Efforts Underway to Preserve Historic Images of 1960s San Francisco and Find the Mystery Photographer Who Shot Them

Bill Delzell is trying to track down who took thousands of high-quality photos in the late 1960s in San Francisco and left the vast collection abandoned in a storage unit. The images include protests of the Vietnam War, the music scene with Jerry Garcia, and young people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In.

A commercial photographer himself, Delzell became interested in the mystery two years ago. Today, he is championing an effort to identify the person behind the camera and share the work broadly, including providing public access to the collection through the Internet Archive. He launched a Kickstarter campaign, “Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed” to help uncover clues and locate the photographer. Photographs shared on social media have attracted over 1.5 million views and the Kickstarter effort is advancing to its $49,000 goal. “It’s been quite a ride,” he said. “I think of myself as an advocate for this unknown photographer.”

So far, about 5,700 photos from 1966 to 1970 on black-and-white film and color slides have been developed ; another 75 rolls of 35mm film remain unprocessed. The images were discovered in the 1980s and passed hands through several dealers before Delzell was introduced to them through a friend.

“After turning a few pages in the collection, I had this overwhelming sense of loss,” said Delzell, 67, who worked as a photographer for over 30 years in San Francisco and now runs SpeakLocal.org, a nonprofit in Sacramento. “The idea that a person could devote five years of their life capturing so much of such an iconic era, and then to have become separated from it … my mind was spinning. I left with an awareness of the importance of the collection and preoccupied with how we could reconnect the photographer with their work.”

Now, his dream is to raise enough money to complete the restoration and uncover the mystery of the gifted photographer. The images would be of great value to educators, he said, teaching about that tumultuous time in American history.

“There is historical significance of the work,” Delzell said, who went to protests in the 1960s with his activist parents. “The idea of a community coming together to search for the identity of this individual, as well as individuals in the photograph, is what appeals to me. We’re still at a time where a lot of the people in those images are alive, and they can share their stories.”

Resources
– Kickstarter campaign: Who Shot Me — Stories Unprocessed
– Reddit: /WhoShotMe

Delzell has involved young people through his nonprofit organization dedicated to project-based learning. They are helping to scan the images and create a database through paid internships or school credit. The aim is to develop an interactive tool, and perhaps a book or documentary about the photos and quest for the photographer.

Once the work is shared with backers, Delzell wants it to be available to all on the Internet Archive. His plan is to preserve the collection and make it accessible with the public interest in mind.

Delzell credits the enthusiastic response to the project to the phenomenal era when the photos were taken. 

“If you think about any moment in the history of humankind, there’s probably never been a time that has had such a transformational impact on culture as the 60s,” he said. “To be able to dive into 8,000 images – all captured through the eye of one individual – is unique. Educators can add the images to their curriculum when they’re talking about subjects like the Civil Rights movement or the Summer of Love or the counterculture movement. It just really represents a great opportunity.”

LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO — Streets, People and Play: The Drama of Daily Life

January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets

This year’s LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO (the 19th!) casts an archival gaze on the lives of San Franciscans and Bay residents. Drawn from over 400 newly scanned archival films plus a few old favorites, this year’s film revels in the textures and activities of everyday life, labor and celebration, replaying known and unknown historical moments, daylighting lost and found infrastructures, revealing the scars of settlement and pointing to more hopeful futures. Highlights include intimate views of the Mission District, recently discovered BART films, coverage of Western Addition redevelopment and displacement, and much more. Almost all of the footage has not been shown before.

As always, the audience makes the soundtrack. Please come prepared to raise your voices; identify places, people and events; and ask questions of others in the audience.

By attending, you’ll directly contribute to supporting the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger will be presenting as per usual. Don’t miss this opportunity to be a part of truly special evening!

Doors open at 6:30 pm. Film starts at 7:30 PM

No one will be turned away due to lack of funds!

January 13 @ 6:30pm – 9pm
Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Buy Tickets

Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025

Image credit: Montage of materials moving into the public domain in 2025. Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways:

  • Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 22 – both virtual and in-person.
  • Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest.
  • Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2025, below.

On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain! The passage of these works into the public domain celebrates our shared cultural heritage. The ability to breathe new life into long forgotten works, remix the most popular and enduring works of the time, and to better circulate the oddities we find in thrift stores, attics, and on random pockets of the internet are now freely available for us all.

