Category Archives: Image Archive

Aruba Becomes First Country to Endorse Statement Protecting Digital Rights of Memory Institutions

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From left: Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten (Director, Biblioteca Nacional Aruba), signs the statement protecting memory organizations online as Raymond Hernandez (Director, Archivo Nacional Aruba) and Brewster Kahle (Founder, Internet Archive) look on.

This was a week of firsts in Aruba. The small island nation in the southern Caribbean launched its new heritage portal, the Aruba Collection (Coleccion Aruba), and it became the first country to sign a statement to protect the digital rights of libraries & other memory institutions.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Archive, attended the signing ceremony in Aruba, a country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands located 18 miles north of Venezuela.

Support for the statement, Four Digital Rights For Protecting Memory Institutions Online, was spearheaded by Peter Scholing, information scientist and researcher at the country’s national library, Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (BNA). Last fall, he learned about the need for library digital rights to be championed during a conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. While much of that discussion was based on the 2022 report, “Securing Digital Rights for Libraries: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet,” authored by Lila Bailey and Michael Menna, and focused on protecting library access to e-books, Scholing was interested in Aruba making a broader statement—one encompassing all memory institutions and the diverse types of materials they house.

“Over the last few months we’ve brainstormed about these digital rights and how to broaden the statement to make it relevant to not only libraries, but also for memory institutions and GLAMs in general,” said Scholing, using the acronym for galleries, libraries, archives & museums. “In that sense, it has become a near universal declaration for open access to information, in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2030 Agenda/Sustainable Development Goals, #16.10) or other statements on open access to documentary, cultural or digital heritage. This aligns almost perfectly with what we aim to achieve here on Aruba—universal access to “our” information.”

Many memory institutions on the island have long worked together to digitize collections including books, government documents, photos and videos. The statement reinforces the importance of libraries, archives, museums and other memory institutions being able to fulfill their mission by preserving knowledge for the public to access.

Initial Signing Organizations

  • Archivo Nacional Aruba (ANA)
  • Aruban National Committee for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme
  • Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (BNA)
  • Coleccion Aruba
  • Museo Arkeologico Nacional Aruba (MANA)
  • Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba
  • Union di Organisacionnan Cultural Arubano (UNOCA)

The statement asserts that the rights and responsibilities that memory institutions have always enjoyed offline must also be protected online. To accomplish this goal, libraries, archives and museums must have the legal rights and practical ability to:

  • Collect digital materials, including those made available only via streaming and other restricted means, through purchase on the open market or any other legal means, no matter the underlying file format;
  • Preserve those materials, and where necessary repair or reformat them, to ensure their long-term existence and availability;
  • Provide controlled access to digital materials for advanced research techniques and to patrons where they are—online;
  • Cooperate with other memory institutions, by sharing or transferring digital collections, so as to provide more equitable access for communities in remote and less well-funded areas.

DOWNLOAD THE STATEMENT

In Aruba, Scholing said library and archive leaders believed strongly that these rights should be upheld with a public endorsement. Michael Menna, co-author of the statement and the 2022 report, saw this as a key first step in building a coalition of memory institutions.

“Aruba has been brave to make such a clear and unequivocal statement about the many challenges facing libraries, archives, and museums,” said Menna. “Simply put, these essential institutions need better protections to adapt their services to today’s media environment. Hopefully, after hearing Aruba speak out, others can follow suit.”

Report co-author Lila Bailey, senior policy counsel at the Internet Archive, said that seeing the statement embraced and endorsed by memory institutions is rewarding.

“It is a thrill to see Aruba leading the way towards a better digital future for memory institutions worldwide,” said Bailey. “These institutions must meet the needs of a modern public using the best tools available. It is good public policy and basic common sense that libraries, archives and museums should be not only permitted but encouraged to leverage digital technologies to serve their essential public functions.”

The statement can be endorsed by governments, organizations, and individuals following a verification process. If you are interested in signing the statement, or would like to learn more, please complete the initial online inquiry, or e-mail Chris Freeland, Internet Archive’s director of library services, at chrisfreeland@archive.org.

Aruba Launches Digital Heritage Portal, Preserving Its History and Culture for Global Access

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Many know Aruba as a popular tourist destination with beautiful beaches. The small island nation just north of Venezuela is also home to 110,000 inhabitants with a rich history—that many are working to preserve.

Aruba’s memory institutions have been digitizing materials for years. Initially, residents and international scholars could only view the items at the library on the island. But now with the help of Internet Archive, the Aruba Collection (Coleccion Aruba) is available to anyone for free from anywhere.

