Category Archives: Past Event

DWeb and Digital Rights: A Report Back from RightsCon in Taipei

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Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton, in front of the RightsCon25 sign

In late February, members of the DWeb Core Team and the DWeb community were in Taipei to attend the 13th edition of RightsCon, the largest global summit on human rights in the digital age. Namely, we were there to connect with the digital rights community. We wanted to participate in an event where thousands of people travel from around the world to discuss the current and future state of the internet, and to meet others who were involved in building decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer network technologies.

Thus we took the opportunity to organize activities before and during the conference: a local networking workshop co-organized with g0v, sessions on both DWeb organizing and how fiction can better depict surveillance technologies, a DWeb dinner, as well as a final day of tabling in the halls of the venue.

DWeb x g0v Local Network Workshop 

Michael Suantak, Cheng of g0v, and mai standing in front of National Taipei University of Technology where the community network workshop took place

We partnered with g0v, the leading decentralized civic technology community in Taiwan, to co-organize an event focused on local community networks at the National Taipei University of Technology. When we met with them several months ago, g0v leaders told us that they wanted to connect with those building and stewarding community networks. Such networks are controlled directly by communities, especially in places where internet access is non-existent or undermined, in order to maintain local network services and ensure internet connections are available or affordable. In Taiwan, these types of decentralized network infrastructures are a potential lifeline, as internet shutdowns in the country remain an ever-present threat.

DWeb standing banner in front of the classroom where the workshop took place

Our event, “Building Resilient Connections: A Hands-on Local Network Workshop” dove into the core concepts of community networks, their technical setups, and the ways they’re making a difference in under-served communities worldwide.

We had a great turnout: attended by more than 35 people. Since we had a survey built into our registration form, we knew what topics the participants were interested in learning about and tailored the workshop to them. These included community networks’ key challenges and opportunities, technical overview and tools, and issues surrounding their ethics, privacy and security. 

Cheng introducing g0v at the community network workshop

Notably, we had community network leaders from Myanmar, Taiwan, and Indonesia present case studies on their community networks, from the technologies they use to the ways they govern and manage the networks. We were lucky to be able to bring Michael Suantak to lead the presentations and the workshop on locally-hosted services. He was a 2024 DWeb Fellow, but for visa reasons he was not able to attend DWeb Camp in person, so we were happy to learn from him in person! 

Michael Suantak giving a presentation on local community networks

Sean of Mesh TWC also gave a presentation and workshop, as well as Gustaff H. Iskandar of Common Room who joined us from Indonesia. The sessions were not recorded, but you can view their notes and slides below (note: these are Google docs and Google slides).

Presentation by Michael Suantak

Presentation by Gustaff H. Iskandar (Common Room)

Presentation by Sean (Mesh TWC)

Slide from a presentation by Gustaff of Common Room on community networks

We ended with a few hands-on activities with Meshtastic LoRa devices and local-first services, as well as a discussion on the role of community networks in digital literacy and empowerment.

Group photo of the community networks workshop who stayed until the end!

Attending RightsCon 2025

RightsCon brings over 3,000 people from all corners of the globe to discuss the most pressing concerns facing people’s digital rights today. At a sprawling convention center in Taipei, hundreds of sessions took place across the last week of February, on issues related to free expression, privacy, and innovation and creativity online — specifically surrounding organizing tactics, policy advocacy, and sustaining movements in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide. There was also notable interest in decentralized web solutions to these crises, with sessions led by DWeb Camp attendees, the Social Web Foundation, Equalitie, Project Liberty, Open Future, WITNESS, Open Archive, and Creative Commons.

RightsCon25 Opening Ceremony

Round Table DWeb Workshop

We led a workshop discussion on strategies for decentralized, transnational organizing. Approximately 25 people attended and came to learn about the DWeb community. We shared our approach to building trust and solidarity between projects and individuals working to create a decentralized web that is usable, secure, and people-centric, all in spite of the exploitative and profit-driven status quo of the Internet. We spent the hour strategizing effective tactics for transnational organizing. Namely, how to use in-person and online gatherings to organize, share resources, and build enduring connections to strengthen our efforts.