While not at the same blockbuster level as 2024 with Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain, works from 1929 still inhabit strong cultural significance today. The works of 1929 continue to capture the Lost Generation’s voice, the rise of sound film, and the emerging modern moment of the 1920s. 

Musical Compositions

Show tunes and Jazz dominated the year with many standards that we remember today first being published. While best known for the 1952 film of the same name, Singin’ in the Rain was first published in 1929 and serves as the inspiration for our remix contest this year. George Gershwin also officially published (and copyrighted) his suite An American in Paris following a premiere in late 1928.

Below is sheet music for some popular compositions of the time.

Literature

Reflections on World War I continued with A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. William Faulkner published his modernist novel The Sound and the Fury. A. A. Milne followed up 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner by adapting The Wind in the Willows into the play Toad of Toad Hall. Detective fiction thrived in 1929, with The Maltese Falcon serialized in Black Mask, Agatha Christie captivating readers with The Seven Dials Mystery, and the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, making its debut. Explore our 1929 periodicals to find more hidden detective gems.

While not a towering work of literature, the first set of comic strips featuring Popeye also are joining the public domain. Popeye first made an appearance in Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Initially just a side character for an adventure arc featuring gambling and sailing, Popeye rose quickly to fame. By February 4, 1931 the Thimble Theatre would feature a subtitle, Starring Popeye, before being renamed just Popeye later on.

Below is a further selection of works from the year:

Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1929.

Films

Last year Mickey Mouse made a splash with Steamboat Willie cruising into the public domain. This year TWELVE more Mickey shorts join to flesh out the notable events of Mickey’s young career. He speaks his first words in The Karnival Kid, he wears gloves for the first time in The Opry House, and Ub Iwerks leaves the studio at year’s end with Wild Waves. Disney animation also kickstarted their Silly Symphonies series with the haunting tales The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.

In 1929, if your film wanted to have any attention it needed sound. Musical films were everywhere with The Broadway Melody winning the second ever Best Picture award at the Oscars, The Hollywood Revue introducing the world to “Singin’ in the Rain”, and the Marx Brothers making their big screen debut with The Cocoanuts.

Below is a list of more significant films from the year:

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 17, 2025, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

Additional resources

In honor of Public Domain Day, this post is published with a CC0 Waiver dedicating it to the public domain.

Celebrate the Public Domain with the Internet Archive

On January 1, 2025, creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US.

1929 marked the last gasp of the roaring 20s and ushered in the Great Depression, a major economic crisis that would span the next 12 years. One thing we can see nearly a century later is that, in good times and bad, human creativity, knowledge, and culture persist. That year, Virginia Woolfe published her groundbreaking essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” advocating for female freedom of expression. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York City, featuring the works of Van Gough, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Major movie studios put out not one, but two musicals starring all Black casts: “Halleluja” and “Hearts of Dixie.” Disney continued the Mickey Mouse trend with a dozen new animated shorts. And of course famous songs like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Singin’ in the Rain” topped the charts.

Celebrate the public domain with us:

1. Creators: Enter the Public Domain Film Remix Contest

We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate the public domain by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive! Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500. Contest details.

2. Virtual Celebration: January 22nd @ 10am PT

Join us on January 22 to get “that glorious feeling” of singin’ in the public domain! We’ll have an amazing virtual lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to celebrate this new class of works being free for everyone to enjoy. Register now!

3. In-Person Celebration: January 22nd @ 6pm PT

Please join us at our headquarters in San Francisco for a Celebration of the Public Domain! This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. Put on your finest attire and get ready for an award-worthy evening. Register now!

4. Explore the public domain

Check out our recent post for links to the newly opened public domain resources at the Internet Archive.

Additional resources

  • Learn more about what’s moving into the public domain in 2025 from Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
  • Public Domain Review has a festive countdown to 2025.
  • Interested in what’s happening with the public domain in Europe? Communia is hosting a one-day event on January 9 in Brussels.

Staring into the Void

First, let’s get one myth out of the way: The Internet Archive has not been up, rock-steady and with no loss of service or connection, for twenty-eight years.

Starting out as a project to archive online materials, with a lot of speculative ideas of how to handle data at scale, the archive.org website was hosted at a shifting set of locations across its early years. It ran at razor-thin margins while rubbing hardware and software elbows with all sorts of then-famous sites; it directed its staff towards nebulous and aspirational goals while trying not to burn through its resources.

Stand back, we’re not sure how big this Archive is going to get.

