Category Archives: News

The Lardine Tapes: Celebrity, History, Conversation

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Bob Lardine (1924-2019) asked great questions.

As an interviewer, he knew how to keep things light, conversational. He got the information he needed, and wrote articles based on what answers the subject provided, but he did it in a way that never felt like he was prodding, or intending to catch someone out.

He held a number of positions in journalism but one of the most memorable was as a Hollywood correspondent for the NY Post, where he would write up interviews with on-the-rise celebrities or long-established actors and directors about their current project and what they’d learned. If you’ve ever read a typical Sunday newspaper magazine with a couple pages of interview with a contemporary star of stage or screen, you’ve settled in with Bob’s bread and butter for decades.

Bob would share his interview tapes with his family (his niece Drew Wanderman and his nephew Todd Wanderman). Scrawled with all sorts of markings and ranging with dates from the 1960s to the 1980s. Ultimately, they came to the Internet Archive as a physical donation with the intention of being digitized and put up for all to enjoy.

A selection of Lardine cassettes from the original physical donation

For a number of years, after being donated, classified, and assigned an inventory number, the tapes were stored waiting to join a digitization queue. In 2025, the box was opened to be digitized using a tape setup and converted to .WAV sound files.

Tape Digitizing Setup – TASCAM 122mkIII deck to MOTU M4 USB Interface to Audacity

The box of audio cassettes, excepting a few in need of repair, are now digitized into the Interview Tapes by Bob Lardine collection at the Archive. 57 separate recorded interviews with celebrities, and two compilations of tapes, discussed further below.

Most people will be naturally drawn to the celebrity interviews. With names like George Peppard, Sharon Gless, Ricardo Montalban and more, they represent a killer lineup of recognizable names, especially if you experienced television in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these tapes were recorded during the height of their careers (Peppard in the middle of A-Team, Gless while appearing in House Calls, and Kate Jackson just starting out on Charlie’s Angels) and they are more than happy to talk through their biographies and thoughts while in the salad days of nationwide celebrity status.

Which is fine, but you should know – the tape quality is spectacularly terrible.

Recorded, as they were, on the tables of restaurants, in dressing rooms or sitting on set between scenes, the goal of these recordings was clearly for Bob to use as backups to notes he was taking on paper. In the modern era of podcast microphones and post-processing software able to be recorded next to moving vehicles with no problem, the tape recorder in use was likely to be a simple affair, and one left in the same place even as people shifted around or looked in the wrong direction while talking.

But as muddy as the interview tapes can be, they still do the job. In her 1978 interview, Olivia Newton-John talks about her accent and sketches out her plans for her future career, and the listener can follow with little trouble. Erik Estrada talks about his health regimen and his plans to support his extended family, recorded in what sounds like a small room. And Robert Urich talks about feeling betrayed by various press interviews, showing how trustable Bob Lardine is in conducting his.

Ultimately, the tapes are legible. And, once your ear adjusts to the situation, wonderfully personal. These are workers, craftspeople, artists, taking time out from their day to share their current worries, considerations and plans. They speak, not so much as a performer providing entertainment at a microphone for a “personal moment” during a concert or appearance, but people with a job sharing how they got there, and where they are going.

No interview shows this better than the 1975 interview tape with Henry Winkler.

With Happy Days now in its third season, Winkler has been given co-starring status in the series with Ron Howard. Fonz-mania, years away from famously “jumping the shark”, has him in stadiums with 25,000 people cheering for him. Under any measurement, he is experiencing super-stardom, with the sky the limit.

But in this tape, Winkler is the picture of humility. He talks about how nobody keeps the throne for long, how it can all disappear overnight, and what steps he takes to mentally prepare for that change. He fears typecasting (which turned out to be a legitimate concern in the 1980s) and opens his sketched-out plans for what to do about that. Through it all, he’s an artist who cares about his art, and is doing his best to keep a level head through a gauntlet of hyperbolic fame.

It’s worth nothing that our obsession with celebrity means that many of the basic facts about these interviewees is known – where they were in May of 1975, or what the actual name of a production they were working on became. We have a literal deluge of knowledge about their marriages, divorces, places of residence. From these known facts, we can surmise a lot about what these tapes are talking about. If only this were the case with so many other cultures, now-lost places or people.

