This post is part of our ongoing series highlighting how our patrons and partners use the Internet Archive to further their own research and programs.
David Samuel, a Canadian-born viola player, has lived all over the world working as a professional musician. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he lived in Europe and New Zealand before settling in San Francisco two years ago.
As Samuel works through the U.S. immigration process to get his permanent residence (green) card, he has turned to the Internet Archive for help in gathering documentation. He’s applying for residency under the “extraordinary ability” category. To make the case, he needs to put together an extensive resume of his accomplishments, awards and reviews in the arts.
Samuel performs and teaches in the Bay Area, as a member of the Alexander String Quartet and a lecturer at San Francisco State University. Using the Wayback Machine, he was able to track down website postings and programs about his past concerts to use in his application. “It was quite remarkable to find the exact dates and times of past performances,” said Samuel. “It would have been really tough otherwise, because I only have a limited number of actual physical documents with me.”
The application process is grueling, Samuel said, but being able to freely search for supporting evidence on the Wayback Machine has made it easier. “It’s been an important tool for me,” said Samuel, who heard about the Internet Archive years ago. “It’s like an encyclopedia for the history of the internet.”
This post is part of our ongoing series highlighting how our patrons and partners use the Internet Archive to further their own research and programs.
From Patricia Rose, in her own words:
Tour guide Patricia Rose
In 2019, after retiring from an administrative career at the University of Pennsylvania, I signed up to be a tour guide at Philadelphia’s historic Laurel Hill Cemetery (now Laurel Hill East), the first American cemetery to be named a National Historic Landmark. With more than 75,000 “permanent residents”, there are lots of opportunities to tour stopping at the graves of fascinating men and women, most from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, although there are still some new burials. It was so much fun I started leading tours at their larger sister cemetery, Laurel Hill West, itself listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, and with permanent residents mostly from the twentieth century to the modern day.
In 2020, COVID made fresh-air cemetery tours quite popular, and I led specialized tours on spiritualism, and on gay and lesbian residents called “Out of the Closet and into the Crypt.”
Sara Yorke Stevenson
Among the stops on some of my tours was the grave of Sara Yorke Stevenson (1847 – 1921). She was an Egyptologist, a museum curator, co-founder and leader, author, journalist and fighter for women’s suffrage. She led a full and eventful life, born in Paris, and ending after her successful efforts to bring medical help to France during World War I, raising the equivalent of $36 million in today’s dollars.
As part of the cemetery’s educational programming, my fellow tour guide Joe Lex (retired Professor of Emergency Medicine) created a wonderful podcast, All Bones Considered, focusing on both Laurel Hill East and West, and I jumped at the chance to present Stevenson on the podcast.
There is a wealth of information on Stevenson. As a co-founder, curator, and board chair at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (the Penn Museum), Sara appears in numerous histories of the museum, and in volumes on the beginnings of archaeology in this country. Luckily, in 2006, Sara’s private papers were discovered in the attic of a Philadelphia home that was being cleaned out for sale. Those papers are now housed in the Special Collections of the LaSalle University Library, and in the Archives of the Penn Museum. These I visited and enjoyed reading letters Sara received, a few materials she wrote, and relevant newspaper clippings she saved.
Fortunately, also in the Internet Archive I found relevant issues of the Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum from the early days of the twentieth century. (The Pennsylvania Museum became the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and its School of Industrial Art became Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.) Sara served as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum, and also as the acting director. In the April 1908 edition of the Bulletin, the following appears:
“It is proposed to establish at the School of Industrial Art of the Pennsylvania Museum…a course in the training of curators for art, archaeological and industrial museums, under the supervision of Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson, ScD.”
Museums were being founded throughout the country, and there was a need for trained curators. The next issue of the Bulletin details the twelve lectures in Stevenson’s course. She begins with The History of Museums, followed by the Modern Museum. She covers the Museum Building, with attention to light, heat, water, workshops, repair shops and store rooms. She addresses the Art of Collecting. In addition to lecturing, she took her students to every museum in the city, met with directors and curators, critiqued exhibits and identified problems of preservation and conservation. This was the first course in museum studies and curatorship offered in the United States, and luckily I could read all about it on the Internet Archive.