EXPLORE THE COLECCION ARUBA

A celebration of the heritage portal’s launch is being held via livestream on April 8.

COLLABORATION IS KEY

Digitizing the island’s historic materials was a collaborative effort. After Aruba became a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1986, the national library (Biblioteca Nacional Aruba; Aruba National Library – BNA) and the national archives (Archivo Nacional Aruba; National Archives of Aruba – ANA) were established. Leaders from the two institutions worked together to curate and scan artifacts including newspapers, government reports, and cultural items.

“Aruba has a challenging past due to migration, colonization, and slavery,” said Peter Scholing, information specialist/researcher at BNA, the national library. “That means there has been a diaspora of people coming in and spreading out throughout the world—the same goes for our collection and documents.”

Locating materials to digitize involved several local institutions on the island. Because the materials are scattered, Aruba has branched out to collaborate with others in the Caribbean, Venezuela, Netherlands and the United States. The local leaders established protocols and standards for the collection, but didn’t have enough resources to make the materials available in a robust digital library.

Kaart van het Eiland Aruba (1825) / Map of the Island of Aruba (1825)

Connecting with the Internet Archive to host the digital collection provided the missing piece of the puzzle, according to leaders in Aruba. “Because of the reality of our small island state, we don’t have much funding for big company servers,” said Raymond Hernandez, head of the Aruba National Archives (ANA). “If you have a limited budget, it’s not possible. The dream has come true, thanks to the Internet Archive. We are very grateful.”

The new portal on the Internet Archive devoted to Aruba includes links to the several other institutions such as UNOCA (Union di Organisacionnan Cultural Arubano (UNOCA),  Museo Arkeologico Nacional Aruba (MANA); National Archaeological Museum Aruba; Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba (SMFA); Monuments Fund of Aruba), Departamento di Cultura Aruba, University of Aruba, TeleAruba and UNESCO Aruba.

EXPLORE THE COLECCION ARUBA

The collection has more than 100,000 items to date — nearly a one-to-one ratio for the island’s population. This includes about 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, 900 videos, 45 audio files and seven 3D objects for a total of 67 thematic and/or institutional (sub)collections.

As an additional layer of protection, the materials are being uploaded to the Filecoin  decentralized storage network, thanks to a longstanding relationship between the Internet Archive and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW).

[See paper on the Aruba Model – Coleccion Aruba: Intersectoral Collaboration on Aruba as a Model for the (Dutch) Caribbean : A collaborative approach for preservation and access of collections in small island states]

RESEARCH USE OF THE COLLECTION

Chelsea Schields, University of California, Irvine

For Chelsea Schields, associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the materials were so compelling and easy to use that she integrated them into her undergraduate course, “Oil and Capitalism.” Students learn about the global history of petroleum and develop research skills to build an argument based on evidence. “Students use the Aruba Collection to write research papers related to the culture of oil towns,” Schields said. “It is often their favorite part of the course because they get to dig into the sources themselves and identify the themes that resonate across those materials.”

Unlike other primary source collections, which are often cumbersome and hidden behind a costly paywall, the diverse sources found enabled students to write papers on topics ranging from migrant domestic workers in Aruba to the spatial organization of oil towns. 

In her own research for a book on the social histories of oil refineries on Aruba and Curaçao, Schields said the Aruba heritage portal was extremely useful when the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel in the summer of 2020. “The Aruba Collection provided such an indispensable, bottom-up portrait of the history of the island’s Lago Refinery, which at its peak was among the largest plants in the world,” she said. “From photographs of refinery workers and their families to digitized copies of employee publications, these sources allowed me to see the labor required to transform oil into the commodities we rely upon today.”

Adi Martis, Utrecht University (emeritus)

Since the launch of Coleccion Aruba, Adi Martis said he uses the website almost every day. The emeritus associate professor at Utrecht University in The Netherlands appreciates how easy it is to access a variety of materials in national archives and the national library collections.  For example, by combining data from digitized historical maps and land ownership register books from the Aruban Land Registry, users can gain an insight into the history of land ownership on the island, he said. 

By applying AI-based, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms, the digitized, difficult-to-read handwritten texts are made accessible to the public and transformed into searchable data. Martis said in some cases, digitized archives from Aruba, Curaçao and the Netherlands are combined and search results are sometimes surprising—in particular with data about the history of slavery. Users can search using different keywords and the site can even create family trees, which normally can be difficult because the slaves had no surnames.