Stop Surveillance Copaganda Workshops

Lia Holland of Fight for the Future and I co-facilitated three workshops on the Stop Surveillance Copaganda project, a partnership between Fight For the Future and COMPOST Magazine. The discussions centered around how we better support fiction that depicts futures and alternate realities where privacy is a universally respected human right. Attendees shared useful resources and analyses of surveillance tech’s impacts, as well as real-world tactics to resist illegal surveillance. Everything we gleaned from that week will go into a toolkit for authors and artists to more justly depict surveillance technologies. 

Stop Surveillance Copaganda Session at RightsCon25

RightsCon Booth 

We signed up to table at RightsCon in order to introduce ourselves to the digital rights community and meet those working to build alternative, decentralized technologies. Dozens of new and familiar faces stopped by to grab our stickers and zines, and to learn about what the DWeb community has been doing to build our movement.

Senior Organizer, mai, tabling at RightsCon25

DWebbers Dinner

Mid-conference, we organized a DWeb hot pot dinner for those of us in town for the event!

Group photo of DWebbers having hot pot!

Attending RightsCon this year felt incredibly productive and worthwhile. We’ll likely be there at the next one — in order to build better webs and learn from the past, it’s crucial that we connect with those directly confronting the pervasive challenges of the mainstream internet. That has always been our north star: to build decentralized technologies that help solve real world problems, not just in the future, but now.

DWebbers & friends at a Buddhist temple in Taipei

DWeb: Let’s Look Ahead to Another Big Year

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Looking back at 2024 and a summary of ideas for what comes next

Photo of about 20 people sitting under the redwoods discussing how to decentralize DWeb.
Photo of Campers sitting under the redwoods discussing how to decentralize DWeb.

This year marked the eighth year of DWeb – since 2016 scores of us have gathered in the redwoods, in the halls of Greco-Roman buildings, on the beaches of California and Brazil, in hackerspaces, on the Playa — and online, spanning international time zones, languages, expertise, and interests. Over these years, DWeb has become a dynamic community of dreamers and builders creating alternatives to the dominant, centralized and corporate internet. We want to build a web that manifests trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. And DWeb is a space for thoughtful conversation and finding the collaborators and resources to bring decentralized, distributed, and local-first networks to life. 

DWeb Camp 2024

By many accounts (and feedback survey responses), DWeb Camp 2024 was our most successful camp yet. It was our fourth Camp, with more than 520 people flying from all corners of the world to meet in the redwoods of Navarro, California. We held our first Demo Night Market, where 32 projects showcased their working code, allowing campers to try out and provide meaningful feedback to builders. We held over 420 sessions and workshops over five days and this year we brought 25 DWeb Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East.

You can read some of the reflections about this year’s camp here, here, and here. While we are taking a break from holding Camp in 2025, stay tuned for details on DWeb Camp 2026.

As we close out 2024, let’s look back at the other highlights of the year.

DWeb 2024 Highlights

Virtual Meetups — We held eight virtual meetups this year, with topics covering governance, cryptography, AI, project funding, and more. You can check out all of the recordings of our past meetups.

Local Node Meetups — Across our local Nodes, there were over 12 in-person meetups in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Hanoi, Buenos Aires, Burning Man Playa. See more below on ways we’re planning to grow the DWeb Node network next year!

What were some other notable happenings in our ecosystem?

DWeb For Creators Course — Gray Area designed and offered its first online course focused on DWeb history, principles, and practice in the spring. If you missed it, you can find all the open source content and also take the course again this coming spring 2025.

Bluesky’s Massive User Growth — Many of the core team of leaders and developers at Bluesky have been a part of the DWeb community. The network relies on content-addressed content and is working towards making “credible exit” possible, especially in light of the major exodus from X-Twitter. So while it’s debatable whether it’s truly a decentralized social network from a technological perspective, we cannot help but feel like this is a big step forward for the DWeb movement (note: the back and forth written exchange between Christine Lemmer-Webber and Bryan Newbold is worth checking out ICYMI).

We’re sure we missed some other highlights from 2024 — tag us on our social networks so we can boost your successes from the year on Bluesky (@dweb.bsky.social) and on the Fediverse (@dweb@social.coop)!

What’s Next for DWeb in 2025

When the DWeb organizing team decided to take a year off from holding Camp in California, a big part of our decision was weighed by our desire to work towards decentralizing the movement. Our vision in 2025 is to support the growth of DWeb nodes around the world, empowering and aiding them in hosting DWeb gatherings big and small. Rather than focus on one big convening in Northern California, we will be supporting smaller regional gatherings in Vancouver, Taiwan, Healdsburg, and Brazil. 