Finally, on the Archive I found John W. Jordan’s 1911 volume, Colonial Families of Philadelphia, which contains invaluable genealogical information on the families of Stevenson and her husband (and many others).
The Internet Archive’s Sara Yorke Stevenson collection was invaluable to me as I prepared my blog post. Going forward, I will turn to the Archive whenever I do research for my cemetery tours. Thank you to all who have created this marvelous resource.
Should you wish to learn more about Laurel Hill East and West, please visit https://laurelhillphl.com/. My podcast is part of episode #48, Shattering Some Glass Ceilings, on All Bones Considered, which is available at https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-kty8f-780f6a, on Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A part of a series: The Internet Archive as Research Library
Written by Caralee Adams
When gathering evidence for a court case or researching human rights violations, Lili Siri Spira often found that the material she needed was preserved by the Internet Archive.
In Spira’s work, the Wayback Machine has played an integral role in providing stamped artifacts and metadata.
For example, when researching the Bolivian coup in 2019, she wanted to learn more about the sentiment of indigenous people toward political leadership. Spira used the Wayback Machine to examine how indigenous Bolivian websites had changed since 2009. She discovered after initial criticism, some websites seemed to have disappeared.
“The great thing about the Internet Archive is that it really protects the chain of custody,” Spira said. “It’s not only that you look back, but you can even find a website now and capture it in time with the metadata.”
In 2020, The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Violations provided global guidelines for using public digital information as evidence in international criminal and human rights investigations. Spira said this allows preserved website data to be used in court proceedings to hold parties accountable.
On other occasions, Spira has investigated companies suspected of unethical practices. Sometimes executives openly admitted to certain behaviors, only to later deny their action. Companies may attempt to erase past communication, but Spira said she can uncover the previous versions of websites through the Wayback Machine.
“Our knowledge is not being held sacred by many people in this country and around the world,” Spira said. “It’s incredibly important for research work in any field to have access to preserved [digital] information—especially when that research is making certain allegations against powerful entities and corporations.”
We thank Lili and her colleagues for sharing their story for how they use the Internet Archive’s collections in their work.
Last month, we hosted Laine Nooney and Finn Brunton for an in-person discussion at the Internet Archive. We had considerable interest from people who couldn’t make it to the discussion, so we’re pleased to host the conversation again, this time virtually, so that anyone can join in!
Join us for an engrossing origin story of the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance. Author LAINE NOONEY will read a selection from their new book, then discuss the importance of the Apple II with historian FINN BRUNTON.
If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. It was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.
Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.
About our speakers:
Laine Nooney is assistant professor of media and information industries at New York University. Their research has been featured by outlets such as The Atlantic, Motherboard, and NPR. They live in New York City, where their hobbies include motorcycles, tugboats, and Texas hold ’em.
Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a professor at UC Davis with appointments in Science and Technology Studies and Cinema and Digital Media. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency, and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest.
Book Talk: The Apple II Age July 13th @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual discussion!
Whether you are a teacher, filmmaker, journalist, scientist or historian, having access to recordings about the tobacco, drug and other industries can be invaluable.
For more than fifteen years, archivists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Industry Documents Library (IDL) have curated a collection of more than 5,000 video and audio files documenting the marketing, manufacturing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco, chemical, drug, and food products, as well as materials produced by public health advocates. As of 2023, the collection has received more than 300,000 views.
This wealth of information is available to the public through the UCSF Industry Archives Videos on the Internet Archive. The recordings include commercials, focus groups, internal corporate meetings and communications, depositions of tobacco industry employees, and government hearings.
Most of the files were made public beginning in 1998, following a lawsuit involving 46 states against tobacco manufacturers. In the settlement, the court ordered the companies to restrict advertising and release internal documents. “The industry put out misinformation for years to hold off on regulations,” said Rachel Taketa, IDL processing and reference archivist at UCSF. Having access to these materials provides new insight into marketing strategies that can help the public be on the lookout for future industry activities.
