Category Archives: Books Archive

A Red-Carpet Affair: Celebrating Public Domain Day 2025 in 1929 Hollywood Style

Lights, camera, preservation! On a star-studded evening at the Internet Archive, we rolled out the red carpet to honor the creative works from 1929 and the sound recordings from 1924 that entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to celebrate than with a glamorous, Oscar-inspired soirée?

Guests arrived in true 1920s fashion, riding in a vintage convertible before stepping onto the red carpet, where they were met by the spirited Raining Chainsaws street theater troupe, who transformed into a fleet of eager, old-time paparazzi—flashing cameras, barking questions, and adding a touch of whimsy and Hollywood magic to the night.

📸 Check out photos from the red carpet!

Inside the Internet Archive, attendees sipped on French 75s and Old-Fashioneds, classic cocktails that transported us back to the final, glittering moments of the Roaring Twenties. The theme of the night? 1929—the year of the very first Academy Awards—and we honored this cinematic milestone with an evening of film, history, and remixing of the past.

🎞 Lecture by George Evelyn on Disney’s The Skeleton Dance
Animation historian George Evelyn enlightened the audience with a viewing of The Skeleton Dance, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. With its pioneering use of synchronized sound and animation, the 1929 short was a perfect reminder of how creativity from the past continues to shape the present.

🎬 Public Domain Film Remix Contest Screening
What happens when today’s creators remix yesterday’s masterpieces? Our Public Domain Film Remix Contest showcased the most inventive reinterpretations of public domain classics, where old Hollywood met modern storytelling in unexpected and thrilling ways. View all the winners, honorable mentions and submissions from this year’s contest.

👀 Watch the livestream of the night’s festivities

As the evening came to a close, guests toasted to the future of open culture, celebrating the power of preservation, creativity, and the public domain. Thank you to everyone who joined us for this dazzling night of history, cinema, and community!

Virtual Public Domain Day Celebrates 1929 Creative Works & 1924 Sound Recordings

On January 22, hundreds of people from all over the world gathered together for Singin’ in the Public Domain, a virtual celebration of the works that moved into the public domain in 2025. The event was co-hosted by Internet Archive and Library Futures.

Watch:

Speakers include (in order of appearance):

  • Natalia Paruz (The Saw Lady), musician
  • Lila Bailey, Internet Archive
  • Jennie Rose Halperin, Internet Archive
  • Sean Dudley, Internet Archive
  • Jennifer Jenkins, Center for the Study of the Public Domain
  • Vivian Li, Innovator in Residence, Library of Congress
  • Tim Findlen (Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepherd Kings), musician
  • Kathleen DeLaurenti, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University’s Arthur Friedheim Music Library
  • Colin Hancock (The Joymakers), musician
  • Ayun Halliday, Necromancers of the Public Domain
  • Simon Close, WYNC & Public Song Project
  • Dorothy Berry, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
  • Theo Unkrich, Internet Archive

Public Domain Spotlight: Popeye

Over the last few years we have seen many new characters enter the public domain including Winnie-the-Pooh in 2022, Mickey Mouse in 2024, and now, Popeye in 2025! The character emerged from a comic strip called Thimble Theater, which was started in 1919 and originally centered around the characters Ham Gravy and Olive Oyl. Popeye made his first appearance in the series as a minor player in early 1929, and as his popularity grew, he later became the central focus of the comic.

Let’s take a look at who Popeye was as a character in 1929:

January 17, 1929

In his very first appearance, Popeye shows off his thorny side by retorting Castor Oyl’s question with a sly remark about being a cowboy. The strip also shows him in a traditional all white sailor get-up that does not reflect his later appearance.


February 14, 1929

Popeye wears a black shirt for the first time, which is more in line with his iconic appearance.


February 18, 1929

Popeye throws his first ever punch. This time against Ham Gravy, one of the main characters of the strip at this point. The title, “That Sailor’s No Gentleman”, is indicative of Popeye’s rough and tough demeanor that would come to define the character.


June 11, 1929

After being shot repeatedly nearly a month earlier, in May 1929, Popeye reemerges full of bullet holes to knock down a foe. His displays of super strength do not originate from spinach, but possibly from rubbing the head of the Whiffle Hen (as seen on May 16, 1929).