But we want to hear directly from the DWeb community and understand what you want to see happen in the coming year. So at last month’s virtual DWeb meetup, we asked: how could DWeb better support our community’s goals in building a decentralized/distributed Web? And how do we each want to contribute to help support this network? 

One of the walking paths across the river at Camp Navarro.
Photo: Navarro Path © 2024 by mai ishikawa sutton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Following a short presentation from core organizers about the events and projects we’d like to pursue next year, we opened the floor for an open discussion. Following that, the 60 or so of us present divided into small groups and discussed what we’d like to see next for DWeb. You can find the recording of the whole meetup here. 

Here are the highlights of what we heard:

Let’s Walk Our Talk

Many expressed the desire for us to do more to highlight the projects and best practices for replacing the “centralized, attention hijacking, surveillance technology” of the dominant internet with “decentralized technology that supports human values including autonomy, personal data protection, privacy, etc.”

People felt that we should find ways to encourage participatory design by building bridges to communities to better map needs to solutions, and solutions to needs. A key to this (repeated by many across) was that people find it really helpful to receive feedback on their projects. They want to understand how their tools can work better, and how they can get collaborators and financial support. One of the main ways people find value in the DWeb community is to allow people to share their projects to make them more usable and viable. Offerings by people included holding branding / UX design workshops and working with the DWeb Principles to make them more robust and actualized.

DWeb has a robust website with resources on DWeb technologies and analysis, but it currently needs some brushing up and updating. One person desired specific resources for counter-surveillance measures for high-risk communities including indigenous and queer communities. These types of resources would be critical in showing how DWeb can be immediately useful for those who are in urgent need of alternatives. 

DWeb Project Directory

An oft-repeated desire that we’ve heard is for a DWeb Project Directory, where people can find aligned projects, affinity groups, and potential collaborators. People want to know where the DWebbers are! 

Such a curated directory could map individual people’s skills, interests, and locations for people to interact and post topics/needs/projects for them to find each other. It was particularly noted that it should include non-developers, with people skilled in communications, UX design, organizational and governance design, fundraising, community management and more. The directory could be shaped by select community members, and also be used to shape an ecosystem map to visualize the domains of decentralization happening across the network stack. 

Nodes Network and In-Person Gatherings

There were calls for decentralizing the technological infrastructure of DWeb. One of the main ways we hope to achieve this is by growing our Nodes network – where people within a region can meet in-person and have regular local get-togethers. We’ve heard that a toolkit and support system would be helpful for those wanting to get their local Node off the ground. One person said that they wanted to help set up local nodes around the DWeb Principles “that go beyond the technology layers to involve social governance and way[s] of living / growing.”

On that note, there’s a growing contingent who would like to see a kind of DWeb residency, where people would go to a place for a period of time to work on a project together and co-create the experience, much like Camp. There have been Hacker Houses that have done something similar, and they tend to meet alongside related events such as Ethereum DevCon. There are a few folks in our midst who are already (or are interested in) experimenting with co-living. They said that they’d like to try a similar model with the residency using a benefactor model, where people could live somewhere for a certain period, with all their expenses paid, so they could collaborate in person on building DWeb infrastructure. This would also entail building relationships with people on the ground who live there, who want and need the kinds of tools that would be created through the residency. 

Many would also like to see a DWeb Calendar, which people could add events to and subscribe to directly with their calendar app of choice. One person said “it would be incredibly supportive for dweb as an attractor of brilliance and credibility to endorse distributed events who apply for said endorsement.”

Virtual Gatherings and Communications

DWebbers want to continue to see virtual meetups happen throughout the year. Some suggested that the virtual meetups can be more experimental, with meet and greets where people can be invited to share asks and offers. But a few people suggested that in lieu of meeting at Camp, there could be a big virtual summit that takes place to bring people together virtually for a few days — much like DecentSocial from a few years back.  

We could also do a better job of providing ongoing news, updates, and publications across the DWeb ecosystem. Many echoed the fact that they wanted to make sure that they didn’t miss any big updates. So people suggested a DWeb News Digest – where people could also describe their needs, request specific help, post or offer jobs and opportunities. It was noted that it would help to establish a habit amongst the community to see this as a kind of clearinghouse for DWeb news. This would likely have to interface with the Directory mentioned above. 