“It provides transparency and accountability,” said Kate Tasker, IDL managing archivist at UCSF. Examples from the collection are marketing campaigns and materials that targeted marginalized groups, in particular women and the African American and LGBTQ+ communities. “We talk to community advocacy organizations that often say it is powerful to show these videos to a group where it lays out clearly what the industry was doing to their community. It empowers people and inspires them to take action.”
Senate hearings in regards to S1883 The Tobacco Education Control Act of 1990.
UCSF archivists say the partnership with the Internet Archive provides users with two different access points and expands the audience for the collection beyond academics. The Medical Heritage Library has also added videos and audio files from UCSF into its larger collection on the Internet Archive, spreading the materials’ reach even further.
Next, the UCSF archivists are looking to develop new ways of working with and accessing the collection, using automated transcription to enable data scientists to analyze the recordings in new ways. The IDL is also adding opioid industry recordings to the collection as part of its work on the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University. These new recordings will enable the public to learn more about the circumstances leading to the opioid crisis.
“It’s exciting to be connected to such an innovative organization as the Internet Archive,” Tasker said. “It’s out in front of a lot of big issues that most digital archives are facing. Whenever we’re looking to do something with a new media type, format, or a new way of distributing content to people, archivists and librarians look to what the Internet Archive is doing as a guide.”
What just happened on archive.org today, as best we know:
Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. (Even by web standards,10’s of thousands of requests per second is a lot.)
This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
We are thankful to our engineers who could scramble on a Sunday afternoon on a holiday weekend to work on this.
We got the service back up by blocking those IP addresses.
But, another 64 addresses started the same type of activity a couple of hours later.
We figured out how to block this new set, but again, with about an hour outage.
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How this could have gone better for us:
Those wanting to use our materials in bulk should start slowly, and ramp up.
Also, if you are starting a large project please contact us at info@archive.org, we are here to help.
If you find yourself blocked, please don’t just start again, reach out.
Again, please use the Internet Archive, but don’t bring us down in the process.
While there are plenty of items at the Internet Archive that have no obvious home elsewhere online, there are also cases where we hold a copy of a frequently-available set of material, but we can provide it for much easier distribution and preview, including the ability to download the entire original set of files in one fell swoop.
Such it is with the USC SOUND EFFECTS LIBRARY, a collection of .WAV files taken from rapidly crumbling magnetic tape and presented for reference, enjoyment and even projects.
The world of sound effects is two-fold interesting:
There’s the interesting way we use recorded sound, cut together from various sources and even spliced from organic and generated sources, to provide the audio soundtrack for visual experiences in a way the audience thinks sounds “natural”.
And there’s the actual process of sound effects, of engineers going into the field or into a studio and generating sound after speculative sound, trying to find just the right combination of noise and speech to create just what they might need in the future.
As long as there has been performance on the Radio and to mediums beyond, the generating of sound effects live and recorded is a fascinating skill, shared among many different people, and is rightly considered an awards-worthy occupation. While not everyone is fascinated at this sort of work, many people are, and there’s a childlike delight in going through a “sound library” of effects and noises, getting ideas of how they might be used later.
As explained in a blog entry written by Craig Smith, a variety of tapes called the “Red” and “Gold” libraries of recorded sound effects were joined by a third set from a sound company called Sunset Editorial, who worked on hundreds of films over the years.
This collection has now been mirrored at the Internet Archive.
In the USC Optical Effects Library are over 1,000 digitized tapes of sound effects, including not just the sounds themselves but the voices of many different engineers bracketing them with explanations, cajoling and call-outs while they’re being made. We hear not just a dog panting, but an engineer talking to the dog that they’re doing a good job. Some recordings clearly have a crew sitting around while recordings are being made, and they hush with the sound of professionals knowing they can’t just edit the noise out if they talk over it.
There are machines: Planes, Cars and Weapons. There are explosions, fire and footsteps. There’s effects just called SCIFI or MAGIC, where the shared culture of Hollywood’s take on what things “sounded like” makes itself known.