June 15, 1929

Olive Oyl displays her first inclinations of romantic interest toward Popeye stating she would like to give him a kiss. The two do not become romantically involved in 1929, but the seeds were planted early.


June 27, 1929

This strip sees Popeye leave until August. However, his departure is not even the main appeal of the strip as it instead focuses on Olive Oyl’s purchase of new clothing. This focus and Popeye’s long absence, he is gone for all of July, thus implies that he was not meant to be a long lasting character, but only around temporarily.


August 5, 1929

Following over a month-long absence, Popeye returns to help Castor Oyl determine if Olive’s new boyfriend is only there for her money. His return indicates his overwhelming popularity with the public that was soon to transpire into his status as unchallenged main character of the strip. The title of this strip too foreshadows this shift being titled: Popeye’s The Man.


August 27, 1929

Olive Oyl displays her first show of affection to Popeye with a kiss. Though this was a mistake as she believed Popeye to be someone else. Despite this, it is yet another early indicator of their soon to be romance.


October 12, 1929

Popeye and Castor Oyl set off to locate Castor’s newly purchased brass mine. Their duo pairing indicates Popeye’s increased status and stature within the strip as Castor was the undeniable main character of the strip up to this point. Popeye’s appearance here again followed a brief absence from the strip dating back to September 30, 1929.


October 22, 1929

Popeye and Castor discover that where the brass mine ought to be is instead a farmer. Popeye implores Castor to allow the farmer to stay on the land, thus showing off his tender heart. Notably this strip takes place just two days before Black Thursday, the start of the Wall Street crash of 1929.


November 4, 1929

This strip shows off a bit more of Popeye’s peculiar dialect and his penchant for curving authority. In the strip he asserts that he is only going to jail because Castor has implored him to.

The title of the panel, “That Jailer’s No Postage Stamp”, also appears to be a humorous play on odd dialects installing postage stamp in lieu of “sap”. In 1920s slang, sap referred to a foolish or gullible person. The title’s swapping of the two terms is reflective of Popeye’s own tendency to swap out words with similar meaning as a postage stamp and sap are both sticky.


November 7, 1929

Another display of Popeye’s superhuman strength as he rips the bars off the jail cell.


Throughout 1929, Popeye not only showcased his superhuman strength and distinctive wardrobe but also his unique dialect and a characteristic phrase, “blow me down.” These foundational elements of his character, present from his very inception, have now entered the public domain. As we continue to engage with and reinterpret Popeye in modern contexts, there are some complexities. 

Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, explains the following in regards to character copyrights in a post from 2025:

“First, under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works—that content remains freely available.

Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to their features that qualify for protection. It is not enough for the new material to be different. The features must be “original, creative expression,” meaning that they were independently created (as opposed to copied from somewhere else) and possess at least a modicum of creativity. Mere “ideas” such as generic character traits are not copyrightable. Nor are “merely trivial” or “minuscule” variations added to the original characters. In addition, using commonplace elements that have become standard or indispensable (copyright law calls these “scènes à faire”) is not infringement.”

Jenkins, Jennifer, and James Boyle. “Public Domain Day 2025.” Duke University School of Law, December 2024. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/.


As beloved characters enter the public domain, modern creators can give them a new gloss, recontextualizing them for a new audience. One memorable example is a 2023 horror movie starring a much darker vision of Winnie the Pooh: “Blood and Honey.” We look forward to seeing what modern reinterpretations of Popeye arise, now that his fundamental character traits belong to everyone as part of the public domain.

Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

A selection of cassette tapes from the “Ham Radio & More” radio show digitized by DLARC.

Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and radio waves, people have been experimenting with these technologies and advancing the state of the art. As a result, the world has moved from wired telegraphy to tube radios to telephones—fast forward a century—to GPS and high-speed digital communication devices that fit in your pocket.

Advances made by amateur radio experimenters have propelled the work of NASA, satellites, television, the internet, and every communications company in existence today. People fiddling with radios have pushed forward technological advances the world around, time and time again.

And yet, the people making these efforts, doing these feats, aren’t always the best at documenting and preserving their work for the future. That’s where Internet Archive comes in.

I’m the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive, and my job is to find and preserve this rich history of radio and communications. DLARC collects resources related to amateur radio, satellite communications, television, shortwave radio, pirate radio, experimental communications, and related communications.