And lastly, the topic of storytelling came up across the groups. Those new to the space don’t quite understand what DWeb is and its community’s values and approaches. DWeb regulars note that they continue to participate in DWeb because it energizes both the “heart and the head” and that they’ve come to know the community for being “rigorous intellectually and generous in openness”. A regular DWeb Blog with writings and media could help better reflect how our values can be embodied in the technologies that we build.  

*~*~*~*~*

With all the challenges in the world and a shifting landscape in the U.S., we don’t know what’s in store for us in 2025. But as the DWeb Organizing Team, we truly look forward to continuing the conversation and maybe even seeing you at some of the events planned in the new year. 

Upwards and onwards!

With gratitude,

DWeb Core Organizing Team

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.

Book Talks Draw More Than 2,000 Attendees in 2023

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Internet Archive drew more than 2,000 attendees to its popular book talk series in 2023, held in collaboration with Authors Alliance. The books and authors represented in this year’s series covered topics as varied as digital copyright, the persistence of history and culture through preservation, early personal computing history, and the harms of political control and corporate surveillance. Browse the full collection.

WATCH NOW:

January 12, 2023 – Ben Tarnoff, “Internet for the People“

March 9, 2023 – Jason Steinhauer, “History, Disrupted“

March 28, 2023 – Peter Baldwin, “Athena Unbound“

April 20, 2023 – Jessica Litman, “Digital Copyright“

May 9, 2023 – Jessica Silbey, “Against Progress“

July 13, 2023 – Laine Nooney, “The Apple II Age“

August 24, 2023 – Oya Y. Rieger, “Moving Theory Into Practice“

September 20, 2023 – Abby Smith Rumsey, “Memory, Edited“

October 19, 2023 – Ian Johnson, “Sparks“

October 31, 2023 – Cory Doctorow, “The Internet Con“

November 16, 2023 – Howie Singer & Bill Rosenblatt, “Key Changes“

December 6, 2023 – David G. Stork, “Pixels & Paintings“

Internet Archive Celebrates Research and Research Libraries at Annual Gathering

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At this year’s annual celebration in San Francisco, the Internet Archive team showcased its innovative projects and rallied supporters around its mission of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian, welcomes hundreds of guests to the annual celebration on October 12, 2023.

“People need libraries more than ever,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, at the October 12 event. “We have a set of forces that are making libraries harder and harder to happen—so we have to do something more about it.”

Efforts to ban books and defund libraries are worrisome trends, Kahle said, but there are hopeful signs and emerging champions.

Watch the full live stream of the celebration

Among the headliners of the program was Connie Chan, Supervisor of San Francisco’s District 1, who was honored with the 2023 Internet Archive Hero Award. In April, she authored and unanimously passed a resolution at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, backing the Internet Archive and the digital rights of all libraries.

Chan spoke at the event about her experience as a first-generation, low-income immigrant who relied on books in Chinese and English at the public library in Chinatown.  

Watch Supervisor Chan’s acceptance speech

“Having free access to information was a critical part of my education—and I know I was not alone,” said Chan, who is a supporter of the Internet Archive’s role as a digital, online library. “The Internet Archive is a hidden gem…It is very critical to humanity, to freedom of information, diversity of information and access to truth…We aren’t just fighting for libraries, we are fighting for our humanity.”

Several users shared testimonials about how resources from the Internet Archive have enabled them to advance their research, fact-check politicians’ claims, and inspire their creative works. Content in the collection is helping improve machine translation of languages. It is preserving international television news coverage and Ukrainian memes on social media during the war with Russia.  

Quinn Dombrowski, of the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online project, shows off Ukrainian memes preserved by the project.

Technology is changing things—some for the worse, but a lot for the better, said David McRaney, speaking via video to the audience in the auditorium at 300 Funston Ave. “And when [technology] changes things for the better, it’s going to expand the limited capabilities of human beings. It’s going to extend the reach of those capabilities, both in speed and scope,” he said. “It’s about a newfound freedom of mind, and time, and democratizing that freedom so everyone has access to it.”

Open Library developer Drini Cami explained how the Internet Archive is using artificial intelligence to improve access to its collections.