“For the past 50 years I have been doing archival research and I must admit that I am proud of my small island that was able to achieve such incredible results in such a short time with the help of Internet Archive,” Martis said.

Jan Bant, a doctoral student in history from Aruba who lives in The Netherlands, relied heavily on the Coleccion Aruba when doing research for  his master’s thesis in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Although he was unable to return to the island, he accessed journals and newspaper articles from Europe to examine Aruba’s political climate between in the 1970s and 80s. Being able to enter key words and dates in the search function was particularly helpful in locating sources. Bant was able to uncover documents about protests, revealing the country’s somewhat radical traditions of commenting on world affairs despite its image as a calm player in the Caribbean, he said.

As Bant continues his PhD research on the role of sports in Dutch Caribbean communities, he is tapping into the Coleccion Aruba, including materials about the oil refinery and laborers who brought baseball to the island.  

Bant contributed back to the portal by uploading his completed master’s thesis, which was completed in 2021. “There is a lot of research about Aruba that gets written but it’s never really used—often because people don’t know where to find it,” Bant said. “The Aruba Collection can also serve well as a repository to store research that has been done about Aruba. That’s what I think is very valuable.”

SERVING PATRONS

Aruba’s UNOCA Managing Director Ray-Anne Hernandez said the heritage portal allows users to easily search her foundation’s work of arts and culture. Researchers now can go to one place to locate digitized images and documents. 

“We have collections that we want to share and have accessible to the public, so this was a logical step to be part of this collaboration,” Hernadez said. “In the collection, we have history. We have art, music, and education. It’s so much more than we initially thought it would be and that fills us with great pride and great joy. It’s not just that we made a website. It’s something that’s continually growing and everybody is using it.”

The Dutch Caribbean Digital Heritage Week will be held on Aruba April 8-12. For the first day, April 8, a day-long symposium is planned, titled “Connecting our Shared Heritage: Linking (Dutch) Caribbean Heritage Institutions and Collections”, with keynote speeches from Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Eppo van Nispen (Dutch Network for Digital Heritage NDE and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), and contributions from a wide range of heritage professionals from across the Dutch Caribbean, and the world. It will be livestreamed via https://coleccion.aw/stream.

[Editorial note: For another take on the Coleccion Aruba, see, “The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island” from Wired.]

Growing Up Asian – Hall and Chan Family Photos

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Please come join us as the Internet Archive partners with the Skyline College Art Gallery for the viewing of “Portraits of Growing Up Asian,” a photo exhibition that tells a visual story of a Chinese American family’s journey from China to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The Hall family’s arrival from China in the 1850’s resulted in the opening of the first Chinese herbal medicine shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1864 and became a hub for the local community. The business was open until it was unlawfully shut down by the FBI in 1957. This tragedy led to a family tradition in photography that spanned generations.

View the full collection at archive.org

The exhibition features archived photographs and artifacts from the Hall Family Collection, including the family herb shop signage. It also features photographs by Timothy Hall and his experiences growing up in San Francisco from the 1950’s to contemporary times.

The exhibition explores themes of ancestry, family, discrimination, and all that comes with growing up as Chinese Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the mid to late 20th century.

In an era where the vast majority of “photographs” are a series of captured data points stored in the etheric realm of a digital universe, it becomes a delightful trip to step into the authentic past and to awaken to the sensations conveyed through the experience of an actual photograph. Please join us.

DATES:
Mon Feb 26th Opening Reception and Opening 12-2pm
Mar 26th – Closing Day

HOURS:
Please visit the Skyline College Art Gallery Website for Hours
Monday: 10am-12:30pm
Tuesday: 4pm-6pm
Wednesday: 10am-12:30pm
Thursday: 4pm-6pm
Friday: 11-4pm

Public Domain Day Celebrates Creative Works from 1928

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Hundreds of people from all over the world gathered together on January 25 to honor the thousands of movies, plays, books, poems and songs that recently entered the U.S. public domain.

Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney’s 1928 animated film featuring Mickey Mouse, had top billing at the virtual event. Literature now free from restriction for reuse includes Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Tarzan Lord of the Jungle by Edgar R. Burroughs. Sound recordings from 1923 (released on a different schedule) joined the public domain such as ”Down Hearted Blues” by Bessie Smith and ”Who’s Sorry Now” by Isham Jones Orchestra.