In the two years since the project launched, DLARC has preserved thousands of magazines and journals, manuals, product catalogs, radio programs, and conference proceedings. These materials were scattered worldwide, often inaccessible and in obsolete formats. We’ve digitized material that was on paper, cassette tape, reel-to-reel tape, CD-ROMs, DVDs. We’ve digitized video from 16mm film, VHS, U-Matic, Betacam and even more obscure video formats.

We’ve built a collection of more than 140,000 items and made them available to the world. Researchers, academics, and hobbyists use the library to learn from the rich history of this 100-year-old hobby.

Learn more about DLARC

One reason this preservation is necessary is that the people creating history don’t always realize at the time that they’re creating history. In 1977, the creators of Amateur Radio Newsline—a weekly audio news bulletin—probably didn’t realize that their project would still be going on in 2024, 47 years later. And for all of their amazing work, if they had realized they were documenting history, they might have made more effort to save those recordings: the first 20 years of their work are missing. (DLARC has found some recordings from 1996, then most of them since 2012.)

Sometimes creators do recognize the importance of their effort. For more than six years, Len Winkler hosted Ham Radio & More, a radio show about amateur radio. Winker recorded every episode on cassette tape and managed to digitize many of the shows himself. However, the process of digitizing hundreds of episodes is tedious and he wasn’t able to complete it. With his approval, DLARC stepped in to finish the job. They’re all online now, more than 300 episodes including interviews with many notable names in the radio community.

There have been other huge successes: the entire 43-year run of 73 Magazine is digitized and online thanks to the publisher, Wayne Green, who donated the collection to Internet Archive before his death. Most issues of The W5YI Report, a ham radio newsletter that was published for 25 years, are online as well.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Attempting to preserve material years, or sometimes decades, after the fact makes systematic preservation nearly impossible. For every success story of content saved and archived, there is a heartbreaking story of loss. When amateur radio enthusiasts die, their media collections are often disposed of by survivors who don’t have any connection to amateur radio. File cabinets and bookcases full of (sometimes irreplaceable) materials are emptied into recycle bins.

Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.

Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.

So we float where the radio waves take us, trying to preserve the past as much as possible, while encouraging today’s content creators to consider how to make their material accessible to future generations.

About the author

Kay Savetz is curator of Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. DLARC is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact kay@archive.org.

Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025

Image credit: Montage of materials moving into the public domain in 2025. Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways:

  • Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 22 – both virtual and in-person.
  • Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest.
  • Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2025, below.

On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain! The passage of these works into the public domain celebrates our shared cultural heritage. The ability to breathe new life into long forgotten works, remix the most popular and enduring works of the time, and to better circulate the oddities we find in thrift stores, attics, and on random pockets of the internet are now freely available for us all.

While not at the same blockbuster level as 2024 with Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain, works from 1929 still inhabit strong cultural significance today. The works of 1929 continue to capture the Lost Generation’s voice, the rise of sound film, and the emerging modern moment of the 1920s. 

Musical Compositions

Show tunes and Jazz dominated the year with many standards that we remember today first being published. While best known for the 1952 film of the same name, Singin’ in the Rain was first published in 1929 and serves as the inspiration for our remix contest this year. George Gershwin also officially published (and copyrighted) his suite An American in Paris following a premiere in late 1928.

Below is sheet music for some popular compositions of the time.

Literature

Reflections on World War I continued with A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. William Faulkner published his modernist novel The Sound and the Fury. A. A. Milne followed up 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner by adapting The Wind in the Willows into the play Toad of Toad Hall. Detective fiction thrived in 1929, with The Maltese Falcon serialized in Black Mask, Agatha Christie captivating readers with The Seven Dials Mystery, and the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, making its debut. Explore our 1929 periodicals to find more hidden detective gems.

While not a towering work of literature, the first set of comic strips featuring Popeye also are joining the public domain. Popeye first made an appearance in Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Initially just a side character for an adventure arc featuring gambling and sailing, Popeye rose quickly to fame. By February 4, 1931 the Thimble Theatre would feature a subtitle, Starring Popeye, before being renamed just Popeye later on.

Below is a further selection of works from the year:

Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1929.

Films

Last year Mickey Mouse made a splash with Steamboat Willie cruising into the public domain. This year TWELVE more Mickey shorts join to flesh out the notable events of Mickey’s young career. He speaks his first words in The Karnival Kid, he wears gloves for the first time in The Opry House, and Ub Iwerks leaves the studio at year’s end with Wild Waves. Disney animation also kickstarted their Silly Symphonies series with the haunting tales The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.

