell Us!

As always, please use the Beta feedback link in the top right corner to let us know what you think.  Is everything awesome?  Are you confused about where to find something?  Tell us!

If you’re interested in a more detailed running log of changes from our lead developer, Tracey Jaquith, you can get the “nerd version” here: https://archive.org/CHANGELOG.txt

This project receives support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.

Knight Foundation to Support Toolsets for Building Libraries Together

KnightNewsChallengeonLibraries

Last September, the John S. and James L Knight Foundation issued this challenge:  “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” Today we are proud to announce that the Internet Archive’s plan for “Building Libraries Together” will make archive.org more community-driven, with a major grant from the kflogo-tag-3000pxKnight Foundation.  The Knight Foundation is the leading funder of journalism and media innovation, seeking to promote informed and engaged communities.

At the Internet Archive, we know we can’t preserve the world’s knowledge alone.  We will need the public’s help to curate our shared human culture.  So we are embarking on a two-year project to build a toolset and user interface that allow communitBuildingLibrariesTogetheries outside the Archive to save, manage and share their cultural treasures— further democratizing access to all knowledge. Citizen-archivists will be able to build collections, enhance metadata and join like-minded communities in deciding what of our history gets archived and made accessible to everyone, forever, for free.

A look at the Internet Archive's software library in the new user interface.

A look at the Internet Archive’s software library in the new user interface.

What Wikimedia did for encyclopedia articles, the Internet Archive hopes to do for collections of media:  give people the tools to build library collections together and make them accessible to everyone.

Please try out our new beta-version of our site here.

Redesigning Archive.org

Last week we announced a new beta version of the archive.org site.  The beta is the first step toward inviting people to participate in building libraries together.

archive1997

1997

2000

2000

archive2001

2001

archive2002Oct

2002

archive2005

2005

2014

2014

2014 beta site

2014 beta site

Why redesign the site?

The Wayback Machine was launched in 2001, and the current look of the site was debuted in 2002 when we added movies, texts, software, and music.  There have been minor design changes and we’ve added features over the years to make the library materials more usable, but the current interface has just accumulated over time.  We have not “rethought” the site in a holistic way in the past 12 years.

A lot has changed since 2002, for the Internet Archive and on the web.  In 2002 the archive contained 5,000 non-Wayback items, about half movies from the Prelinger Archive and half live music concerts from the Etree.org community with a few books and pieces of software sprinkled in. Those 5,000 files added up to about 3 terabytes of data.  Today we have more than 20 million media items that add up to about 10,000 terabytes of data (that’s not including 435 billion saved web pages that take up an additional 10,000 terabytes of space).

As we added more stuff to the archive, people came to visit.  We ended 2002 with about 9,000 registered users.  Today we have just a hair under 2 million registered users, and around 2.5 million individuals use the library materials every day.

Having thousands of movies available on the Internet in 2002 was actually pretty rare (remember, Youtube didn’t exist until 2005). Those 5,000 media items couldn’t be played on our site – you had to download them to your own computer to watch or listen. It was very difficult to add your own files to the Internet Archive – and who would have had the bandwidth to do it anyway?  In 2002 only 21% of U.S. homes had “high speed” internet connections.  High speed back then meant 200 kb per second. [1]

And of course, we can’t forget mobile. About 20-30% of our users today are on mobile devices, and the current web site is not serving them well.

Over the years the archive has grown immensely in terms of material and patrons. Our mission is Universal Access to All Knowledge.  And we think we can do better both with Access and with gathering All Knowledge if we have new tools and a better interface for the site.

Why this interface?

We started talking about the redesign in January of this year.  (Well, honestly we’ve been talking about it since 2006, but this was the first serious, archive-wide project.)

First we found a wonderful Creative Director, David Merkoski, and hired a great designer, Kristen Schlott.  We interviewed people, both users of the archive and people who had never heard of us, and asked them questions about how they use media. We examined how our site was being used, and talked about the intricacies and complications that come with archiving 20 million disparate things. We researched how other sites deal with large amounts of media. We used our current collections and use cases to understand how different designs would perform. Our lead developer, Tracey Jaquith, built prototypes and we user tested them. We talked to some of our power users and partners about our plans and showed them the prototype to get feedback. We had a LOT of meetings.