WATCH RECORDING:

“There’s so much to rediscover and to celebrate,” said Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. For example, the release of The Great Gatsby into the public domain in 2021 inspired a creative flurry — new versions of the novel from the perspective of different characters, a prequel telling the backstory of Nick Caraway, a young adult remix, and song. “From the serious to the creative, to the whimsical to the wacky, these are all the great things we can do…now that [these works] are in the public domain and free to copy, to share, to digitize and to build upon without permission or fee.”

For an overview of new works in the public domain, view the curated list from the Center for the Public Domain.

Remix Contest

The winning film from the Public Domain Day 2024 Remix Contest was shown as well: “Sick on New Year’s,” by Ty Cummings. Every year since 2021, this contest has invited artists to remix works from its collection to showcase new and creative uses of public domain materials. Fifty films were submitted to this year’s competition, according to Amir Esfahania, artist in residence at the Archive. Learn more about the finalists or watch all the submissions in our recent blog post.

Advocacy

“Celebrating the public domain is not just about vintage references and period-appropriate clothing. It’s about understanding history to inform the present day,” said Lila Bailey, Internet Archive senior policy counsel and co-host of the virtual festivities. “We think there should be time set aside every year to celebrate the immense riches that free and open culture provides to everyone.”

While federal holiday recognition (like MLK Day or Presidents’ Day) for the public domain is unlikely, there was a discussion of an advocacy campaign for establishment of a commemorative Public Domain Day (more along the lines of National Data Privacy  Day or National Whistleblowers Day).

“It only requires a simple resolution in the Senate with high chances of recognition,” said Amanda Levendowski, director of Georgetown Law School’s Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic. “Prospects for passage are way better than possible. About 80 percent of proposals are passed — and maybe next year, Public Domain Day will be among them.”

Experts said a successful drive for the designation will require a collaborative effort. A kickoff event will be held February 29 in New York City, hosted by Library Futures, executive director Jennie-Rose Halperin announced.

AI and the Public Domain

The online program also featured a panel discussion on generative artificial intelligence, copyright and artist expression. Experts weighed in on just what should be the copyright status of the outputs of generative AI.

Panelists (clockwise from top left): Lila Bailey (Internet Archive), Heather Timm (artist), Maxximillian (artist), Matthew Sag (Emory Law), and Juliana Castro Varón (Cita Press).

Now, AI tools can turn text or simple descriptions into images that are  genuinely new and often look like exactly the kind of things that people get copyrighted if a human made them, explained Matthew Sag, professor of law, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science at Emory University.

“The copyright office is quite clear that to get copyright, you have to have human authorship. So something created entirely by an unsupervised machine is not eligible for copyright,” Sag said, noting that the courts have recently agreed. “The interesting question is what about when humans are using AI as a tool and directing the output. This is where the controversy really is.”

On the panel, two artists, Heather Timm and Maxximillian, shared how they both leverage AI in the creative process.

Timm said she started using generative AI in 2021 and thinks the copyright office should cover works that have results from it. She has trained AI models on her own physical work and then created something new collaborating with the machine, as well as conceptualized how to blend different pieces of work in a collage or sculpture.  

“I use it almost as a notebook,” Timm said. “If I have a concept or an idea about something on the go, I can immediately prompt that and have it as a placeholder to explore it later.”

As a filmmaker and musician, Maxximillian said she feels passionate about AI and it has saved her time creating animated characters and helping refine her text. “As a professional artist, I rely on copyright to keep viable the works that I produce for clients legally,” said Maxximillian. “It’s important to understand that copyright protection enables the creator to be a steward of that work. The question to consider: Who benefits by denying copyright on AI? I think nobody benefits.”

An open access publisher, Juliana Castro Varón, design director and founder of Cita Press, also addressed the issue. “I believe that AI may pose economic, power, and labor challenges, but I feel very confident that creativity will survive technology,” she said. All books Cita produces are in the public domain for everyone to download. “We are not at all against people using AI for their work, but we continue to hire humans…elevating the work of people is core to our mission.”

***

The event was co-hosted by Internet Archive and Library Futures with support from Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, SPARC and Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Press conference statement: Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law

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Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard Law. Lawrence spoke at the press conference hosted by Internet Archive ahead of oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive.

Statement

Also available at Lessig for the Internet Archive on Medium.

We should all recognize — and celebrate—the importance of commercial publishing, for authors and creators everywhere. Commercial publishing creates the income that authors depend upon to have the freedom to create great new works. Without commercial publishing, much of the greatest that will be won’t be written.

But we must also recognize that culture needs more than commercial publishing. If the business model of commercial publishing controlled our access to our past, then much of who we were, and much of how we learned to be better, would simply disappear.