This collection would already be hours of insight and materials, but there’s just a little bit more.

Alongside these celebrity interviews, Bob also had tapes from the 1960s for a radio program called The Jewish Hour. Broadcast out of Phoenix, Arizona, and syndicated elsewhere, this radio show contains a variety of interviews, appearances and performances aimed from a Jewish perspective. There appears to be very little information about this show online – and while there might be a library or archive that has records of this show, there is nothing currently obvious to find. Until now: Lardine’s tapes have recordings, as well as related taped-off-radio recordings of interviews and shows covering historical people and events of the time. Without these tapes, there seems to be very scant recorded evidence of them available.

We’re always happy to take donations of audio cassettes like this, and look forward to continuing the process of bringing them online. Who knows what other lost treasures lurk in the world?

A very large thank you to Bob Lardine’s family for their donation of these tapes, as well as friends of the Internet Archive who helped fund purchase of the tape decks used for playback and digitization.

Screams in the Vault: Public Domain Horror in the Age of IP

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An image of Mickey Mouse holding a match and looking at a ghoulish figure on the wall in 1929's The Haunted House. The right said of the image has text saying "Screams in the Vault: Public Domain Horror in the Age of IP".

As many iconic works have entered into the public domain since 2019, there has been a surge of horror film adaptations. These horror adaptations have received strong critiques for their deviation from or failure to say something unique about their source material. Ultimately, this criticism has spilled over into skepticism about the public domain itself, framing it as a creative dead-end. This critique, however, overlooks the underlying benefit of the public domain: the ability for anyone, not just corporations, to create their own version/adaptation of the same work. Despite consistent criticism surrounding public domain horror adaptations, a further study of these works reveals underlying contemporary industry conditions that lead to their creation, and demonstrates the enduring importance of the public domain in enabling creative freedom beyond pure corporate control.

These adaptations exist within the current characteristics of contemporary filmmaking; a type of filmmaking largely driven by financial risk-aversion that relies on Intellectual Property (IP) adaptations rather than original stories to guarantee audience attendance and big money earnings. Look no further than April 2025’s A Minecraft Movie that relied on the Minecraft IP to pull in over $150 million in a single weekend in the United States and Canada, as well as over $900 million worldwide across its theatrical run. As studios continue to embrace IP and risk-aversion as rules of the game, creators must either find ways to craft original stories within these confines, or find another way to keep the cost down, such as working in a historically proven low-cost genre: Horror.

Horror films are a popular selection for filmmakers as they can be made more economically compared to other genres by utilizing fewer elements such as limited locations, small casts, and visual ambiguity to enact the horror/unease. There is a long lineage of economical horror films that set off careers including John Carpenter’s Halloween, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, and Mike Flanagan’s Absentia. Each film was made for less than $500,000, unadjusted for inflation, and launched careers of well known and successful filmmakers. While each film is hugely varied and different from one another, they are all connected by one common element: being original stories. But when IP is heavily guarded and protected by risk-averse studios, it makes sense to turn to the public domain for creative freedom as an independent filmmaker working with budgetary constrictions. 

Though shaped by the same constraints and standards, the resulting films vary wildly. Some horror films adapted from public domain works lean heavily on shock value while others take a more reflexive approach, using the tools of horror to comment on copyright itself. In 2022, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey utilized the shock elements to draw an audience, while 2025’s Screamboat embedded a metatextual critique of copyright lengths.

An illustration by E. H. Shepard showing Piglet and Pooh walking in the snow.
An iconic illustration by E. H Shepard from the first Pooh book. This iconography has helped to make the Pooh stories recognizable worldwide.

In 2022, shortly after 1926’s Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield, whose earlier indie films received little attention, announced Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. By adapting the Pooh stories, Frake-Waterfield utilized their near-hundred year history and public recognition to garner immediate attention to his new production, highlighting the benefits that IP provides even in an area of filmmaking that is historically amenable to emerging filmmakers. 

