Category Archives: Books Archive

Vanishing Culture: Type Ephemera—Lessons in Endearment

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

Learning from Cyberattacks

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The Wayback Machine, Archive.org, Archive-it.org, and OpenLibrary.org came up in stages over the week after cyberattacks with some of the contributor features coming up over the last couple of weeks.  A few to go.  Much of the development during this time has been focused on securing the services so they can still run while attacks continue.  

The Internet Archive is adapting to a more hostile world, where DDOS attacks are recurring periodically (such as yesterday and today), and more severe attacks might happen. Our response has been to harden our services and learn from friends. This note is to share some high level findings, without being so detailed as to help those that are still attacking archive.org.

By tightening firewall technologies, we have changed how data flows through our systems to improve monitoring and control. The downside is these upgrades have forced changes to software, some of it quite old. 

The bright side is this is forcing upgrades that we have long planned or hoped for.  We are greatly helped by the free and open source community’s improving tools that can be used by large corporations as well as non-profit libraries because they are freely available.

Also, some commercial companies have offered assistance that would generally be prohibitively expensive.  We are grateful for the support.

Where the Internet Archive has always focused on building collections and preserving them, we have been starkly reminded how important reliable access is to researchers, journalists, and readers. This is leading us to install technical defenses and increase staff to improve service availability.

Libraries in general, and the Internet Archive in specific, have been under attack for many years now.  For us it started with the book publishers suing (about lending books), and now the recording industry (about 78rpm records), which is a drain on our staff and financial resources. Now recurring DDOS attacks distract us from the goals of preservation and access to our digital heritage.

We don’t know why these attacks have started recently and if they are coordinated, but we are building defenses.

We are grateful for the support from our patrons, through social media, through donations, and through offers of help, which frankly, makes it worthwhile to keep building a library for all of us.

– Brewster Kahle

Vanishing Culture: Archiving Community Care Work Online

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The following guest post from researcher Amanda Gray Rendón 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.

When asked to consider women’s care labor, people likely think about feminized gender roles within “the domestic sphere” where labor has historically been invisible and undervalued. For women of color, the lines between public and private have often been blurred, as evidenced by the family photo of my great-grandmother picking beets in a field while caring for my two-year-old grandmother. Sixty years later the roles would reverse and my grandmother would serve as the primary caregiver for her mother with Alzheimer’s dementia. I could not begin to quantify in dollars the thirteen years of 24/7 care she provided our family.

In U.S. culture, women have historically been thought of as “natural” caregivers or predisposed to caring for others, so little to no concern has been given to assigning monetary value to the labor that women are expected to perform.

This begs the question: how can we adequately archive a history that is designed to be hidden and undervalued precisely because of how invaluable it is to our social, cultural, and economic fabric? 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Women’s care work—both paid and unpaid—serves as the foundation on which the world’s postindustrial economies have functioned. Working mothers and caregivers often participate in what scholars refer to as the “double-day,” or the “double shift.” This is when (predominantly) women have an income-earning day job followed by unpaid caregiving labor they provide their families when they get home in the evening after “work.” Some have argued women’s care work has expanded into a triple shift whereby women have taken on more caregiving roles within their communities, adding significantly to gendered burdens of care.

The invisible, and at times isolating, nature of care work contributes to the precarity of archiving women’s care labor history. To preserve this aspect of our cultural history, it’s vital to engage with those performing care work, as well as to understand the different ways that community care work is performed. Documenting caregiver culture on social media allows us to identify the contributions that caregivers and care communities make, along with the barriers they face.

No one has helped me to understand this more than Cynthia “Cindy Ann” Espinoza. Cindy Ann and I met when we both attended Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio. She graciously offered to participate in my research when I spoke at a community education session on Alzheimer’s disease that the church sponsored in collaboration with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. We became Facebook friends shortly thereafter and I observed firsthand the virtual care work in which Cindy Ann participated, as well as the archive she had created of the “real world” care she provided her mother who passed from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia several years earlier.