A lot changed in October of 2001, when the Wayback Machine was introduced to the world at a ceremony at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, and the Web spontaneously developed something it hadn’t really had before: a memory.

That Memory went from a feature to a core utility for the internet.

Collections such as the Prelinger Library and the Live Music Archive were also coming along for the ride, providing a way for people to just get to the good stuff and not face down web banners and pop-up ads just to listen and watch culture from a growing set of sources and reaching back farther in time, to before the web itself.

Serving a massively-enlarging set of data to a massively-increasing audience became an engineering and cost problem, and ultimately the problem – how do you retrieve and provide terabytes, then hundreds of terabytes, then petabytes, then dozens of petabytes of data to your patrons without, again, falling to a thousand potential problems?

Photo by Ben Margot of Associated Press, 2006.

The short answer is that you work very hard with a very dedicated crew with a shared vision, but the longer answer is that sometimes, issues arise.

Many issues.

Network equipment crashes, power strip failures, unexpected configurations and firmware upgrades gone wrong. Unaccounted growth in files, surprise operating system limits, and countless other snags and roadbumps have hit the archive over nearly three decades. These problems are definitely not unique to the archive’s existence – many other websites and computers in the world experience the same snags.

Some of the snags have been localized – an item stops loading, or a filetype renders wrong in some browsers. Others will take out a rack of machines, a fleet of drives, and late nights or long days bring them back to service.

Further issues are even more generalized: Power outages due to weather or fire, or a cable (power or network) is sliced through by a misinformed construction crew. A solid heatwave takes some of the machines out for hours at a time.

Across the years, the Archive has had outages lasting minutes, hours, and even days.

In 2024, for the first time in recent history, it was weeks.

The Archive staff was now spending long days and nights auditing, assessing, and improving the entire infrastructure of the Archive, top to bottom. To the public, we looked completely down, and to some, waiting patiently and then less-patiently for the return of the site, they came to a conclusion: this was it.

For some people, the era of Internet Archive was over. The Wayback Machine, Open Library and the Internet Archive were, in one shocking stroke, gone.

This was, it turns out, not true. And it was also something surprising: an opportunity.

Among the things it is very difficult to do is attend your own funeral. You don’t get to stand among the mourners and hear their thoughts, and to find out what about you mattered to them, and what difference you made over the course of them knowing you.

You don’t hear the proclamations, the dedications, the thoughts about what inspirations and warnings your life held.

But in October, we did.

There is, naturally, an entire ecosystem dedicated to taking news about sites like the Archive being down and stretching them into 30 minute presentations, and there are articles and editorials about any events of note online.

But during this period of weeks, we also got to see the conversations, statements and posts of long-time users, who otherwise would not have communicated about their relationship with the holdings and offerings they’d used for so long.

For many people, the Archive is a standard part of their browsing life – a vast and complex shelf of media and pieces of culture that they reach out to in the process of their day.

For others, it’s a critical tool in their toolbox of research, be it verifying a source for an assignment or tracking down long-otherwise-removed sources that would be near impossible if not for the Wayback Machine or the stacks within the main site.

And the amount of people who spend their days and nights walking the collections, browsing idly and finding inspiration or entertainment or relief flipping through the items, is very significant.

The inherent invisibility of the Archive, however, can’t be ignored.

It’s clear that, for many patrons, when they look for something, they search for “SOMETHING internet archive” in their search engine or go directly to archive.org to search, but the existence of a “there” related to the archive had drifted into the background. The outage had brought the bulk of our collection and presence, the depth of it, into the foreground.

In this new attention came bewilderment at the downtime, and then a protective anger.

The Archive represents a shrinking population of sites on the web – it is not “for” a company or “for” shareholders, but is run and available “for” everyone, as much as it can afford, and facing down all the challenges that come with a constantly growing site being visited by millions of patrons, daily.

As time has passed and the years have progressed, it feels like the air you breathe and the water you drink: the place you walk through on your way to knowledge.

Staring into the void of a lost Internet Archive, people took to social media and communities to be scared, bothered, worried, and angry – and for many to recognize what part it plays in many people’s lives.

At the end of 2024, after a pretty tough year, with often-unsung employees within the Archive working incredible long and stressful hours to minimize the outages and downtime, it’s the comments from donors, posts on social media, and supportive communications (e-mail and otherwise) that have helped make everyone excited to face 2025 and beyond.