Since its release, critics and viewers alike have highlighted the deviation from the childhood source material through a gory slasher adaptation. These critiques are reasonable and definitely feel notable to viewers as a dead-eyed Pooh Bear and tusk-bearing Piglet eat Eeyore. However jarring the contrast of the adaptation to the source material may be, it does not undercut the value of the public domain. In creating this adaptation, it acts as a celebration of the public domain as a vehicle for filmmakers and other creatives to remix old works for their own creative and commercial benefit and not just the benefit of select corporate IP holders.

The Blood and Honey film is an adaptation that does not utilize the Pooh stories for much more than audience familiarity. It utilizes the public domain works primarily as a shock factor to attract audience attention. Generally it grafts the iconography of these stories onto an indie horror film that would remain fundamentally unchanged if all of the Pooh elements were stripped away. Beneath the surface of this iconography is a standard slasher film playing in the mold of what has come before.

A book cover stating "The House at Pooh Corner" by A. A. Milne with an illustration of Pooh.
The original Pooh stories, like The House at Pooh Corner (1928), can be fully read online.

This adaptation does not diminish the original stories that still exist and are available to everyone. Nor does it create a new monopoly on the stories, as these Pooh stories remain in the public domain. Instead, it highlights the underlying conditions of filmmaking that surround the film during the time in which it was made. By entering the public domain in the 2020s, newly public domain works give rise to modern adaptations that reflect the popular trends of the moment. They fit within the confines of the corporate, risk-averse IP conditions that drive filmmaking. And yes, many are becoming franchises, itself a reflection of the current moment. Frake-Waterfield has expanded upon his original Blood and Honey film with a direct sequel as well as the greater Twisted Childhood Universe, pulling from other public domain works such as the original Bambi and Peter Pan. 

Similarly to Blood and Honey, the recent Screamboat adaptation of Steamboat Willie by Steven LaMorte is also a grafting of a public domain work onto a more standard narrative. In a 2025 interview with Paul Marsh, LaMorte reveals that he had been working on a Staten Island Ferry horror film since the early 2010s. However, following Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain in 2024, LaMorte reworked the film into an adaptation. In contrast to Blood and Honey, Screamboat functions as a metatextual film commenting not only on the original work, but also the nature of the public domain. It is not solely a horror film based on a public domain work, but a horror film about corporate copyright terms and how these long terms may alienate creators from their original works. This perspective becomes especially vivid in the film’s midsection, which recounts the story of Willie’s separation from Walt Disney in a visually striking animated flashback.

Mickey Mouse standing behind a steamboat's wheel and spinning it while whistling.
Original animation from Steamboat Willie (1928) that inspired Screamboat (2025).

Utilizing animation reminiscent of the original Steamboat Willie cartoon, the film recounts an old man’s tale of how Willie was separated from his creator, an animated depiction of Walt Disney. Much like in real life, the film too omits inclusion of Ub Iwerks as a creator of Mickey Mouse, reinforcing how authorship itself can be obscured by copyright mythologies. In the course of the tale, Walt falls overboard leaving Willie behind locked away in the ferry’s underbelly. Upon Willie’s release, after ninety-five years, he goes off on a rampage killing and terrorizing anyone that he comes across. Willie’s violence is framed not just as horror, but as retribution—an eruption of neglected cultural memory finally freed from captivity.

The middle animation segment of Screamboat utilizes the public domain nature of Steamboat Willie by formally adapting something that was previously restricted by copyright. This unique passage during the film’s middle point sticks in the viewer’s mind, elevating the work a step beyond pure shock value. It instead evokes an iconic character to examine the legacy of copyright control. Through Willie’s violent acts, the film suggests that long copyright terms can turn cultural icons into imprisoned relics. Screamboat critiques the copyright maximalism that the Disney company helped enshrine, using one of Disney’s earliest icons. Together, Blood and Honey and Screamboat reflect two poles of public domain horror—one exploitative, the other expressive. But both are artifacts of a specific cultural and creative moment.

A poster for the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story. It is red and features silhouettes of characters extending their arms and legs in dance.
Pulling from a long public domain tale, West Side Story adapts Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to 1950s New York City.