On January 17, 2017, about a week before PBS aired the documentary Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts, Cindy Ann posted a video excerpt from the film to her wall on Facebook. The three-minute video, with 4.4 million views and over 5,000 comments, was originally posted to Facebook by Next Avenue, a PBS digital publication dedicated to issues facing individuals over 50 years old in the United States. The documentary follows Daisy Duarte, a Latina in Minneapolis, as she cares for her mother, Sonja, who is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia.

Next Avenue’s original post reads, “Millions of Americans will be able to relate to this story.” Cindy Ann identified herself as one of those millions of Americans almost five years after her mother’s passing from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia. Her post included the message, “I can relate to this woman in this story. Its the hardest thing to see ur parent dealing with Alzheimer”s ..but i did it for 9 yrs caring for my Mom i have no regrets. I would do it all again even if she didn’t remember who i was. I love & miss you dearly Mommy..” Cindy Ann watched Daisy wash her mother’s clothes, brush her teeth, apply her makeup, do her hair, show her how to hold a spoon, sit her in a recliner to watch television—all while exclusively speaking Spanish. The invisible care work Cindy Ann provided her mother nearly a decade before was publicly visible for the world to see.

I also related to the family portrayed in the film. As I viewed the video, I was reminded of my own experience helping my grandmother care for my great-grandmother when the three of us lived together in San Antonio. This personal connection prompted me to comment with a note of: “thanks for sharing.” I appreciated the connection Cindy Ann created in that moment.

Several of her other Facebook friends left comments in response to her post. There was one from an employee at a local adult daycare facility: “Yup and ur mama was a beautiful blessing for us at seniors 2000! I loved her so much <3;” and another from a current caregiver, “Aww I’m doing it right now. My heart aches every time I leave my mom. I pray for her mind to heal. It’s one of the ugliest diseases ever encountered! I pray they find a cure very soon.” Others were comments of support, such as: “Super hard, girl.” and “Amen.” 

The commenters were all women who either acknowledged Cindy Ann’s experience as their own or validated it with words of empathy and support. That winter morning, Cindy Ann’s public Facebook page was a place where women came together to share a commonality of experience in an online space.  The care community helped to make visible their friend’s caregiving labor, as well as their own—in effect becoming a part of care labor history.

Though the internet seems to be “forever”, the ephemeral nature of certain online spaces—such as social media pages and posts that can be deleted or websites that are no longer supported—necessitates an archival space such as the Internet Archive, which on May 9, 2017 captured the full-length documentary Cindy Ann posted about. Nowhere else on the internet can I access this film without a subscription, rental, or purchase. As a researcher, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable archival research tool that I rely on to provide accurate records of historical online spaces I can no longer access. However, we must find a way to better preserve social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and others where caregivers post and provide community care. The sheer volume of pages and posts may have made this a challenging task previously, but with new AI language learning models, we can begin to conceive of ways to more pointedly target and capture the rich history of online care communities and women’s virtual care work.

To preserve a more complete and inclusive history of women’s caregiving labor, digital archivists must seek out the spaces where women are performing the work. The Internet Archive serves as a record that women’s care communities exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist. Documenting the challenges women caregivers face, the support they need, and their shared spaces of communal experience helps to create a more complete historical record of their cultural impact for future generations.

About the author

Amanda Gray Rendón is a community-based researcher, writer, oral historian, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Narrative Medicine and Digital Health Humanities at Wheaton College. She received her PhD in American Studies with concentrations in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her work in academia, Gray Rendón was a project manager in implementation services for a medical software company followed by several years in case management for a mediation and arbitration firm in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of fellowships and appointments at several institutions, including the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Earlham College, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Saint Louis University. Her scholarship centers the lived experiences of Latina professional and family caregivers. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.

Library Leaders Forum: Annual Gathering Highlights a ‘Critical Moment for Libraries’

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In the wake of a rapid-fire cyberattack on the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle reassured participants at the 2024 Library Leaders Forum that the organization’s data is safe, and employees are working around the clock to fully restore services.  