When a book is digitized, it used to be that photographs of pages had to be manually cropped by scanning operators. The Internet Archive recently trained a custom machine learning model to automatically suggest page boundaries—allowing staff to double the rate of process. Also, an open-source machine learning tool converts images into text, making it possible for books to be searchable, and for the collection to be available for bulk research, cross-referencing, text analysis, as well as read aloud to people with print disabilities.

Open Library developer Drini Cami.

“Since 2021, we’ve made 14 million books, documents, microfiche, records—you name it—discoverable and accessible in over 100 languages,” Cami said.

As AI technology advanced this year, Internet Archive  engineers piloted a metadata extractor, a tool that automatically pulls key data elements from digitized books. This extra information helps librarians match the digitized book to other cataloged records, beginning to resolve the backlog of books with limited metadata in the Archive’s collection. AI is also being leveraged to assist in writing descriptions of magazines and newspapers—reducing the time from 40 to 10 minutes per item.

“Because of AI, we’ve been able to create new tools to streamline the workflows of our librarians and the data staff, and make our materials easier to discover, and work with patrons and researchers, Cami said. “With new AI capabilities being announced and made available at a breakneck rate, new ideas of projects are constantly being added.”

Jamie Joyce & AI hackathon participants.

A recent Internet Archive hackathon explored the risks and opportunities of AI by using the technology itself to generate content, said Jamie Joyce, project lead with the organization’s Democracy’s Library project. One of the hackathon volunteers created an autonomous research agent to crawl the web and identify claims related to AI. With a prompt-based model, the machine was able to generate nearly 23,000 claims from 500 references. The information could be the basis for creating economic, environmental and other arguments about the use of AI technology. Joyce invited others to get involved in future hackathons as the Internet Archive continues to expand its AI potential.

Peter Wang, CEO and co-founder at Anaconda, said interesting kinds of people and communities have emerged around cultures of sharing. For example, those who participate in the DWeb community are often both humanists and technologists, he said, with an understanding about the importance of reducing barriers to information for the future of humanity. Wang said rather than a scarcity mindset, he embraces an abundant approach to knowledge sharing and applying community values to technology solutions.

Peter Wang, CEO and co-founder at Anaconda.

“With information, knowledge and open-source software, if I make a project, I share it with someone else, they’re more likely to find a bug,” he said. “They might improve the documentation a little bit. They might adapt it for a novel use case that I can then benefit from. Sharing increases value.”

The Internet Archive’s Joy Chesbrough, director of philanthropy, closed the program by expressing appreciation for those who have supported the digital library, especially in these precarious times.

“We are one community tied together by the internet, this connected web of knowledge sharing. We have a commitment to an inclusive and open internet, where there are many winners, and where ethical approaches to genuine AI research are supported,” she said. “The real solution lies in our deep human connection. It inspires the most amazing acts of generosity and humanity.”

***

If you value the Internet Archive and our mission to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” please consider making a donation today.

What Happened at the Virtual Library Leaders Forum?

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The Internet Archive team, its partners, and enthusiasts recently shared updates on how the organization is empowering research, ensuring preservation of vital materials, and extending access to knowledge to a growing number of grateful users.

The 2023 Library Leaders Forum, held virtually Oct. 4, featured snapshots of the many activities the organization is supporting on a global scale. Together, the efforts are making a difference in the lives of students, scholars, educators, entrepreneurs, journalists, public servants — anyone who needs trusted information without barriers.

“It’s important for us to recognize that the Internet Archive is a library. It’s a research library in the role that it plays, in the way that it works,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

Watch the 2023 Library Leaders Forum:

With the rise of misinformation and new artificial intelligence technologies, reliable, digital information is needed more than ever, he said.  

“This is going to be a challenging time in the United States when all of our institutions — the press, the election system, and libraries — are going to be tested,” Kahle said. “It’s time for us to make sure we stand up tall and be as useful to people in the United States and to people around the world who are having some of the same issues.”

To provide citizens everywhere with free access to government data, documents, records, the Archive launched Democracy’s Library last year. The collection now has 889,000 government publications, with many more items donated but yet to be organized, said the Archive’s Jamie Joyce at the forum. The goal is to digitize municipal, provincial, state and federal documents, along with datasets, research, records publications, and microfiche so they are searchable and accessible.

The Archive is taking a leadership role in harnessing the power of AI to make its information easier for users to find, Kahle added. It is also preserving state television newscasts from Russia and Iran, along with translations, to allow researchers to track trends in coverage.