Placed in the context of this broader moment in filmmaking, public domain horror is not an aberration but a logical outcome. Despite this, the context that surrounds the films now will not always be in living memory. In many years, when reflecting on this particular filmmaking environment, these horror adaptations might be seen as an odd and quirky moment of filmmaking. In actuality, these films are emblematic of the cultural moment in which they were produced, highlighting an evolving landscape of intellectual property and creative voice. Ultimately, these films probably won’t reach the same cultural impact as adaptations of other public domain works like 1961’s West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet) or 1959’s Ben-Hur (Ben-Hur). Still, they will remain important and interesting cultural artifacts that inform future generations as snapshots and reflections of the conditions in which they were made. Looking back at the past through creative works informs us of the societal and creative mores of that moment, and helps to anchor us in a contextual reference point to our own moment. Maybe these films will be celebrated themselves when they inevitably enter the public domain… in nearly 100 years.

Screams in the Vault: Public Domain Horror in the Age of IP by Sterling Dudley is marked with CC0 1.0

Keep on GIFin’ — A New Version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine!

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We are excited to announce a new version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine! 

GifCities was a special project of Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. Since then, GifCities GIFs have been used in innumerable web projects, artistic works, and in the media and press, including this internet-melting combination of GifCities GIFs and the British Royal Wedding in this New York Times article and the avant-GIF “GifCollider” exhibit at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

The new version of GifCities includes a number of new improvements. We are especially excited at the drastic improvement in “GifSearchies” by implementing semantic search for GifCities, instead of the hacky old “file name” text search of the original version. Note that via the “Special Search” tab, you can still search only by the old text-based index, for, uh, search index nostalgia purposes. But wait, you say, I need a specific-sized animated GIF for my project! No problemo, you can also now search for GIFs by size too. State of the world got you a bit anxious, dear reader? Calm thyself with 51 results pages of 150×20 pixel blinkies.

We also updated the results interface to add pagination for results instead of the original infinite scroll — that would sometimes paralyze your browser after a non-infinite amount of scrolling. And as with GifCities v1, each GIF links to the archived GeoCities page on which it originally appeared, many of these wonders unto themselves. 

Finally, in the spirit of “sharing is caring” and “every GIF is truly a GIFT,” we have added the ability to make GifGrams that you can share with your special someones. Nothing says “I’m thinking of you” more than a custom webcard of GifCities GIFs and inspirational text, like “Hang in There” or “The Web is Yours for the Making.”

GifCities’s new semantic search index used a model called CLIP-ViT L/14 to analyze each frame of the GIFs and searching applies a “nearest neighbors algorithm” to find GIFs that match a vectorized query, allowing you to enter nuanced searches like “blue sparkling border‘ or (everybody’s favorite performing rodent) ‘”dancing hamster” and get matching results. Need more wolf snowglobe GIFs in your life? Yes, you do. Here ya go.

Thanks to all the GifCities enthusiasts out there that send us many messages each week on how they are using and enjoying the site. More details on GeoCities and GifCities are in the About page and a special thanks to enthusiast Ben Friesen who helped prototype using CLIP on GifCities. Now go browse some GeoCities GIFs and send some GifGrams!

Announcing “Future Knowledge”: A New Podcast from the Internet Archive & Authors Alliance

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Listen and subscribe to the Future Knowledge podcast: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/

How is knowledge created, shared, and preserved in the digital age—and what forces are shaping its future?

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Future Knowledge, a new podcast from the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance. Hosted by Chris Freeland, librarian at the Internet Archive, and Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance, the series brings together authors, librarians, policymakers, technologists, and artists to explore how knowledge, creativity, and policy intersect in today’s fast-changing world.

In each episode, an author discusses their book or publication and the big ideas behind it—paired with a thought-provoking conversation partner who brings a fresh perspective from the realms of policy, technology, libraries, or the arts.

We’re kicking off the podcast with a double feature—two episodes tackling copyright history and AI’s global impact:

Episode 1: The Copyright Wars

Historian Peter Baldwin joins copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson to unpack The Copyright Wars—a sweeping look at 300 years of trans-Atlantic copyright battles. From 18th-century publishing monopolies to today’s clashes between Big Tech, libraries, and the entertainment industry, this conversation reveals how history can illuminate the future of intellectual property in a digital world.

