Please come join us as the Internet Archive partners with the Skyline College Art Gallery for the viewing of “Portraits of Growing Up Asian,” a photo exhibition that tells a visual story of a Chinese American family’s journey from China to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The Hall family’s arrival from China in the 1850’s resulted in the opening of the first Chinese herbal medicine shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1864 and became a hub for the local community. The business was open until it was unlawfully shut down by the FBI in 1957. This tragedy led to a family tradition in photography that spanned generations.
The exhibition features archived photographs and artifacts from the Hall Family Collection, including the family herb shop signage. It also features photographs by Timothy Hall and his experiences growing up in San Francisco from the 1950’s to contemporary times.
The exhibition explores themes of ancestry, family, discrimination, and all that comes with growing up as Chinese Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the mid to late 20th century.
In an era where the vast majority of “photographs” are a series of captured data points stored in the etheric realm of a digital universe, it becomes a delightful trip to step into the authentic past and to awaken to the sensations conveyed through the experience of an actual photograph. Please join us.
DATES: Mon Feb 26th Opening Reception and Opening 12-2pm Mar 26th – Closing Day
HOURS: Please visit the Skyline College Art Gallery Website for Hours Monday: 10am-12:30pm Tuesday: 4pm-6pm Wednesday: 10am-12:30pm Thursday: 4pm-6pm Friday: 11-4pm
This post was originally published in a newsletter by Project Liberty, February 20, 2024. Image by Project Liberty.
In the summer of 2023, the New York Times ran an article titled “Ways You Can Still Cancel Your Federal Student Loan Debt.”
The article outlined six ways to cancel student debt, with the final being:
“Death This is not something that most people would choose as a solution to their debt burden.”
At least that was the sixth reason until the New York Times revised it with a stealth edit. When you read the article today, choosing death as a solution to a debt burden has been replaced, but there’s no mention that this article was revised. The timestamp is still the day it was originally published.
The internet is constantly being revised in ways that allow history to be rewritten and a shared sense of truth to be questioned. With AI-generated disinformation, the potential to exert control over the future by rewriting the past has never been greater.
This week we’re exploring how digital archives are crucial in developing a record of truth in an ever-changing web.
The need for digital archives
Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine, spoke with the Project Liberty Foundation and shared the key reasons why there’s an even greater need for digital archives:
The importance of the internet. So much of what humanity publishes and makes available lives only on the internet. Given how much time we spend online, the internet has become a central medium of human expression, history, and culture.
The fragile and ephemeral nature of the internet. Graham shared two stats that underscore how fragile today’s internet is:
A study found that of the two million hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 to 2019, 25% of all links were broken (described as link rot).
The Wayback Machine has fixed 20 million broken links in Wikipedia articles with the correct ones.
“The web itself is a living thing. Webpages change. They go away on quite a frequent basis. There’s no backup system or version control system for the web,” Graham explained. That is, except for archives like the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a “time machine for the web,” in Graham’s words. It allows users to trace the evolution (or disappearance) of a webpage over time, enabling them to establish a record of what happened on the internet.
For example, the Apple.com URL has been archived 539,000 times since its first archived page in October 1996.
The Wayback Machine has archived over 866 billion webpages in its 28-year history. Today, it archives hundreds of millions of webpages every day and has become one of the most important archives of online content in the world.
How it works
The Wayback Machine “crawls” the web and downloads publicly accessible information. Webpages, documents, and data are stored with a time-stamped URL.
For information that’s not publicly accessible, Internet Archive offers web archiving services through Archive-It for 1,200 organizations in 24 countries around the world (from libraries to research institutions).
The Wayback Machine supports everyday people to help it archive the internet. Anyone can go to Save Page Now to archive a webpage or article.
The Wayback Machine partners with 1,200 fact-checking organizations globally to help it reference material on the web that was the source of disinformation. It has built a library of more than 200,000 examples where a claim has been made, and the Wayback Machine has provided additional context on if that claim is true (known as a review of the claim).