Think about the extraordinary platform that is Netflix. For a small price each month, subscribers have access to thousands of movies and television shows, far more than at any point in human history. The revenue subscribers provide in turn lets Netflix invest in new creative work. No one who knew television from the 1970s could believe that the quality of television has not improved dramatically over the last 50 years.

Yet Netflix’ archive is not endless. And each year, the site culls titles from its collection and removes them from its library. Netflix does this for many reasons — for example, the content could be licensed from third parties, and the term of that license has expired, or the site may see that demand for the title is meager, so bearing the costs of carrying it no longer makes sense. Regardless of the reason, the decision is an economic one for Netflix — Netflix makes available only those titles that it continues to make economic sense to make available. Such is the business model of a commercial publisher.

But culture needs a different business model. We need access to our past, not just the part of our past that continues to be commercially viable. We need libraries that assure we can see everything our parents or grandparents saw, so we can understand why they were as they were, and how they got better. Great libraries preserve access to as much as they physically can — not based on which titles continue to earn revenue. The past is just one more competitor for a commercial publisher; but for a library, the past is a gift that is to be nurtured and protected, regardless of its commercial value.

We are at a critical moment in the history of culture. The lawsuit that the Internet Archive faces will determine whether the business model of culture is the commercial model alone, or whether there will continue to be a place for libraries, and therefore, continue to be a practice of assuring as much access to our past as is possible. The particular fight in this lawsuit is important; the general fight is critical: Is the past that we have access to just the past that continues to pay? Or is the past we can have reliable access to the past that libraries strive to make available — not for profit, but for the love of culture and for the truth that that access to all of culture continues to assure.

Meet the Librarians: Alexis Rossi, Media & Access

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To celebrate National Library Week 2022, we are taking readers behind the scenes to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in associated programs.

Alexis Rossi has always loved books and connecting others with information. After receiving her undergraduate degree in English and creative writing, she became a book editor and then worked in online news. 

Alexis Rossi

In 2006, Rossi joined the staff of the Internet Archive. She was working on the launch of the Open Library project when she recognized the need to learn more about how to best organize materials. She enrolled at San Jose State University and earned her Master’s of Library and Information Science in 2010.

“It gave me a better grasp of how to hierarchically organize information in a way that is sensible and useful to other libraries,” Rossi said. “It also gave me better familiarity with how other more traditional libraries actually work—the types of data and systems they use.”

Rossi concentrated on web interfaces for library information, understanding digital metadata, and how to operate as a digital librarian. In addition to overseeing the Open Library project, at the Internet Archive, Rossi managed a revamp of the organization’s website, ran the Wayback Machine for four years, founded the webwide crawling program, and is currently a librarian and director of media & access.

“One of the themes of my life is trying to empower people to do whatever they want to do,” said Rossi, who grew up in Monterey, California, and now lives in San Francisco. “Giving people the resources to teach themselves—whatever they want to learn—is my driving force.”

“Giving people the resources to teach themselves—whatever they want to learn—is my driving force.”

Alexis Rossi, Media & Access

Rossi acknowledges she is privileged to have means to avail herself to an abundance of information, while many in other parts of the world do not. There are so many societal problems she cannot solve, Rossi said, but she believes her work is making a contribution.  

“We can build a library that allows people to access information for free, wherever they are, and however they can get to it, in whatever way. That, to me, is incredibly important,” Rossi said. It’s also rewarding to help patrons discover new information and recover materials they may have thought were lost, she added.

When she’s not working, Rossi enjoys making funky jewelry and elaborate cakes (a skill she learned on YouTube).

Among the millions of items and collections in the Internet Archive, what is Rossi’s favorite? Video and audio recordings of her dad, now 73, playing the piano, organ and accordion: “It’s just so good. It’s such a perfect little piece of history.”

Boston Phoenix Rises Again With New Online Access

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For more than 40 years, The Boston Phoenix was the city’s largest alternative weekly in covering local politics, arts, and culture.

The Boston Phoenix, Volume 2, Issue 44 – October 30, 1973

“It was really a pretty legendary paper. The style of the writing and the quality of writers were nationally known,” said Carly Carioli, who started at the newspaper as an intern in 1993 and became its last editor-in-chief.

With the advent of online advertising, it struggled like many independent newspapers to compete. In 2013, the Phoenix folded.

After the publication shut down, owner Stephen Mindich wanted the public to be able to access back issues of the Phoenix. The complete run of the newspaper from 1973 to 2013 was donated to Northeastern University’s special collections. The family signed copyright over the university. 