Collections as data

Thomas Padilla, deputy director of data archiving and data services at the Internet Archive, reported on a project that examines how libraries can support responsible use of collections as data. Working in partnership with Iowa State University, University of Pennsylvania, and James Madison University, it is a community development effort for libraries, archives, museums and galleries to help researchers use new technology (text and data mining, machine learning) while also mitigating potential harm that can be generated by the process.

Through the effort, the Archive gave grants to 12 research libraries and cultural heritage organizations to explore questions around collections as data, Padilla said. As it became apparent that others around the world were grappling with similar issues, the project convened representatives from 60 organizations representing 18 countries earlier this year in Canada. The group agreed on core principles (The Vancouver Statement on Collections-As-Data) to use when providing machine actionable collection data to researchers. Next, the project expects to issue a roadmap for the broader international community in this space, Padilla said.

Helping libraries help publishers

The recent forum also featured digitization managers from the Internet Archive who are collaborating with partner libraries, including Tim Bigelow, Sophie Flynn-Piercy, Elizabeth MacLead, Andrea Mills and Jeff Sharpe. These librarians are at institutions big and small from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the Wellcome Trust in London, working with teams of professionally trained technicians to digitize collections.

One of those partnerships is taking an exciting new direction. The Boston Public Library’s partnership with the Archive began in 2007. Over the years, the team has completed digitization of the John Adams presidential library, Shakespeare’s First Folio (his 36 plays published in 1632), more than 17,000 government documents and the Houghton Mifflin trade book archival collection, according to Bigelow, the Northeast Regional digitization manager for the Archive.

The Houghton Mifflin collection includes 20,000 titles dating back to 1832, including some of the best known works in American fiction and children’s literature, such as books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Curious George series. The publisher gave BPL the entire physical collection for preservation (90% of which were out of print) and continues to add new titles as they are published. With the formal agreement of Houghton Mifflin, BPL and the Archive have been working together since 2017 to digitize every book—those in the public domain are completely readable and downloadable; those still in copyright are available through controlled digital lending (CDL).

Lawsuit updates

As in Boston, many libraries have embraced CDL. However, commercial publishers have challenged the practice.

Lila Bailey, senior policy counsel for the Archive, provided an update at the forum on the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, in which the court ruled in favor of the publishers in limiting the use of CDL. The Archive filed an appeal in September.  Bailey encouraged supporters to consider filing amicus briefs when the Archive’s case is expected to be reviewed by the appellate court.

For the Internet Archive—and libraries everywhere—to continue their work, the Archive is advocating for a legal infrastructure that ensures libraries can collect digital materials, preserve those materials in different formats, lend digital materials, and cooperate with other libraries.

“In our evolving digital society, will new technologies serve the public good, or only corporate interests?” Bailey asked in her remarks at the forum. “Libraries are on the front line of the fight to decide this question in favor of the public good. In order to maintain our age-old role as guardians of knowledge, we need our rights to own, lend and preserve books, as we all live more and more of our lives online.”

The International Democracy’s Library Team Came Together for Presentations, Discussion, and a Workshop About Gov Docs (3.16.23)

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Let’s Build It Together!

Video: https://archive.org/details/full-democracys-library-3.16.23-presentation

On March 16, 2023, the Internet Archive hosted the “Democracy’s Library Workshop: Community Collaboration.” This event marked the first public presentation and discussion of the Democracy’s Library Project since its inauguration at the 2022 Annual Event, following several months of research, supported by the Filecoin Foundation, from November 2022 to February 2023. The presentation, a collaboration between Internet Archive staff and a visiting government official, aims to preserve government information and make it much more meaningfully accessible to the public. The event was live-streamed and can be viewed at the provided video link.

Presentation includes:

  • Brewster Kahhale, founder of The Internet Archive, providing an introduction and discussing why we need to “Build Our Collections Together.”
  • Andrea Mills, Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, discussing the incredible progress made in Canada working with their foundational partner, the University of Toronto, in digitizing government information. 
  • Jamie Joyce,  leading the Democracy’s Library initiative at Internet Archive in the U.S., reporting on the U.S. landscape analysis and stakeholder interviews.

To librarians and archivists: please know we are still collecting feedback from government information professionals. So if you are a librarian or archivist, we would love to hear from your experience. If you’re interested in sharing, please fill out this survey.