Archive of facts
Fixing links, archiving webpages, and fact-checking digital articles are part of a deeper, more important project to chronicle digital history and establish a record of facts.
Last month, the archive of press releases from a sitting member of Congress, New York’s Elise Stefanik, vanished after she came under scrutiny. The Wayback Machine documented this erasure and provided a time-stamped record of past versions of her website and press releases.
In 2018, a US Appeals court ruled that the Wayback Machine’s archive of webpages can be used as legitimate legal evidence.
The Internet Archive has countless examples of when the press have referenced the Wayback Machine to correct disinformation and dispel rumors. In one example from last year, the Associated Press relied on the Wayback Machine to set the record that the CDC did not say the polio vaccine gave millions of Americans a “cancer virus.”
Building digital archives is a bulwark against those attempting to rewrite history and spread misinformation. An archived, time-stamped webpage is not just unimpeachable evidence, it’s a foundational building block of a shared sense of reality.
In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down over Ukraine, the Wayback Machine captured evidence that a pro-Russian group was behind the missile attack. But it wasn’t the Wayback Machine’s algorithms that captured the evidence by crawling the internet; it was an individual who found an obscure blog post from a Ukrainian separatist leader touting the shooting down of a plane. That individual identified the blogpost as important enough to be archived, and it became a critical piece of evidence, even after that post disappeared from the internet.
As Graham said, “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. If you see something, save something.”
What pages can you help archive? Archive them with the Wayback Machine on Save Page Now.
As we celebrate Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, we are reminded of all the ways these flexible copyright exceptions enable libraries to preserve materials and meet the needs of the communities they serve. Indeed, fair use is essential to the functioning of libraries, and underlies many of the ordinary library practices that we all take for granted. In this blog post, we wanted to describe a few of the ways the fair use doctrine has helped us build our library.
Fair use in action: Web Archives and the Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive has been archiving the web since the mid-1990’s. Our web collection now includes more than 850 billion web pages, with hundreds of millions added each day. The Wayback Machine is a free service that lets people visit these archived websites. Users can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the web.
Web archives are used for a variety of important purposes, many of which are themselves fair uses. News reporting and investigative journalism is one such use of the Wayback Machine. Indeed, thousands of news articles have relied upon historical versions of the web from the Wayback Machine. Just last week, 13 links to the Wayback Machine were used in a CNN story about an Ohio GOP Senate candidate’s previous statements that were critical of former President Trump. Our web archive also becomes an urgent backup for media sites that are shut down suddenly, whether by authoritarian governments or for other reasons, often becoming the only accessible source both for the authors of these stories and for the public. Another important purpose web archives can serve is as evidence in legal disputes. Attorneys use the Wayback Machine in their daily practice for evidentiary and research purposes. In 2023 alone, the Internet Archive attested to 450 affidavits in cases where Wayback Machine captures were used as evidence in court.
The Wayback Machine also makes other parts of the web, such as Wikipedia, more useful and reliable. To date, the Internet Archive has been able to repair over 19 million broken links, URLs, that had returned a 404 (Page Not Found) error message, from 320 different Wikipedia language editions. There are many reasons, including bit rot and content drift, why links stop working. Restoring links ensures that Wikipedia remains an accurate and verifiable source of information for the public good. And we hope to build new tools and partnerships to help create a more dependable knowledge ecosystem as more and more content on the web is created by generative AI.
The Fair Use doctrine is broadly considered to be what makes web archiving possible. Without it, much of our knowledge and cultural heritage–huge amounts of which are now artifacts in digital form–would be at risk. In today’s chaotic information ecosystem, safeguarding this material in an open, accessible, and transparent way is vital for history and vital for democracy.