Episode 2: Copyright, AI, and Great Power Competition

Authors Joshua Levine and Tim Hwang sit down with Lila Bailey to discuss Copyright, AI, and Great Power Competition. Together they explore how artificial intelligence is transforming copyright law—and how global powers are using IP policy as a strategic tool in the race for technological dominance.

Whether you’re an author thinking about how to share your work, a librarian navigating digital access, or a curious listener exploring how knowledge shapes our world, Future Knowledge is for you.

Meet Sophia Tung, the Creative Force Behind Internet Archive’s Microfiche Scanning Livestream

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Setting up a livestream is more complicated than just turning on a camera. That’s why the Internet Archive tapped into the expertise of Sophia Tung, a software engineer and online content creator, to help create the livestream for its microfiche scanning center, which launched May 21.

The 29-year-old garnered international media coverage for her livestream of robotaxis parked in a depot just below her San Francisco apartment as they jostled and honked – sometimes in the middle of the night.

“I put it up just sort of as a meme to get some attention. If I couldn’t do anything about it, then I might as well make the best of it,” Tung said of the livestream she posted on YouTube with Lo-fi music in the background. “People became fans of it and Brewster [Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian] reached out to see if I could do something similar with the Internet Archive.”

An avid user of the Internet Archive for years, Tung said she was eager to visit its Funston Avenue headquarters and work with the staff on the project. As a sign of our tech-connected times, it’s become popular to have a mesmerizing scene with mellow music playing on a second monitor as people work. Tung said she could envision a relaxing, but informative, feed showing the preservation process.

Sophia Tung

Tung met with the team who take microfiche – flat sheets of film that hold miniaturized documents – and turn them into digital images that can be accessed online. The team is now digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s.

After assessing the space with five active microfiche digitization stations,Tung decided on a three-camera setup for the livestream. One is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards under a high-resolution camera that captures multiple detailed images. Another is an up-close look of what actually happens on the machine. A third wide-angle camera covers the entire room and is blurred for security, but still conveys motion.  

All team members are open to being on camera as they work, but Tung said she recognized privacy concerns may arise. She devised a pause button to be installed to stop the feed, momentarily dimming the “on air” sign in the room. Although initially concerned that employees might not like being on camera, Tung said staff were hired who agreed to the concept and they are on board with the livestream as a mixed media project.

Live activity with the scanners occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays. Ambient Lo-fi music plays continuously. After hours, other Internet Archive content runs on the video feed including silent films, lost landscape footage from everyday life, and public domain photographs from NASA and other sources.

The project has required a combination of engineering to make the infrastructure work 24/7, plus physical design integrating signage and broadcasting lights, which Tung says she enjoyed. Her goal was two-fold: to recreate the excitement of her last livestream and to shine a light on the individuals working behind the scenes at the Archive.

“I always thought about the Internet Archive as just some mysterious entity, trying to preserve what we as individuals cannot. It’s an invaluable tool for journalists and, basically, everybody,” Tung said. “Now, preservation is more important than ever. I think people just assume that it happens. Actually, it takes money, effort, machinery and people. I think it’s important to highlight all the people-hours that go into it.”

Tung produced an explainer video about the microfiche livestream project on YouTube. “The reception has been great so far,” said Tung, who is working on more features and possible additional channels to add to the stream. “I hope the stream brings awareness to the effort it takes to preserve all this important material. If we don’t preserve it now, we are going to lose it.”

All microfiche materials are added to Democracy’s Library, the global project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications.

More details on the livestream project can be found here: https://blog.archive.org/2025/05/21/new-livestream-brings-microfiche-digitization-to-life-for-democracys-library/

In Memory of Rob Reich: Musician, Performer, Friend

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Rob Reich, performing at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration, October 2022.

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Rob Reich, a remarkable musician whose warmth, humor, and creativity touched the hearts of so many. Based in San Francisco, Rob was a frequent and beloved performer in our “Essential Music Concerts from Home” series at the Internet Archive. At the height of the pandemic in October 2020, when we all needed connection and comfort, Rob brought us both. He performed for us a total of eight times, including serving as the MC for two of our virtual holiday parties during the pandemic. His music lifted our spirits, and his presence made everything feel like a celebration.