Librarians led a crowdsourcing project to create a digital index of all the articles and authors, which was helpful for historians and others in their research, said Giordana Mecagni, head of special collections and university archivist. Northeastern had inquired about digitizing the collection, but it was cost prohibitive. 

As it turns out, the Internet Archive owned the master microfilm for the Phoenix and it put the full collection online in a separate collection: The Boston Phoenix 1973-2013. Initially, the back issues were only available for one patron to check out at a time through Controlled Digital Lending. Once Northeastern learned about the digitized collection, it extended rights to the Archive to allow the Phoenix to be downloaded without controls.

Read The Boston Phoenix at the Internet Archive

“All of a sudden it was free to the public. It was wonderful,” Mecagni said. “We get tons and tons of research requests for various  aspects of the Phoenix, so having it available online for free for people to download is a huge help for us.” 

Inquiries range from someone trying to track down a classified ad through which they met their spouse, or an individual looking up an article about a band. The paper was a leader in writing groundbreaking stories about the LGBTQ community, the AIDS crisis, race and the Vietnam War—often issues not covered in the mainstream press. “Making that coverage public is adding an immense amount to the historical record that would not be there otherwise,” said Carioli. He said he appreciates the preservation and easy access to back issues, as do other journalists, researchers and academics.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Carioli of the Internet Archive’s digitization of the newspaper. “The Phoenix was invaluable in its own time, and I think it will be invaluable for a new generation who are just discovering it now. It was a labor of love then and the fact that it’s online now is huge for Boston, but also for anyone who’s interested in independent media and culture.”

Pretend you’re here with Internet Archive Zoom backgrounds

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Have you seen these gorgeous library backgrounds you can use to pretend you’re amongst the smell of of old books and hushed page turning?

When I saw them I got a little jealous and thought, “computers are just as soothing!” So without further ado, welcome to your Internet Archive virtual Zoom backgrounds.

We’ve got a pretty majestic building you could sit in front of. There’s free wifi.

Or you can come inside and sit in the Great Room with us, stained glass dome and all.

Sit quietly amongst the pews with our little Internet Archivist sculptures by Nuala Creed.

Or have them be your backup dancers / Greek chorus on all your calls.

You can sit amongst the films waiting to be digitized.

Or pretend to be digitizing them yourself.

Scan books seated in front of a Table Top Scribe.

Or sit with the constant hum of busy servers in the background.

Images of Afghanistan 1987-1994

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Afghan Media Resource Center’s correspondent interviewing a Muj Commander, 1991

Journalists and others risk their lives to keep the public informed in times of conflict. War imagery provides us with important information in the moment, and creates a trove of invaluable archival content for the future.

Please be aware that this collection contains some disturbing photos of violence and its aftermath (though we have not included any in this blog post).

The Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC) was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1987, by a team of media trainers working under contract to Boston University. The goal of the project was to assist Afghans to produce and distribute accurate and reliable accounts of the Afghan war to news agencies and television networks throughout the world.  Beginning in the early 1980’s amidst a news blackout imposed by the Soviet backed Kabul government, foreign journalists had become targets to be captured or killed. The AMRC was an effort to overcome the substantial obstacles encountered by media representatives in bringing events surrounding the Afghan-Soviet war to world attention.

An armed Muj posing for the camera, 1988

Beginning in 1987, a series of six week training sessions were conducted at the AMRC original home in University Town, Peshawar, Pakistan.  Qualified Afghans were recruited from all major political parties, all major ethnic groups and all regions of Afghanistan, to receive professional training in print journalism, photo journalism and video news production.  Haji Sayed Daud, a former television producer and journalist at Kabul TV before the Soviet invasion, was named AMRC Director.

After the completion of their training, 3-person teams were dispatched on specific stories throughout Afghanistan’s 27 provinces, with 35mm cameras, video cameras, notebooks, and audio tape recorders. Photo materials were distributed internationally through SYGMA and Agence France Press (AFP). Video material was syndicated and broadcast by VisNews (now Reuters), with 150 broadcasters in 87 countries, Euronews and London-based WTN (now Associated Press), Thames Television, ITN, Swedish, French, Pakistani and other regional networks.

A young girl carrying clean drinking water, 1989

In 2000 AMRC began publishing a popular and influential newspaper in Kabul: ERADA (Intention). With one interruption, ERADA publication continued until 2012.