In 1929, if your film wanted to have any attention it needed sound. Musical films were everywhere with The Broadway Melody winning the second ever Best Picture award at the Oscars, The Hollywood Revue introducing the world to “Singin’ in the Rain”, and the Marx Brothers making their big screen debut with The Cocoanuts.

Below is a list of more significant films from the year:

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 17, 2025, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

Additional resources

In honor of Public Domain Day, this post is published with a CC0 Waiver dedicating it to the public domain.

Celebrate the Public Domain with the Internet Archive

On January 1, 2025, creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US.

1929 marked the last gasp of the roaring 20s and ushered in the Great Depression, a major economic crisis that would span the next 12 years. One thing we can see nearly a century later is that, in good times and bad, human creativity, knowledge, and culture persist. That year, Virginia Woolfe published her groundbreaking essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” advocating for female freedom of expression. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York City, featuring the works of Van Gough, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Major movie studios put out not one, but two musicals starring all Black casts: “Halleluja” and “Hearts of Dixie.” Disney continued the Mickey Mouse trend with a dozen new animated shorts. And of course famous songs like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Singin’ in the Rain” topped the charts.

Celebrate the public domain with us:

1. Creators: Enter the Public Domain Film Remix Contest

We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate the public domain by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive! Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500. Contest details.

2. Virtual Celebration: January 22nd @ 10am PT

Join us on January 22 to get “that glorious feeling” of singin’ in the public domain! We’ll have an amazing virtual lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to celebrate this new class of works being free for everyone to enjoy. Register now!

3. In-Person Celebration: January 22nd @ 6pm PT

Please join us at our headquarters in San Francisco for a Celebration of the Public Domain! This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. Put on your finest attire and get ready for an award-worthy evening. Register now!

4. Explore the public domain

Check out our recent post for links to the newly opened public domain resources at the Internet Archive.

Additional resources

  • Learn more about what’s moving into the public domain in 2025 from Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
  • Public Domain Review has a festive countdown to 2025.
  • Interested in what’s happening with the public domain in Europe? Communia is hosting a one-day event on January 9 in Brussels.

Vanishing Culture: Type Ephemera—Lessons in Endearment

The following guest post from writer and book artist Eve Scarborough is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

What is type ephemera and why does it need to be preserved? 

Type ephemera, specifically the kind collected by Letterform Archive, refers to paper goods used to advertise or display typefaces for purchase. Often produced by foundries, type ephemera takes many structural forms and examples including—

  • a paper folio containing multiple examples of types in use, such as mock restaurant menus, travel pamphlets, concert programs and business cards. (below)
  • a saddle stitched book with one or more typefaces, referred to as a type specimen, including examples of the upper and lowercase alphabet or shown alongside sample sentences. (below)
  • a small booklet printed in black, red and green ink, illustrating the foundry’s seasonal collection of holiday borders and ornaments. (below)

From an archival perspective, type ephemera is important to preserve because it captures a time when past printing technologies and methods of bookbinding were abundant. While there are multiple organizations, museums and libraries dedicated to preserving fine press and book arts, not all are accessible to everyone, and only a handful focus specifically on instruction. Thus, it is urgent for type ephemera to be digitized and remain widely available to the public, especially as interest in learning book arts and letterpress printing continues to grow. Ephemera is unique in that it challenges notions of value and permanence, two ideas that dominate special collections and archives. Its temporal nature as both everyday and non-archival objects invites us to consider, and in some cases witness, how pieces of ephemera were repurposed and transformed by their makers and guardians. 

It is difficult to find and name the workers who cast, set, printed, and bound the specimens that eventually made their way to the archive. At the time I was cataloging this collection, the metadata fields we used included columns to note typeface designers, foundry names, and potential partner distributors. There was also a column to include the object worktype; “metal type” appears frequently throughout the spreadsheet. As I worked, I noticed that many of the specimens were produced with acidic paper,* intended for immediate distribution to print shops and customers.

Sometimes I would come across a pamphlet or binding that expanded unexpectedly, or made use of additional space. I began making note of the type of structure or binding for each specimen in the object description field: 

“Booklet, 12 pages. Saddle stitched binding. Light blue cover. Single color printing. Black ink on white paper.” 