Fair use in action: Manuals collection
Whether you are an individual who has rendered an appliance useless because you lost the instructions, or a professional mechanic looking to fix an old vehicle, owners’ manuals are invaluable. As the right to repair movement has amply demonstrated, copyright should not stand as an obstacle to using machines you’ve bought and paid for. This is a place where fair use can shine.
Over the years, the Internet Archive has received manuals, instruction sheets and informational pamphlets of all kinds. The Manuals collection has well over a million items—or users to access 24/7 at no cost. This resource gives people the right to repair and extend the life of their products. Whether you are a rocket scientist needing to operate your space shuttle, a mechanic who needs to repair a vintage VW Bug, or a curious kid trying to fix up your mom’s old computer, having free online access to the technical documentation you need is essential. And in many cases, there would appear to be no other way to get access to this crucial information.
Some preserved manuals are a single printed page with poorly constructed diagrams. Others are multi-volume tomes that give exacting details on operation of a complex piece of machinery. These materials are more than instructions or a list of components. They reflect the priorities and approaches that companies and individuals take with products, as well as the artistic and visual efforts to make an item clear to the reader.
This collection is a cool example of how fair use provides a framework for the Internet Archive to share critical knowledge with consumers. At the same time, it provides a historical timeline of sorts for innovation and the development of technology.
From preserving our digital history to providing access to manuals of obsolete devices, fair use helps libraries like ours serve our community. And while there are no doubt a variety of commercial projects that properly rely on fair use, fair use is at heart about the public good. As we celebrate Fair Use week, we should remember the crucial role it plays, and ensure that we preserve and protect fair use for the good of future generations. For more on events and news on Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, visit FairUseWeek.org.
From Prince of Persia to Replay: A video game creator’s family odyssey
Jordan Mechner (creator of “Prince of Persia”) shares his story as a pioneer in the fast-growing video game industry from the 1980s to today, and how his family’s back story as refugees from war-torn Europe led to his own multifaceted 4-decade creative career. Interweaving of past and present, family transmission, exile and renewal are at the heart of his award-winning graphic novel “Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.”
For general audiences, including anyone interested in video game development, graphic novels, transmedia, or multigenerational family stories.
Book Talk: REPLAY March 27 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
About REPLAY
1914. A teenage romantic heads to the enlistment ofice when his idyllic life in a Jewish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is shattered by World War I.
1938. A seven-year-old refugee begins a desperate odyssey through France, struggling to outrun the rapidly expanding Nazi regime and reunite with his family on the other side of the Atlantic.
2015. e creator of a world-famous video game franchise weighs the costs of uprooting his family and moving to France as the cracks in his marriage begin to grow.
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner calls on the voices of his father and grandfather to weave a powerful story about the enduring challenge of holding a family together in the face of an ever-changing world.
JORDAN MECHNER is an author, graphic novelist, game designer, and screenwriter. He created the video game Prince of Persia in 1989, rebooted it with Ubisot in 2003, and wrote the first screenplay for Disney’s 2010 film adaptation, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. His other games include Karateka and The Last Express. In 2017, he received the Pioneer Award from the International Game Developers Association. Jordan’s graphic novels as writer include the New York Times bestseller Templar (from First Second, with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland), Monte Cristo (Mario Alberti), and Liberty (Etienne LeRoux). Replay is his first book as writer/artist.
Book Talk: REPLAY March 27 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET Register now for the virtual event!
How data surveillance, digital forensics, and generative AI pose new long-term threats and opportunities—and how we can use them to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.
Book Talk: The Secret Life of Data April 18 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET ONLINE Register now!
“I have been waiting a long time for a clearly written book that cuts through the hype and describes how data—big and small, old and new—actually operate in our lives. Neither utopian nor dystopian, The Secret Life of Data just tells it like it is.” —Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, The University of Virginia; author of Antisocial Media and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
In The Secret Life of Data, Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.
ARAM SINNREICH is an author, professor, and musician. He is Chair of Communication Studies at American University. His books include Mashed Up,The Piracy Crusade, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property, and A Second Chance for Yesterday(published as R. A. Sinn).