Beyond the AMRC archive, the AMRC conducted dozens of training programs and workshops for writers and radio journalists, including training programs for Refugee Women in Development (REFWID). The AMRC also established radio and TV studios in the provincial capitaol, Jalalabad, and produced radio and TV programs, including educational radio dramas, for a variety of international organizations. AMRC also conducted public opinion polls in Afghanistan, including an extensive Media Use Survey in Afghanistan, financed by InterMedia, a Washington, D.C. group.

Armed Muj pulling out an unexploded missile, 1989

The AMRC collection spans a critical period in Afghanistan’s history – (1987 – 1994), including 76,000 photographs, 1,175 hours of video material, 356 hours of audio material, and many stories from print media.

An Afghan weaving carpet, 1990

In 2012 AMRC received a grant to digitize the entire AMRC archive, to preserve the collection at the U.S. Library of Congress. AMRC senior media advisors Stephen Olsson and Nick Mills were trained in the digitization processes by the Library of Congress, then spent two weeks in Kabul training the AMRC staff. The digitization and metadata sheets (in English, Dari and Pashto) were completed in 2016, and were welcomed into the Library of Congress with a formal ceremony.  We are now making the entire AMRC collection available through our on-line partner, The Internet Archive.

Now the entire collection is readily available to scholars, researchers and publishers.  All royalties for commercial use of the photo images and video material will continue to support the non-profit work of the AMRC.

30 Days of Stuff

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Jason Scott, free-range archivist, reporting in as 2017 draws to a close.

As part of our end-of-year fundraising drive, I thought it might be fun to tweet highlighted parts of the vast stacks of content that the Internet Archive makes available for free to millions. A lot of folks know about our Wayback Machine and its 20+ years of website history, but there’s petabytes of media and works available to see throughout the site. I called it “30 Days of Stuff”, and for the last 30 days I’ve been pointing out great items at the Archive, once a day.

You won’t have to swim upstream through my tweets; here on the last day, I’ve compiled the highlighted items in this entry. Enjoy these jewels in the Archive’s collection, a small sample of the wide range of items we provide.

Books and Texts

  • The Latch Key of my Bookhouse was one of the first books scanned by the Internet Archive in its book scanner tests, and it’s a 1921 directory of Children’s Literature that is filled with really nice illustrations that came out great.
  • As part of our ever-growing set of Defense Technical Information Center collection, we have The Role of the Citizens Band Radio Service and Travelers Information Stations In Civil Preparedness Emergencies Final Report, a 1978 overview of CB Radio and what role it might play in civil emergencies. Many thousands of taxpayer-funded educational and defense items are mirrored in this collection.
  • Also in the DTIC collection is The Battalion Commander’s Handbook 1980, which besides the crazy front page of stamps, approvals and sign-offs, is basically a manager’s handbook written from the point of view of the US Army.
  • There are hundreds of tractor manuals at the Archive. Hundreds! Of all types, languages (a lot of them Russian) and level of information. Tractors are one of those tools that can last generations and keeping the maintenance on them in the field can make a huge difference in livelihood.
  • A lovely 1904 catalog for plums called The Maynard Plum Catalogue was scanned in with one of our partner organizations and it’s a breathless and inspiring declaration of the future wonder of the plums this wizard of plum-growing, Luther Burbank, was bringing to the world.
  • Xerox Corporation released “A Metamorphosis of Creative Copying” in 1964, which seems to function as both promotion for Xerox and a weird gift to give to your kids to color in.
  • In 2014, a short zine called The Tao of Bitcoin was released, telling people the dream of $10,000 bitcoin would be real.
  • The 1888 chapbook Goody Two-Shoes has lovely illustrations, and a fine short story.
  • Working with a lovely couple who brought in a 1942 black-owned-businesses directory, I scanned the pages by hand and put them up into this item.
  • Inside that directory was an ad for a school of whistling that said it taught using the methods of Agnes Woodward, and a quick scan of the Archive’s stacks showed that we had an entire copy of her book Whistling as an Art!
  • The medical treatise Sleep and Its Derangements, from 1869, is William A. Hammond, MD’s overview of sleep, and what can go wrong. Scanned from the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, it’s one of many thousands of books we’ve scanned with partners.
  • Let Hartman Feather Your Nest could be described as “A furniture catalog” in the same way the Sistine Chapel could be described as “a place of worship”. The catalog is a thundering, fist-pounding declaration of the superiority of the Hartman enterprise and the quality and breadth of furniture and service that will arrive at your door and be backed up to the far reaches of time.