The pleasant stroll of “just playing” the effects in our browser-based player belies the fact that at one time, this was magnetic reels, sliced with razors and joined with tape, used to remix and reconstitute environments of sound for entertainment. The push to digital allows for much more experimentation and mixing without generational loss and huge amounts of precious time, but in these versions we can hear how much work went into the foundational soundscape of entertainment in the 20th century.
Craig Smith, who made this collection available, goes into great detail in his blog entry about how fragile these tapes had become before being transferred, and how some were lost along the way. Folks unfamiliar with “Sticky Shed Syndrome” and the process of “baking tapes” will be surprised to know how quickly and dramatically tapes can fall apart after a passage of time. With large efforts by a number of people, the amount that was saved is now available at the Archive.
There is extensive metadata in each item, captured as spreadsheets and documents about the assumed sources or credits of the sound. They’re important to bring along with these noises if a patron wants to maintain a local copy.
Speaking of which.
In this collection is a massive compilation of all the data related to the project. It’s located in an item called “Sound Effect Libraries (Red, Gold, Sunset Editorial)”. Patrons whose immediate urge is to grab their own private set of the data to keep “safe” will want to go to this item, using either the direct download of the three .ZIP files inside, or to click on the TORRENT link to download the 20+ gigabytes of files. Depending on your bandwidth, it will take some time to download, but you can be assured that you got “all” the data from this amazing collection. This, in some ways, is the Internet Archive’s greatest strength – direct access to the original files for others to have, instead of adding a layer of processing and change as the presentation mediums of the day require modification for “ease”.
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.
Art historians, critics, curators, humanities scholars and many others rely on the records of artists, galleries, museums, and arts organizations to conduct historical research and to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. Yet, much of the art-related materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web and are thus ephemeral by nature. In response to this challenge, more than 40 art libraries spent the last 3 years developing a collective approach to preservation of web-based art materials at scale.
Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) community has successfully aligned effort across libraries large and small, from Manoa, Hawaii to Toronto, Ontario and back resulting in preservation of and access to 800 web-based art resources, organized into 8 collections (art criticism, art fairs and events, art galleries, art history and scholarship, artists websites, arts education, arts organizations, auction houses), totalling nearly 9 TBs of data with continued growth. All collections are preserved in perpetuity by the Internet Archive.
Today, CARTA is excited to launch the CARTA portal – providing unified access to CARTA collections.
🎨 CARTA portal 🎨
The CARTA portal includes web archive collections developed jointly by CARTA members, as well as preexisting art-related collections from CARTA institutions, and non-CARTA member collections. CARTA portal development builds on the Internet Archive’s experience creating the COVID-19 Web Archive and Community Webs portal.
CARTA collections are searchable by contributing organization, collection, site, and page text. Advanced search supports more granular exploration by host, results per host, file types, and beginning and end dates.
🔭 CARTA search 🔭
In addition to the CARTA portal, CARTA has worked to promote research use of collections through a series of day long computational research workshops – Working to Advance Library Support for Web Archive Research – backed by ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub). A call for applications for the next workshop, held concurrent to the annual Society of American Archivists meeting, is now open.
Moving forward CARTA aims to grow and diversify its membership in order to increase collective ability to preserve web-based art materials. If your art library would like to join CARTA please express interest here..
Welcome to the No Ethics in Big Tech NSA 10th Annual Comedy Night produced by friend of the Internet Archive, Vahid Rezavi.
The evening will feature the comedy of Will Durst, Mean Dave, Chloe McGovern, and Alicia Dattner, accompanied by talented musician Mike Rufo.
But the real stars of the evening are the speakers from No Ethics in Big Tech, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Media Alliance, Veterans for Peace and Common Dreams. These experts will discuss the ethical implications of technology, the latest developments in the tech world, and the importance of a free and independent press in the age of algorithmic news feeds.
Get Tickets to Virtual Event Here Saturday, May 20, 2023 6:00-8:00 pm Pacific