JESSE GILBERT is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design at his firm Dark Matter Media. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.
DR. LAURA DENARDIS is Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society and Director of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Her book The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press) was recognized as a Financial Times Top Technology Book of 2020. Among her seven books, The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press) is considered a definitive source for understanding cyber governance debates and solutions. Professor DeNardis is an affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, where she previously served as Executive Director, and is a life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds engineering degrees and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.
Book Talk: The Secret Life of Data April 18 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET ONLINE Register now!
Join us for a VIRTUAL book talk with author Joanne McNeil about her latest book, WRONG WAY, which examines the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. McNeil will be in conversation with author Sarah Jaffe.
This is the first Internet Archive / Authors Alliance book talk for a work of fiction! Come for a reading, stay for a thoughtful conversation between McNeil & Jaffe about the labor implications of artificial intelligence.
WRONG WAY was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New Yorker and Esquire. It was the Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year and named one of the best tech books by the LA Times.
“Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.
Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.
JOANNE MCNEIL was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Joanne is the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User.
SARAH JAFFE is an author, independent journalist, and a co-host of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast.
Book Talk: Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil February 29 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET VIRTUAL Register now!
Have you ever used the Wayback Machine and witnessed the magic of internet time travel? We want to hear your stories of how web archives have made a positive impact on your life! Whether it’s preserving a cherished memory, aiding in research, or sparking a meaningful change – your stories matter!
Fill out our quick questionnaire and let us know how the Wayback Machine has left a mark on your digital journey: https://forms.gle/5DhDqNTLqxY41K3p6
Your stories could inspire others and highlight the importance of preserving the web’s rich history. Let’s celebrate the incredible moments made possible by the Wayback Machine!
You may be wondering, “Will anyone actually read my submission?” YES! We appreciate your time in sharing your story. Submissions will be reviewed and may be included in upcoming social media posts and news stories. We put out a similar call last year and received hundreds of responses, which we turned into testimonials & blog posts to help people understand how our library is used.
Started in 2017, our Community Webs program has over 175 public libraries and local cultural organizations working to build digital archives documenting the experiences of their communities, especially those patrons often underrepresented in traditional archives. Participating public libraries have created over 1,400 collections documenting local civic life totaling nearly 100 terabytes and tens of millions of individual documents, images, audio/video files, blogs, websites, social media, and more. You can browse many of these collections at the Community Webs website. Participants have also collaborated on digitization efforts to bring minority newspapers online, held public programming and outreach events, and formed local partnerships to help preservation efforts at other mission-aligned organizations. The program has conducted numerous workshops and national symposia to help public librarians gain expertise in digital preservation and cohort members have done dozens of presentations at professional conferences showcasing their work. In the past, Community Webs has received support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Mellon Foundation, the Kahle Austin Foundation, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
We are excited to announce that Community Webs has received $750,000 in funding from The Mellon Foundation to continue expanding the program. The award will allow additional public libraries to join the program and will enable new and existing members to continue their web archiving collection building using our Archive-It service. In addition, the funding will also provide members access to Internet Archive’s new Vault digital preservation service, enabling them to build and preserve collections of any type of digital materials. Lastly, leveraging members’ prior success in local partnerships, Community Webs will now include an “Affiliates” program so member public libraries can nominate local nonprofit partners that can also receive access to archiving services and resources. Funding will also support the continuation of the program’s professional development training in digital preservation and community archiving and its overall cohort and community building activities of workshops, events, and symposia.
We thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of Community Webs. We are excited to continue to expand the program and empower hundreds of public librarians to build archives that document the voices, lives, and events of their communities and to ensure this material is permanently available to patrons, students, scholars, and citizens.