Magazines

  • Photoplay considered itself the magazine for the motion picture industry in the first part of the 20th century, and this multi-volume compilation of photos, articles and advertisements is a truly lovely overview.
  • There’s over 140 issues of the classic Maximum RockNRoll zine, truly the king of music zines for a very long time. On its newsprint pages are howls and screeches of all manner of punk, rock and the needs of musicians.
  • A magazine created by the Walt Disney Company to trumpet various parts of Disneyland and its attractions was called Vacationland, and this Fall 1965 issue covers all sorts of stuff about the park’s first decade.

Movies

  • Rescued from a warehouse years ago, a collection of Hollywood movie “B-Roll”, unused secondary scenes often filmed by different crew, has been digitized. My personal favorite is [Western Film Scenes], which is circa 1950s footage of a Western Town, all of it utterly fake but feeling weirdly real, to be used in a western. Don’t miss everyone standing around looking right at you and looking like they agree quite energetically with you!
  • No compilation could be complete without the legendary Duck and Cover, a cartoon/PSA that explained the simple ways to avoid injury in a nuclear blast. Just lie down! It’ll be fine. Please note: This Probably Won’t Work. But the song is very catchy.
  • The very weird Electric Film Format Acid Test from 1990 has a semi-interested model holding up a color bar plate in a wide, wide variety of film and video formats. Filmed just a few blocks away from the Internet Archive’s current headquarters.
  • I snuck in a 1992 interview with the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, back when he was 33 and working at WAIS, a company or two before the Archive and where he is asked about his thoughts on information and gathering of data. It’s quite interesting to hear the consistency of thought.
  • The Office of War Information worked with Disney to create “Dental Health“, a film to show to troops about proper dental care. It’s a combination of straightforward animation and industrial film-making worth enjoying.

Audio

  • We have a collection of hours of the radio show The Shadow from 1938-1939, starring  Orson Welles at 23, at the height of his performance powers, playing the dual main role.
  • For Christmas Eve, we pointed to “Christmas Chopsticks”, a 1953 78rpm record of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” performed to the tune of the classic piano piece “Chopsticks”; one of tens of thousands of 78rpm records the Archive has been adding this year.
  • On Christmas, a user of the Archive uploaded two obscure albums he’d purchased on eBay – remnants of the S. S. Kresge Company, which became K-Mart, and which were played over the PA system for shoppers. He got his hands on Albums #261 and #294.
  • Earlier in the month before the user uploaded those Christmas albums, I linked to a different holiday collection of K-Mart items, a 1974 Reel-to-Reel that started with a K-Mart jingle and went full holiday from there.
  • Before he was a (retired) talk show host, and before he was a stand-up comedian, David Letterman worked and trained in radio. Happily, we have recordings of Dave Letterman, DJ, from when he was 22, at Ball State University.
  • Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber has been hosting his weekly pop music recycling radio show, “Crap from the Past”, for over 25 years, and he’s been uploading and cataloging his show to the Archive for well over 10 of those years, including all the way back to the beginning of his show. The full Crap From The Past archive is up and is hundreds of hours of fun.
  • The truly weird “Conquer the Video Craze” is a 1982 record album with straightforward descriptions of how to beat games like Centipede, Defender, Stargate, Dig Dug, and more. This album has been sampled from by multiple DJs to bring that extra spice to a track.
  • Over 3,000 shows at the DNA Lounge are at the archive, including “Bootie: Gamer Night“, which combines mash-up tracks and video games. Bootie has been playing at DNA Lounge for years, and puts the audio from one song with the singing from another, and… it’s quite addicting, like games. This night was for the nearby Game Developers’ Conference being held the same week.

Software

  • In 2011, as part of a “retrocomputing” competition, we saw the release of “Paku-Paku”, a pac-clone program which ran in an obscure early PC-Compatible graphics mode that was very colorful and very small (160×100) and was built perfectly for it. You can play the game in your browser by clicking here.
  • Psion Chess is a game for the Macintosh that can play both you and itself with pretty high levels of skill and really sharp and crisp black and white graphics.  It makes a really great screensaver in self-playing mode.

People often overuse a phrase like “Barely scratched the surface”, but I assure you there are millions of amazing items in the archive, and it’s been a pleasure to bring some to light. While the 30 Days of Stuff was a fun way to stretch out a month of fundraising with stuff to see every day, we’re here 24/7 to bring you all these items, and welcome you finding jewels, gems and clunkers throughout our hard drives whenever you want.

Thanks for another year!