Rob and his ensemble, Circus Bella, kicked off our October 2022 celebration with their signature whimsy and energy. He was a master of joy-infused musicianship—a true one-man band. Whether playing the accordion, piano, bells, whistles, or cymbals, Rob’s performances were always memorable. One Bastille Day, he performed in a striped shirt and beret, with an Eiffel Tower zoom backdrop, serenading us with French classics. 

I once had the pleasure of seeing him perform at Zuni, a favorite restaurant in San Francisco, where he played timeless tunes as patrons enjoyed oysters, Caesar salad, and roasted chicken.You’d never have guessed he was also a circus performer—such was his versatility.

Rob was more than a performer—he was someone we could count on. He was reliable, kind, hilarious, serious, wildly creative, and most of all, genuine.

We are grateful for the joy Rob brought to us and to so many others. His loss leaves a silence, but his music and memory continue to resonate.

Our hearts go out to his family and loved ones.

Rest well, Rob. You are deeply missed.

-The Internet Archive Team

New Livestream Brings Microfiche Digitization to Life for Democracy’s Library

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Ever wonder how government documents, once locked away on tiny sheets of microfiche, become searchable and accessible online? Now you can see it happen in real time.

Today, the Internet Archive has launched a livestream from our microfiche scanning center (https://www.youtube.com/live/aPg2V5RVh7U), offering a behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous work powering Democracy’s Library—a global initiative to make government publications freely available to the public.

“This livestream shines a light on the unsung work of preserving the public record, and the critical infrastructure that makes democracy searchable,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “Transparency can’t be passive—it must be built, maintained, and seen. That’s what this livestream is all about.”

Watch the livestream now:

What You’ll See

The livestream features five active microfiche digitization stations, with a close-up view of one in action. Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet. Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card.

Each page is then processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections—completed with metadata—so that researchers, journalists, and the general public can explore and download them freely through Democracy’s Library.

📅 Live activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays—with a second shift coming soon.

What Is Microfiche?

Microfiche is a flat sheet of film that holds dozens—sometimes hundreds—of miniaturized document images. It’s been a common format for archiving newspapers, court documents, government records, and more since the 20th century.

Why Is Microfiche Digitization Important?

“Materials on microfiche are an important part of our country’s history, but right now they are often only available online from expensive databases. We are excited that this project will digitize court documents from our collection and make them freely available to everyone,” said Leslie Street, Director of the Wolf Law Library of William and Mary College.

“Thousands of documents and reports from across the federal government were distributed in microfiche to Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries around the country from 1970 – 2022. While important for space-saving and preservation, microfiche has long been problematic for public access. So this digitization work of Democracy’s Library is incredibly important and will unlock free access to this essential historic public domain corpus to readers and researchers around the world!” noted James R. Jacobs, US government information librarian and co-author of the recently published book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.

To learn more about the importance of microformats like microfiche and microfilm, read Brewster Kahle’s essay, “Microfilm: The Rise, Fall, and New Life of Microfilm Collections.“

About Democracy’s Library

Democracy’s Library is the Internet Archive’s ambitious project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications. From environmental impact reports to court decisions, these materials are essential for accountability, scholarship, and civic engagement.

The microfiche collections that will be digitized in this process include US GPO documents, Canadian government documents, US court documents, and UN publications. We are always looking for more collections to be donated.

Meet the People Behind the Work

From left: Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, with microfiche scanning operators Dylan, Louis, Elijah, Avery, and Fernando.

This digitization livestream was brought to life by Sophia Tung, appmaker & designer behind the viral robotaxi depot livestream on YouTube.

The digitization is overseen by scanning operators who are trained to handle physical library materials and digitization equipment.

Thanks also to Internet Archive staff who assisted this project, including CR Saikley, Merlijn Wajer, Brewster Kahle, Derek Fukumori, Jude Coelho, Anastasiya Smith, Jonathan Bloom, Bas Kloosterman, Andrea Mills, Richard Greydanus, Louis Brizuela, Carla Igot Bordador, and Ria Gargoles.

Thanks to Our Partners

Thank you to Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, University of Alberta, and Free Law Project for donating microfiche and helping advise this project.

If your library has microfiche or other materials to donate to the Internet Archive, please learn more about donating materials for preservation and digitization.