Including the names of these structures allowed me to begin filling the gaps in knowledge. By including them, I hoped that their presence would spark curiosity among viewers and provide insight to those researching book structures. Through writing and editing metadata, I could contribute to the dialogue between the object and its makers, and lend what I knew as a book artist and archival worker to future researchers and visitors. 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Many of the objects I have cataloged during my time with this collection bear signs of use: paragraphs of type circled in ballpoint pen or cut out entirely, lead-smudged fingerprints likely left by typesetters, signatures coming undone from their text blocks. These details are the most precious to me. They are instances in which an object left an impression on its reader, and in turn, its readers left a tangible impression on the object. By making note of these imperfections in the metadata, I hope to preserve the labor and relational histories of the objects, and in a way, center the people who made them. 92 years ago, typography scholar Beatrice Warde argued that good printing should aim to be almost invisible, likening the rare success to a crystal goblet filled with wine (Warde 11, 13). Imperfect, dog-eared, oxidizing type specimens upend this notion, instead placing emphasis on construction and transformation rather than content. The text included in type ephemera is not meant to convey a message or narrative; rather, it is present to center and sell the type. As letterpresses are no longer the primary means of print production, new styles of letterpress printing have become popular—one example being the “bite” or heavy impression of type into paper—revealing first and foremost, the hand of the printer. 

As an archivist, ephemera is endearing to me because it is a form of printed matter that is not meant to endure. Cataloging ephemera transformed the way I thought about time, decay, and value. Before entering the Archive, I favored examples of pristine letterpress printing and craft. Presently, I have grown fond of and admire the work that reminds us of our own temporality. Ephemera still holds a place in our lives, though its proliferation is diminishing as we move toward a more environmentally conscious world. Digital spaces have overwhelmingly become our personal platforms for documentation, record-keeping and more. Perhaps we live in a city that still issues paper bus tickets, or write our grocery lists on square sticky notes, or cram the free paper maps into our backpacks at the visitor center before a hike. Perhaps not. Think of the lifetimes that these objects live, crumpled into our pockets, or refused at cash registers and kiosks, waiting for their turn to be useful. How might we make meaning of, archive, or begin to transform the ephemera in our lives? What can we learn from historic type ephemera, not just as records of printmaking techniques or bound structures, but as anachronisms of the present? 

* Acidic paper refers to paper manufactured with acids, a method that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century. The long cellulose chains in paper degrade slowly over time due to prolonged exposure to air, but the presence of acids catalyzes the process significantly. The presence of acid impacts the paper’s longevity, making it brittle and more susceptible to tearing.

Works Cited:

Warde, Beatrice. “The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible.” The Sylvan Press, 1955. Web accessed 15 September 2024. 

About the author

Eve Scarborough is a Vietnamese-American writer and book artist. Her work explores the tension between structure and content, memory and language loss, and information decay as it relates to archives. Her current practice is grounded in critical theory and craft techniques including bookmaking, letterpress printing, and hand papermaking. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Mills College with a minor in Book Art. Presently, she digitizes ephemera, posters, process work, and more at Letterform Archive in San Francisco.

Revisit a Year of Thought-Provoking Book Talks with Internet Archive and Authors Alliance

In 2024, the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance brought together an array of authors, scholars and thought leaders to explore critical issues at the intersection of technology, culture and information science. From the labor implications of artificial intelligence in Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way to the evolving role of fair use in Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s landmark publication, Reclaiming Fair Use, these conversations covered topics shaping our information-enabled future. Here are highlights from the year’s events, offering session recordings for anyone eager to revisit—or discover for the first time—the compelling ideas shared by these influential voices.


February 29: Wrong Way

Author Joanne McNeil in conversation with author Sarah Jaffe.

McNeil & Jaffe discuss the labor implications of artificial intelligence for our first book talk about a work of fiction.

For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/wrong-way 


March 27: Replay

Author and game designer Jordan Mechner in conversation with historian Chris Kohler.

Jordan Mechner (creator of “Prince of Persia”) shares his story as a pioneer in the fast-growing video game industry from the 1980s to today, and how his family’s back story as refugees from war-torn Europe led to his own multifaceted 4-decade creative career. Interweaving of past and present, family transmission, exile and renewal are at the heart of his award-winning graphic novel “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.”