Ham Radio & More was the first radio show devoted to ham radio on the commercial radio band. It began as a one-hour show on KFNN 1510 AM in Phoenix, Arizona, then expanded to a two-hour format and national syndication. The program’s host, Len Winkler, invited guests to discuss the issues of the day and educate listeners about various aspects of the radio hobby. Today the episodes, some more than 30 years old, provide an invaluable time capsule of the ham radio hobby.
just some of the HR&M cassette tapes
Len Winkler said, “I’m so happy that the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications took all my old shows and made them eternally available for everyone to hear and enjoy. I had the absolute pleasure, along with a few super knowledgeable co-hosts, to interview many of the people that made ham radio great in the past and now everyone can go back and listen to what they had to say. From the early beginnings of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to Senator Barry Goldwater to the daughter of Marconi. So much thanks to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications for doing this amazing service.”
Other interviewees included magazine publisher Wayne Green, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bob Heil, Bill Pasternak, Fred Maia, and other names well known to the amateur radio community. Discussion topics spanned the technical, such as signal propagation, to community issues, including the debate over the Morse code knowledge requirement for ham radio operators—a requirement eventually dropped, to the benefit of the community.
The radio programs were recorded on cassette tapes when they originally aired. Winkler digitized 149 episodes of the show himself in 2015 and 2016. The digitizing project paused for years. In January 2024 he sent the remaining cassettes to DLARC. Using two audio digitizing workstations, we digitized another 165 episodes in about three weeks. The combined collection is now available online: a total of 464 hours of programming, most of which have not been heard since their original air date. The collection represents nearly every episode of the show: only a few tapes went missing over the years or were unrepairable.
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 and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org or on Mastodon at dlarc@mastodon.radio.
Once upon a time, Liz Gotauco fell in love with fairy tales. That is, making videos while retelling them with some quirky twists.
Librarian Liz Gotauco, aka “Cosbrarian” across social media.
By day, Gotauco is a full-time public librarian in Rhode Island. On nights and weekends, she creates content for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube under the name Cosbrarian (a portmanteau of “cosplay” and “librarian”). Gotauco takes a traditional fairy tale or folk tale, writes her own scripts, and films herself telling it — often wearing costumes and using props to make it come alive.
To find the original fairy tales, many of which are in books that are out of print, Gotauco often uses the Internet Archive. She lists her more than 100 stories and sources on her website.
“It has been invaluable to me to have an easily accessible resource like the Internet Archive at my fingertips,” Gotauco said. “Sometimes I’m writing my content on the fly—but I don’t want my time constraints to compromise my research. Being able to quickly find a reputable source is such a gift, especially to those of us without academic library access.”
In her saucy, darker, and wilder versions of fairy tales for adult audiences, she weaves in humor and commentary. Gotauco likes to feature lesser-known folklore from a variety of cultures for her series, “Around the World in 80 Folk Tales.” Many of these books are old and no longer on library shelves, but she often finds them at the Internet Archive.
“I was blown away that there was so much in the collection,” she said. Gotauco recently found Inuit folk tales and stories from Latin America that she adapted. Her online audience also requests stories from their home countries, and she is intentional about representation in her work.
Once she discovers books in the Archive, Gotauco said she then sometimes buys a copy to add to her collection at home.
Gotauco started as a freelance content creator in 2021. It has almost become a part-time job, as she produces about two videos a week, which are available for free to viewers.
“The responses I’m most happy to get are when I make people laugh,” she said. “Especially since I started during the early pandemic, some people were like, “Wow, I just really needed to smile today and this did it for me.’”
Gotauco is busier these days, but plans to continue producing new content and hopes material continues to be available through the Archive to support her endeavor.
“Fairy tales have always been a part of my life. It’s been nice to indulge in that interest and find other people whose interests are the same,” said Gotauco, who has enjoyed tapping into her love for theater. “It’s partially a performance piece, as well as storytelling. I’ve been able to merge my two personas: the theater kid Liz and librarian Liz.”