Support the Work

Preserving and digitizing these fragile, analog records is resource-intensive—and deeply worthwhile. Donate today to support the Internet Archive and Democracy’s Library.

Enjoy the livestream! Thank you for helping us preserve history and protect access to knowledge.

Protect Fair Use, Especially Now

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Brewster Kahle testifying to Congress as part of the Copyright Office Modernization Committee, September 28, 2023.

Fair use, the flexible aspect of U.S. copyright law, enables libraries to fulfill their public mission of providing access to knowledge, preserving culture, and supporting education and research.

Fair use empowers libraries, the web, news reporting and more. Digital learners depend on it. Journalists depend on it. Creators depend on it.  Every person interacting with content on and offline depends on it. 

In the current turmoil surrounding the Copyright Office, we must not lose sight of the importance of fair use. Recent writings about generative AI could substantially undermine fair use across a much broader spectrum, harming many, including libraries and the communities they serve.

I have served on the Copyright Office Modernization Committee because I want to try to help us all move forward in a constructive way. I hope that as we move forward, we are mindful of the long-term impact and avoid causing damage that extends far beyond today’s debates. 

Libraries and readers need the same rights online as offline. We need fair use to play its role to protect those rights.

Public Interest Groups to FTC: Make Digital Ownership Real

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Today, the Internet Archive, alongside a coalition of public interest organizations, library groups, and consumer advocates, supports Senator Ron Wyden’s call for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to protect consumers in the digital marketplace. In a letter to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, we urge the Commission to clarify what constitutes a true “sale” of digital goods. In an era where digital purchases can vanish without warning, true sales are exceedingly rare. The public deserves transparency and, ultimately, the same enduring ownership rights they expect when buying physical items—the rights to use, preserve, and transfer.

Real-world examples have shown how easy it is for these rights to be undermined in the digital marketplace: from Amazon’s deletion of Orwell’s classic 1984 from Kindles, to Microsoft’s closure of its ebook store, to Sony stripping purchased Discovery shows from users’ libraries. These incidents expose the gap between consumer expectations of a sale and corporate practices that fall far short of true ownership. When companies advertise a “sale,” but retain the power to revoke access, it is not just misleading—it erodes public trust, undermines libraries’ ability to preserve access to knowledge, and harms everyday people who believe they are purchasing something permanent.

Our message to the FTC is clear: if digital goods can be deleted, disabled, or restricted after purchase, they should not be marketed as “sales.” With strong federal guidance on what it means to truly own digital products, consumers, creators, libraries, and the public can enjoy a more trustworthy and transparent digital future. 

Read the full letter urging the FTC to stand up for digital ownership rights here.

Vanishing Culture: Recovering Lost Software

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The following guest post from journalist and computer historian Josh Renaud is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Mom and Me (Atari ST, 1985) (color) by Yaakov Kirschen, preserved and playable at the Internet Archive.

Whether it’s Pac-Man or Pikachu, Link or Lara Croft, Master Chief or Mario, we love playing video games.

But what about preserving them?

Data shows we spend big money on video games: more than $200 billion globally. By some reports, gaming is now bigger than the global film industry and the North American sports industry combined. 

Despite all this growth, data also shows the industry has done a poor job stewarding its heritage and history. In fact, a recent study shows classic games are in critical danger of being lost.

Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available.

Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (2023).

Only 13 percent of all classic games released between 1960 and 2009 are currently commercially available, according to the “Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States,” published in 2023 by Phil Salvador for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.

Worse, this percentage drops below three percent for games released before 1985, “the foundational era of video games,” the study found.

The study considered a random sample of 1,500 games from the MobyGames database, as well as the entire catalog of the Nintendo Game Boy—4,000 games altogether.

The commercial unavailability of so many classic games leaves few viable options for playing them today. People can attempt to track down and buy increasingly-rare vintage games and hardware, visit a few specialty institutions, or resort to piracy, the study noted. Terrible options all around. 

But what about cases where a game was never archived in the first place?

Journalist and computer historian, Josh Renaud.

That was a situation I ran into when I wanted to find copies of “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me,” two graphical chatbots created in 1985 by Yaakov Kirschen, the Israeli artist best known for the “Dry Bones” cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. Kirschen died on April 14, 2025, at the age of 87.