See existing Democracy’s Library here: https://archive.org/details/democracys-library 

Also, In Case You Missed Them…Recommendations and Strategic Plans from the GPO: 

Internet Archive Welcomes Digital Humanists and Cultural Heritage Professionals to “Humanities and the Web: Introduction to Web Archive Data Analysis”

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By The Community Programs Team

On November 14, 2022, the Internet Archive hosted Humanities and the Web: Introduction to Web Archive Data Analysis, a one-day introductory workshop for humanities scholars and cultural heritage professionals. The group included disciplinary scholars and information professionals with research interests ranging from Chinese feminist movements, to Indigenous language revitalization, to the effects of digital platforms on discourses of sexuality and more. The workshop was held at the Central Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library and coincided with the National Humanities Conference.

Attendees and Facilitators at Humanities and the Web: Introduction to Web Archive Data Analysis, November 14, 2022, Los Angeles Public Library

The goals of the workshop were to introduce web archives as primary sources and to provide a sampling of tools and methodologies that could support computational analysis of web archive collections. Internet Archive staff shared web archive research use cases and provided participants with hands-on experience building web archives and analyzing web archive collections as data.

Senior Program Manager, Lori Donovan, guiding attendees in using Voyant to analyze text datasets extracted from an Archive-It collection using ARCH.

The workshop’s central feature was an introduction to ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub). ARCH transforms web archives into datasets tuned for computational research, allowing researchers to, for example, extract all text, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, audio, named entities and more from collections. During the workshop, participants worked directly with text, network, and image file datasets generated from web archive collections. With access to datasets derived from these collections, the group explored a range of analyses using Palladio, RAWGraphs, and Voyant. 

Visualization of the image files contained in the Chicago Architecture Biennial collection, created using Palladio based on an Image File dataset extracted from the collection using ARCH.

The high level of interest and participation in this event is indicative of the appetite within the Humanities for workshops on computational research. Participants described how the workshop gave them concrete language to express the challenges of working with large-scale data, while also expressing how the event offered strategies they could apply to their own research or could use to support their research communities. For those who were not able to make it to Humanities and the Web, we will be hosting a series of virtual and in-person workshops in 2023. Keep your eye on this space for upcoming announcements.

Book Talk: Internet for the People

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Join Internet Archive’s senior policy counsel LILA BAILEY in conversation with author BEN TARNOFF about his book, INTERNET FOR THE PEOPLE: THE FIGHT FOR OUR DIGITAL FUTURE.

JANUARY 12 @ 6PM PT
THIS EVENT WILL BE HELD IN-PERSON AT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE, 300 FUNSTON AVE, SAN FRANCISCO. THE DISCUSSION WILL BE RECORDED.

REGISTER NOW

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? The internet is broken, Tarnoff argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn’t always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.

SESSION RECORDING

If you can’t make it to our in-person event, the discussion will be recorded and available for viewing the next day. To receive a notification when the recording is available, select the “Watch Recording” free ticket at registration.

Book Talk: Internet for the People
IN-PERSON AT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE
January 12, 2023 @ 6pm PT
Register now for the free, in-person event

Book Talk: MEME WARS

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The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America

Join Amelia Acker in conversation with authors Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss about their new book, MEME WARS, in-person at the Internet Archive, October 14 @ 6pm.

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Purchase your copy of MEME WARS from The Booksmith.

Memes have long been dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memes are bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists such as Alex Jones, provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, and tacticians like Roger Stone. While the media and most politicians struggle to harness the organizing power of the internet, the “redpill right” weaponizes memes, pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation into the mainstream to drag people down the rabbit hole. These meme wars stir strong emotions, deepen partisanship, and get people off their keyboards and into the streets–and the steps of the US Capitol.

MEME WARS is the first major account of how “Stop the Steal” went from online to real life, from the wires to the weeds. Leading media expert Joan Donovan, PhD, veteran tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss, and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg pull back the curtain on the digital war rooms in which a vast collection of anti-establishmentarians bond over hatred of liberal government and media. Together as a motley reactionary army, they use memes and social media to seek out new recruits, spread ideologies, and remake America according to their desires.

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Book Talk: MEME WARS
October 14 @ 6:00pm PT
IN-PERSON at Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Register now for the in-person event