Usually, the tidal wave of users that pass through our machines remain as blinking lights on servers, and the Archive is simply a website that many people use. In this period of darkness and loss of access, everyone was reminded of the many other parts the archive plays in life, and that, at least, is a precious knowledge.

We’re glad to be back, and to be back with you. Here’s to the next year and the years to follow.

VERBATIM, Verbatim

By Erin McKean, editor of VERBATIM.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly began as a simple six-page pamphlet in 1974, a project launched by lexicographer Laurence Urdang as content marketing — before that was ever a term — for his reference-book publishing company. The quarterly soon outgrew that narrow focus, and within a few years was as many as thirty-two pages jam-packed with “recreational linguistics” articles by scholars, lexicographers, and other word enthusiasts, plus word puzzles and book reviews. 

Now you can find the entire run of the journal on the Internet Archive, under a Creative Commons license. The 125 issues are full-text searchable, and can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs.

VERBATIM ceased publishing in 2008, but much of what it published remains evergreen. Although the journal is available in hard copy in many libraries, having it available via the Internet Archive makes it far more accessible to language enthusiasts! (Many thanks to Kay Savetz of the Archive, who volunteered to scan the paper copies.)

In addition to the new scans at the Archive, the VERBATIM website has relaunched with plain-text versions of the issues, and a full professional index. VERBATIM is now part of Wordnik Society, the 501c3 nonprofit that runs the online English language dictionary Wordnik.com.

A portion of the front page of Verbatim, December 1977 issue. Shows a stylized VERBATIM logo and the headline "We Do Not Only Talk With Our Mouths" - the cover article by Walburga von Raffler-Engel of Vanderbilt University

College Radio’s Rich Legacy: Latest Updates from DLARC

Highlights include 1980s radio interviews with LL Cool J, Sonic Youth and more, 1960s amateur radio footage, college radio oral histories, and radio station correspondence from the 1940s-1960s 

By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection

Feast your eyes and ears on the latest additions to the college radio collection within the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications! Over the past few months we’ve added materials from numerous college radio stations and archives, including vintage and contemporary audio, film, and video pieces. 

Recruitment flyer from New York University college radio station WNYU

Most recently, the archivists at New York University student radio station WNYU-FM have contributed a number of 1980s radio interviews with music luminaries, including LL Cool J, ESG, members of Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore in 1984 and Kim Gordon in 1986), Billy Idol, and Jello Biafra. Also in the WNYU collection is audio from the station’s inaugural FM broadcast in 1973, plus paper items like program guides, flyers, and correspondence.

Another “first” broadcast recording, from campus-only AM station WWEC in 1963, is part of the Elizabethtown College Radio collection. Adding even more context to the story of radio on this Pennsylvania-based college campus is a collection of interviews conducted in 2014-2015 as part of the WWEC Oral History Project. Other WWEC items include station meeting minutes, history documents and a  Top 30 list from 1974. Elizabethtown College’s radio efforts were also represented by work done by its publicity office. Hundreds of pages of scripts for the shows “Campus Calling” and “From the Elizabethtown College Campus,” are other new additions to DLARC.

As was the case at Elizabethtown College, Auburn University also produced promotional radio programs that aired on local stations. Among the items that we’ve added from Auburn University are more than 2,000 installments of the weekly radio show “AU Profiles,” airchecks and shows recorded at student radio station WEGL, and a set of interviews about the history of WEGL.

But perhaps my favorite recent audio-visual addition is a compilation of 1960s home movies that document activities of University of Pennsylvania’s amateur radio club. They reside in our new Penn Amateur Radio Club archive, which collects items from this historically-significant club that began as the Wireless Club of the University of Pennsylvania in 1909. Early student wireless clubs were the incubators for future broadcast stations, so we hope to increase the representation of both high school and collegiate amateur radio clubs in DLARC.

Another area of curatorial interest is college radio at women’s colleges, especially since many women’s colleges built radio stations during the early carrier current boom in the 1940s and 1950s. DLARC’s new Smith College Radio Club and Stations collection provides context for understanding the college radio landscape during this time and what it was like for new stations trying to get their start. Within the collection are numerous folders full of correspondence, items from college radio conferences (including one hosted by Smith College station WCSR), organizational documents, scripts, and program schedules. Newer materials include flyers and program guides from the currently operating FM station at Smith: WOZQ-FM.  

Additionally, we continue to grow our collection of Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) materials. As mentioned in our July update, this college radio trade organization began in 1940 and has been hosting conventions and producing newsletters and other publications ever since. Since they don’t have their own archive, we’ve been piecing one together thanks to all the college radio stations and institutions that have carefully preserved IBS items over the years. 