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“It’s been a little challenging,” said Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian on being hit on October 8 with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach towards rebuilding and strengthening our defenses. Our priority is to ensure that the Internet Archive is stronger and more secure.”

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is up and running, Kahle told those at the October 17 virtual forum. Other services are progressively coming back online—although some are in a read-only mode for now.

The Internet Archive is not alone in being the target of a malicious cyberattack: The British Library and Calgary Public Library have also been victims, said Chris Freeland, moderator of the forum and director of library services.

“This is a critical moment for libraries, including our own. As a library system, together, we are facing unprecedented challenges with book bans, defunding, and now cyberattacks,” Freeland said.

Still, the Internet Archive staff and community partners remain focused on digital preservation and providing access to needed materials that serve the public interest.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.

Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.

“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”

The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.

The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”

Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.

“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”

The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.

The Archive posted an open letter to publishers in the lawsuit to restore access to the books that have been removed from the digital library. To date, more than 120,000 people have signed, adding heartfelt messages about what the impact of the loss has meant.

“We own these books,” Freeland said. “We just want to let readers read.”

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

To build public awareness and support on these issues, Jennie Rose Halperin is developing a coalition to lobby the U.S. Congress for a commemorative National Public Domain Day. She invited interested parties to join in the effort through Library Futures, the organization where she serves as executive director.

Halperin is also active in pushing for a statement of principles on library ownership of digital books. 

Some independent publishers are selling ebooks directly to libraries through BRIET, a new project of the Brick House Cooperative, David Moore, a writer and technologist, said at the forum.

Halperin is working alongside Charlie Barlow, executive director of the Boston Library Consortium, on Project ReShare to develop an open, standards-based, community-owned set of tools for digital lending.

Barlow has long been an advocate of controlled digital lending through BLC, and just released a report outlining CDL workflows and technologies for responsible sharing, he said at the forum. He also is working on a new consortium toolkit for CDL implementation. The report and resources can be downloaded at www.blc.org/cdl. 

Also at this year’s LLF, Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance, encouraged authors to review the organization’s free legal resource guides on copyright and fair use so they see their work more widely disseminated.

Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-17

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[Washinton Post piece]

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. 

The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications.  Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time. 

We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure.

As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks—for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend.

For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing support.

Internet Archive to Receive 400,000 Dissertations from Leiden University

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From https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/news/2024/10/he-internet-archive-takes-over-foreign-dissertations-from-ubl

Last month, the UBL announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. We are happy to report now that The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection.

The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. As Leiden University Libraries has limited space for growth in its stacks, it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions. The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy. The Internet Archive will now take over this collection from the UBL, and will take care of its future preservation and access. The UBL is pleased that The Internet Archive is able to give this collection of foreign dissertations a second life.

Vanishing Culture: Keeping the Receipts

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The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

On August 13, 1961, the Sunday edition of The Honolulu Advertiser published its official Health Bureau Statistics (“Births, Marriages, Deaths”); on page B-6, in the leftmost column—just below the ads for luau supplies and Carnation Evaporated Milk—the twenty-second of twenty-five birth notices announced that on August 4, Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway had given birth to a son. The Honolulu State Library subsequently copied that page, along with the rest of the newspaper, onto microfilm, as a routine addition to its archive. Decades later, as Donald Trump and his fellow “birthers” tried to deceive the public about the birthplace of the 44th president, researchers were able to read the item in its original, verified context, preserved on its slip of plastic film.

A dramatic fate like that one awaits very few reels of microfilm, but the story underscores the crucial importance of authentication, and of archiving. Verifying and making sense of records—books, photos, government documents, magazines, newspapers, films, academic papers—is a never-ending task undertaken not only by historians but also by researchers, journalists, and students in every branch of learning: in the sciences, in medicine, in literature and philosophy and sociology. This is scholarship—the job of sieving over and over through the past, to research the truth of it, to reflect on and comprehend it, in the hope of providing people with useful observations, ideas, and help. That’s why we need records as detailed and accurate as we can make them; that’s the ultimate value of librarianship and archival work.