Idea clustering after user interviews

Idea clustering after user interviews

During this process we realized that we needed to find a way to open the archive up to more participation.  The Internet Archive has built some important and useful collections, both with partners and on our own.  We digitize 1,000 books per day.  We archive 1 billion URLs every week.  We capture television 24 hours per day, every single day.  But there is a lot of media out there in the world, and we can’t save all of it for the future without the help of experts.

Who are the experts?  You!  There are some amazing collections of media in the archive, out on the web, and sitting around on shelves and in basements that have been created by the people who know and care the most about saving those things and making sure their collections are complete and well described.  We want to create a place for those people to build communities around their interests where they can safely store these amazing collections and show them to as many people as possible.  If we all work together, we can create the most useful library the world has ever seen.

WHEN!?

Today the beta has the same basic functions as the current site, with some great additions: more visual cues to help you find things, facets on collections to quickly get you where you want to go, easy searching within collections, user pages, and many more.  We think it’s already an improvement over the current site – otherwise, we wouldn’t be showing it to you yet!

But the tools that will allow you to create your own collections and collaborate with others are still being built.  These features will be released in stages so that we can test them out in the beta and see how they work for people.  We will use feedback from patrons – both what you tell us, and the usage logs for the beta – to make decisions about how things will evolve. (Don’t worry, we aren’t keeping IP addresses — the beta respects user privacy.) When you’re in the beta, you’re going to run into things that might not work quite the way you expected, or that have suddenly changed since you used them yesterday. Sometimes it will be slow or you’ll find bugs. New things will appear, and other things may disappear. New tools will suddenly start working. We hope that for our intrepid beta users, this will be part of the fun. (Because we certainly think it’s fun!)

archivemedia

What new things are coming?

To some extent, this remains to be seen.  We will in part make decisions based on how the beta is used, so please use it!

Our current ideas include: speeding up the site; allowing patrons to create their own collections; improving accessibility for the print disabled, adding ways for patrons to collaborate around collections and items, etc.

There’s a lot more to come.  We hope you will explore all of these new options with us, and help us build the library.  If you would like to give us feedback, please write to us at info at archive dot org, or leave comments here.

 

 

Building Libraries Together: New Tools for a New Direction

building-logo

(NYtimes on this announcement, video of talks)

Let’s work together to save all human knowledge.  Today the Internet Archive is announcing a new beta site and new tools to encourage everyone to lend a hand.

Prototype Table Top Scribe for scanning books

Prototype Table Top Scribe for scanning books

We were founded in 1996 as an archive OF the Internet; we saved web pages and made them available through the Wayback Machine starting in 2001. In 2002 we became an archive ON the internet when we began digitizing and hosting movies, books, TV, music and software by working closely with libraries and online communities. Much of the work of building the current archive has been done by us and a relatively small number of selected partners.

Today marks a change in direction.

Listening Room

Listening Room

We are creating new tools to help every media-based community build their own collections on a long term platform that is available to the entire world for free. Collectors will be able to upload media, reference media from other collections, use tools to coordinate the activities of their community, and create a distinct Internet presence while also offering users the chance to explore diverse collections of other content.

In this future, communities and libraries will take the central role in building collections, leveraging the tools and storage of the Internet Archive.

Political campaign ads

Political campaign pilot interface

Still in its early development, the Internet Archive is looking for feedback and help in this new direction.  Shaping these tools will be a joint process with our library and community partners.

Introducing new tools today, with further developments to come:

    • Table-top book scanner that works with back-end Archive technology and staff to create beautiful online books
Beta preview of archive.org

Beta preview of archive.org

The Internet Archive needs your help to create and use these tools.   Your donations of time, money, digital and physical materials can help us Build Libraries Together.