These “artificial personalities” were among the earliest entertainment software released for the Atari ST computer, and they got splashy write-ups in newspapers including the London Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Even three-time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman wrote a profile in the New York Times.

Despite that publicity, and the advantage of getting in on the ground floor of a brand new computer platform, probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. Apparently I was one of the very few who had copies, which I received from my uncle Jim when he handed down his old Atari 520ST computer to my family in the early 1990s. I remember being amused as my brothers and I conversed with “Mom” and “Murray” back then.

When nostalgia hit me decades later, I began searching online for disk images of these old programs. But there weren’t any, except for one obscure German translation of “Murray” in monochrome.

It was a startling realization: not all software has been preserved in an archive.

I wrote about this predicament in 2014 on my blog, Break Into Chat, which put me in touch with Kevin Ng, who also had some copies. We each made digital images of our old floppy disks, preserving several original versions of “Mom” and “Murray.” But the monochrome version of “Mom” remains lost.

In the years since then, I have continued researching Kirschen’s other lost software, ranging from multiple Jewish and secular educational games for the Apple II computer, to his “artificial creativity” autonomous music composing technology for the Commodore Amiga and the IBM PC. Like “Mom” and “Murray,” none of it sold well, nor was it preserved despite good publicity.

With the help of three fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts in St. Louis, I recovered many of Kirschen’s games and programs from floppy disks Kirschen sent to me. Keith Hacke imaged most of the Apple II and the IBM PC disks, while I imaged the Commodore Amiga disks using hardware loaned by Dan Hevey and Scott Duensing.

I published the disk images with summarized histories on Break Into Chat. Then I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, making them playable in web browsers—but more importantly, preserving them for posterity.

I’m proud to have played a part in bringing this dead software back to life, and restoring a part of Kirschen’s legacy. I think this work is worth rediscovering today. 

Mom and Me screenshot.

Take “Nosh Kosh” from 1983, for example. Essentially a Jewish take on Pac-Man, this is an action game designed to teach children about kashrut, Jewish dietary law. It was one of three games modeled on existing arcade classics made by Kirschen together with Gesher Educational Affiliates in Israel.

In “Nosh Kosh,” the player moves a kippah-wearing character named Chunky around the screen, trying to eat all the food items while avoiding three non-kosher bad guys: Peter Pig, Larry Lobster, and Freddy Frogslegs. There are three kinds of food—ice cream, meat, and carrots—but the player must wait a bit between eating the meat and ice cream, otherwise Chunky will yell “Oy!” and lose a life. 

Nosh Kosh screenshot.

Or consider Kirschen and Gesher’s more ambitious “The Georgia Variations,” a choice-based narrative game about Jewish history, identity, and migration, introduced the same year as “Nosh Kosh.”

In this game, the player takes on the role of Boris Goldberg, a Jewish boy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century who must make decisions about school, work, marriage, and even what to do in the face of persecution and pogroms. The player’s decisions affect the storyline, but in the end, all the threads eventually lead to the same ending: Goldberg immigrates to Atlanta, Georgia. 

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Niche educational games like these were far less popular than mainstream action and adventure games. The hobbyists and amateur archivists who preserved software of that time often skipped this genre entirely. And today, these sorts of games may not hold much interest for the general public. 

So why bother preserving them? 

The prolific Apple II preservationist “4am” gave a great answer in Paleotronic magazine:

“This was how we taught math and science and grammar and history to an entire generation of children. That seems like something worth saving.”

That’s certainly true of Kirschen’s work. In the Apple II games he made with Gesher, we see Jewish educators’ early steps learning to use a new medium to reach kids. And Kirschen’s later work with “artificial personalities” and “artificial creativity” foreshadows the promise and pitfalls of today’s AI craze.

I’m glad to have played a part in bringing this software back to life so others can have the opportunity to play it and study it.

About the author

Josh Renaud is a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He publishes computer history research on his website, Break Into Chat. He is interested in recovering lost or obscure software, and telling the stories of the people who made and used it. In 2024 he received a Geffen and Lewyn Family Southern Jewish Research Fellowship  from Emory University to study papers related to Gesher’s educational computer games.