As part of this effort, we added over 200 pages of IBS correspondence and related items from Smith College and have also sleuthed out various missing issues of IBS’ Journal of College Radio from a variety of sources, bringing our grand total to just about 100 issues. Do you have copies of IBS’ Journal of College Radio in your own collection? Our wish list includes College Radio (Volumes 1-3), Journal of College Radio (Volume 13.2, 19.4, 19.5, 20-22, 25.4 and any subsequent issues), and IBS newsletters and bulletins from many eras.

"Are you interested in radio" flyer from New York University college radio station WNYU

Finally, we have some new collections that we are just starting to populate. Take a peek at the WFMU and WHUS collections for more college radio goodies. And be sure to scope around DLARC College Radio to find other gems from stations where we haven’t established a designated collection. One of my favorites is a short animation demonstrating a Valentine’s Day-themed ‘zine from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s college radio station KCPR. 

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org.

Top Ten Most Popular Grateful Dead Recordings at the Internet Archive

By Herb Greene – Billboard, page 9, 5 December 1970, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27041998

As the Grateful Dead are honored at the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast on Sunday (airing December 22 at 8:30pm ET on CBS & streaming), we’re celebrating their legacy with a look at the top ten most popular recordings in the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection. Home to over 17,000 live recordings spanning decades of performances, this collection reflects the band’s rich history, their loyal taper community, and the boundless creativity of their legendary shows. From mesmerizing jams to unforgettable setlists, these recordings represent the enduring magic of the Dead—and the timeless connection between the band and their fans. Listen in and rediscover the music that has kept the Grateful Dead’s spirit alive for generations:

Top Ten Grateful Dead Live Recordings at the Internet Archive

  1. Grateful Dead Live at Barton Hall, Cornell University on 1977-05-08 (1.3M views)
  2. Grateful Dead Live at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium on 1973-06-10 (1.2M views)
  3. Grateful Dead Live at Dane County Coliseum on 1973-02-15 (1.0M views)
  4. Grateful Dead Live at The Centrum on 1987-04-03 (782k views)
  5. Grateful Dead Live at Boston Garden on 1977-05-07 (772k views)
  6. Grateful Dead Live at Swing Auditorium on 1977-02-26 (741k views)
  7. Grateful Dead Live at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium on 1977-05-09 (704k views)
  8. Grateful Dead Live at Hollywood Palladium on 1971-08-06 (555k views)
  9. Grateful Dead Live at Soldier Field on 1995-07-09 (551k views)
  10. Grateful Dead Live at Barton Hall – Cornell University on 1977-05-08 (545k views)

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the legendary concert at Barton Hall, Cornell University, on May 8, 1977 appears twice on the list. The collection often features multiple recordings of the same show by different tapers from different vantage points in the crowd. A note on #10 indicates that recording was made “10 Feet From Stage=Great Instrement [sic] Pickup.”

Vanishing Culture: Type Ephemera—Lessons in Endearment

The following guest post from writer and book artist Eve Scarborough is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

What is type ephemera and why does it need to be preserved? 

Type ephemera, specifically the kind collected by Letterform Archive, refers to paper goods used to advertise or display typefaces for purchase. Often produced by foundries, type ephemera takes many structural forms and examples including—

  • a paper folio containing multiple examples of types in use, such as mock restaurant menus, travel pamphlets, concert programs and business cards. (below)
  • a saddle stitched book with one or more typefaces, referred to as a type specimen, including examples of the upper and lowercase alphabet or shown alongside sample sentences. (below)
  • a small booklet printed in black, red and green ink, illustrating the foundry’s seasonal collection of holiday borders and ornaments. (below)

From an archival perspective, type ephemera is important to preserve because it captures a time when past printing technologies and methods of bookbinding were abundant. While there are multiple organizations, museums and libraries dedicated to preserving fine press and book arts, not all are accessible to everyone, and only a handful focus specifically on instruction. Thus, it is urgent for type ephemera to be digitized and remain widely available to the public, especially as interest in learning book arts and letterpress printing continues to grow. Ephemera is unique in that it challenges notions of value and permanence, two ideas that dominate special collections and archives. Its temporal nature as both everyday and non-archival objects invites us to consider, and in some cases witness, how pieces of ephemera were repurposed and transformed by their makers and guardians. 