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/replay-jordan-mechner 


April 3: Unlocking the Digital Age

Authors Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti in conversation with musician and educator Kyoko Kitamura, facilitated by music librarian Matthew Vest.

Based on coursework developed at the Peabody Conservatory, Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing by Andrea I. Copland and Kathleen DeLaurenti serves as a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era. This guide bridges the gap between creative practice and scholarly research, empowering musicians to confidently share and protect their work as they expand their performing lives beyond the concert stage as citizen artists. It offers a plain language resource that helps early career musicians see where creative practice and creative research intersect and how to traverse information systems to share their work. As professional musicians and researchers, the authors’ experiences on stage and in academia makes this guide an indispensable tool for musicians aiming to thrive in the digital landscape. 

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/unlocking-the-digital-age 


April 18: Secret Life of Data 

Authors Aram Sinnreich & Jesse Gilbert in conversation with tech scholar Laura Denardis.

In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/the-secret-life-of-data 


May 9: Big Fiction 

Author Dan Sinykin in conversation with humanities scholar Ted Underwood.

Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/big-fiction 


August 22: Governable Spaces 

Author Nathan Schneider in conversation with author Lilly Irani.

When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/governable-spaces 


September 24: Reclaiming Fair Use 

Authors & copyright scholars Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi in conversation with Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance.

In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when a permissions i proves undottable. Analyzing the dampening effect that copyright law can have on scholarship and creativity, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi urge us to embrace in response a principle embedded in copyright law itself—fair use.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/reclaiming-fair-use 


October 10: Attack from Within

Author Barbara McQuade in conversation with Sarah Lamdan of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It’s endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/attack-from-within 


November 19: The Line 

Author James Boyle in conversation with Kate Darling of the MIT Media Lab.

Chatbots like ChatGPT have challenged human exceptionalism: we are no longer the only beings capable of generating language and ideas fluently. But is ChatGPT conscious? Or is it merely engaging in sophisticated mimicry? And what happens in the future if the claims to consciousness are more credible? In The Line, James Boyle explores what these changes might do to our concept of personhood, to “the line” we believe separates our species from the rest of the world, but also separates “persons” with legal rights from objects.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/the-line-ai-and-the-future-of-personhood 


December 3: Vanishing Culture

Authors Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland and Katie Livingston in a roundtable discussion.

In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.

Session recording: https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-book-talk

End of Hachette v. Internet Archive

While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests. 

We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.

Congratulations to Nick Norman for Award Recognizing Digitization Work

Nick Norman

The Internet Archive’s Nick Norman has won a 2024 Anthem Community Voice Award in the category for Best Use of Technology. The Anthem Awards honor mission-driven individuals, companies and organizations worldwide, inspiring global change.

Read Norman’s submission essay, Scanning the Past to Empower the Future.” Learn more about the award.

Norman began volunteering with Internet Archive’s Open Library in 2019, where the Tennessee native took on a variety of responsibilities, including the communications lead in Open Library’s Fellowship program. Now he is a digital technician, assisting on a variety of digitization projects. He has scanned documents from the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Library, the Graduate Theological Union and others.

Making vital documents available to the public is a privilege, he said, and provides important clues about the past that can inform future decisions.

“It’s like breadcrumbs,” Norman said of the knowledge he helps share with users. “Each piece we scan is a breadcrumb, a fragment of a story. People can pick them up, follow the trail, and discover something meaningful — and that’s what I want to do: help people pick them up and see where they lead.”

Norman, whose parents are both librarians, said he was drawn to the work because of his interest in learning and commitment to accessibility of knowledge for all.

“I think about all the materials out there that we get to touch through digitization,” Norman said. “The ability to make significant change or have a profound impact is right at our fingertips.”

Norman considers the documents he has digitized through the course of his work. Some of the materials were given out at meetings or in boardrooms and filed away for safekeeping in places out of reach. He says digitization cracks the knowledge in these materials open again and ushers in new potential.  

“It simply takes pulling up a chair at the computer, looking at [the materials] and seeing how I can harness or leverage this to fill in gaps of information that people didn’t even know was out there,” Norman said. “We’re doing something that can make the world a better place.”

Norman hopes the award shines a spotlight on the Internet Archive’s mission to make knowledge accessible to all, adding: “My goal is to use my expertise in community engagement and building partnerships to draw attention to meaningful work, such as what we’re doing here.”