When people foolishly—and even dangerously—imagine that the past won’t matter to the future, the chance to preserve history evaporates. We live in times of increasing book bans and censorship and fast-deteriorating online archives. Some writers are even willing to deny the lasting value of their own work, shrugging off its place in a unique cultural moment. In July, when the archive of MTV News was summarily vaporized, contributor Kat Rosenfield wrote dismissively of her own work there:

So much of what we—what I—produced was utterly frivolous and intentionally disposable, in a way that certain types of journalism have always been. The listicles and clickbait of early aughts culture may differ in many ways from the penny press tabloids of the 1800s, but in this, they are the same: They are meant to be thrown away.

It’s a shocking thing, to hear a journalist say that the writing of the 19th-century penny press was “meant to be thrown away.” The rise of the penny press represents a key moment in the democratization of media; Benjamin Henry Day, founder of the first such newspaper in the U.S., The New York Sun (“It Shines For All”), is a towering figure in the history of journalism. (His son, Benjamin Henry Day Jr., invented Ben-Day dots!)

Day offered nonpartisan newspapers at a cheap price to a mass working-class audience—a fascinating mix of hard-hitting news, sensationalistic crime reports, and plain whoppers. The Sun ran a deranged report of winged people living on the moon, and it also broke the story of the Crédit Mobilier/Union Pacific corruption scandal in 1872, which brought down a whole herd of Republican congressmen, plus then-Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Day’s rivals, James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley, founders of The Herald and The New York Tribune, respectively, were no less momentous figures in the history of news media. Their sociological, cultural and political impact reverberates still: Bennett’s racist, segregationist views were hot issues in a New York Times story published just a few years ago, and a kaleidoscopically weird July op-ed in the Idaho State Journal called vice presidential candidate JD Vance “A Horace Greeley for Our Century,” despite the fact that Vance is a far-right reactionary conservative, in sharp contrast to Horace Greeley, who held openly socialist, feminist, egalitarian views. 

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Pace Rosenfield, we can count ourselves fortunate that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved nearly half a million articles at MTV News; because of the Wayback Machine, future readers will have access to primary source materials on Peter Gabriel’s social activism, MTV News’s Peabody Award-winning “Choose or Lose” voter information campaign, early coverage of the allegations against pop icon Michael Jackson—and all the details and facts that will be available to provide crucial background and verification for stories we can’t yet imagine.

What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.”

Maria Bustillos, journalist and editor

The MTV News archive joins the archives of Gawker, the LA Weekly, and many other shuttered digital-native publications that would have disappeared entirely from the internet but for the Wayback Machine. Many leading journalists have greeted the Wayback Machine’s archival efforts with relief, and not only because it means preserving access to their own clips. They want all the receipts to be kept.

Tommy Craggs, a former executive editor at Gawker, expressed this idea back in 2018: “There should be a record of your fuck-ups and your triumphs, too.” He viewed Gawker’s archive as a valuable “record of how life was lived and covered on the internet for an era. Taking that away [would be] leaving a huge hole in our understanding.”

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What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.” The records we are keeping now—filled as they are with contradictions, uncertainties and errors—are all that tomorrow can inherit from today. Each teeming, incoherent moment succeeds the last, Now upon Now, wave upon wave of recordings and photographs, testimonials and accounts—true, false, and everything in between—gathered together by librarians and archivists and hurled forward like a Hail Mary pass into the future. 

In other words, nothing is “meant to be thrown away.” Nothing. People may someday want to look into what happened in any part of the world, among any of its people, at any time; and every researcher, reader, and writer will have their own ideas, ideas that we might find incomprehensible now, about what’s worth keeping.

About the author

Maria Bustillos is an editor and journalist in favor of equality, press freedom, libraries, archives, beauty, and fun.