It is difficult to find and name the workers who cast, set, printed, and bound the specimens that eventually made their way to the archive. At the time I was cataloging this collection, the metadata fields we used included columns to note typeface designers, foundry names, and potential partner distributors. There was also a column to include the object worktype; “metal type” appears frequently throughout the spreadsheet. As I worked, I noticed that many of the specimens were produced with acidic paper,* intended for immediate distribution to print shops and customers.

Sometimes I would come across a pamphlet or binding that expanded unexpectedly, or made use of additional space. I began making note of the type of structure or binding for each specimen in the object description field: 

“Booklet, 12 pages. Saddle stitched binding. Light blue cover. Single color printing. Black ink on white paper.” 

Including the names of these structures allowed me to begin filling the gaps in knowledge. By including them, I hoped that their presence would spark curiosity among viewers and provide insight to those researching book structures. Through writing and editing metadata, I could contribute to the dialogue between the object and its makers, and lend what I knew as a book artist and archival worker to future researchers and visitors. 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Many of the objects I have cataloged during my time with this collection bear signs of use: paragraphs of type circled in ballpoint pen or cut out entirely, lead-smudged fingerprints likely left by typesetters, signatures coming undone from their text blocks. These details are the most precious to me. They are instances in which an object left an impression on its reader, and in turn, its readers left a tangible impression on the object. By making note of these imperfections in the metadata, I hope to preserve the labor and relational histories of the objects, and in a way, center the people who made them. 92 years ago, typography scholar Beatrice Warde argued that good printing should aim to be almost invisible, likening the rare success to a crystal goblet filled with wine (Warde 11, 13). Imperfect, dog-eared, oxidizing type specimens upend this notion, instead placing emphasis on construction and transformation rather than content. The text included in type ephemera is not meant to convey a message or narrative; rather, it is present to center and sell the type. As letterpresses are no longer the primary means of print production, new styles of letterpress printing have become popular—one example being the “bite” or heavy impression of type into paper—revealing first and foremost, the hand of the printer. 

As an archivist, ephemera is endearing to me because it is a form of printed matter that is not meant to endure. Cataloging ephemera transformed the way I thought about time, decay, and value. Before entering the Archive, I favored examples of pristine letterpress printing and craft. Presently, I have grown fond of and admire the work that reminds us of our own temporality. Ephemera still holds a place in our lives, though its proliferation is diminishing as we move toward a more environmentally conscious world. Digital spaces have overwhelmingly become our personal platforms for documentation, record-keeping and more. Perhaps we live in a city that still issues paper bus tickets, or write our grocery lists on square sticky notes, or cram the free paper maps into our backpacks at the visitor center before a hike. Perhaps not. Think of the lifetimes that these objects live, crumpled into our pockets, or refused at cash registers and kiosks, waiting for their turn to be useful. How might we make meaning of, archive, or begin to transform the ephemera in our lives? What can we learn from historic type ephemera, not just as records of printmaking techniques or bound structures, but as anachronisms of the present? 

* Acidic paper refers to paper manufactured with acids, a method that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century. The long cellulose chains in paper degrade slowly over time due to prolonged exposure to air, but the presence of acids catalyzes the process significantly. The presence of acid impacts the paper’s longevity, making it brittle and more susceptible to tearing.

Works Cited:

Warde, Beatrice. “The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible.” The Sylvan Press, 1955. Web accessed 15 September 2024. 

About the author

Eve Scarborough is a Vietnamese-American writer and book artist. Her work explores the tension between structure and content, memory and language loss, and information decay as it relates to archives. Her current practice is grounded in critical theory and craft techniques including bookmaking, letterpress printing, and hand papermaking. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Mills College with a minor in Book Art. Presently, she digitizes ephemera, posters, process work, and more at Letterform Archive in San Francisco.

DWeb: Let’s Look Ahead to Another Big Year

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

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

DWeb Camp 2024

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

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

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

DWeb 2024 Highlights

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

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

What were some other notable happenings in our ecosystem?

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

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

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

What’s Next for DWeb in 2025

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

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

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

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

Here are the highlights of what we heard:

Let’s Walk Our Talk

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

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

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

DWeb Project Directory

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

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

Nodes Network and In-Person Gatherings

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

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

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

Virtual Gatherings and Communications

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

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

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

*~*~*~*~*

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

Upwards and onwards!

With gratitude,

DWeb Core Organizing Team