Back in March 2020, teachers were asking themselves a nearly unthinkable question: “How are we going to get books in students’ hands with our schools & libraries closed?” We’ve heard from hundreds of teachers about the challenges they faced in connecting remote learners with books during COVID. Here is their story:
And here we are in August of 2021, with another school year about to start, and educators are still asking this same question. As a nonprofit dedicated to Universal Access to All Knowledge, the Internet Archive provides a number of free resources for parents, students, teachers, and librarians around the world. Check out these tools for remote learning:
Looking for ways to bring diverse representation into your classroom reading? Find books that support the LGBT+ community in Open Library.
In 2015, ten-year-old Marley Dias set out to increase representation of books in which black girls are the main character with her #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign. Inspired by Marley, we want to support schools to make learning more inclusive. Find more than 300 of the curated titles in our library.
Lesson Plans
Looking for lesson plans? Browse our collection to find detailed notes on hundreds of books and themes this summer, including Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote.
Do your students struggle with math? Online tutor The Math Sorcerer has put together a list of math books and resources for self-studying, covering a range of topics and abilities. Borrow the books and help your students gain confidence with math.
Tips for Using Our Library
How long can I borrow a book? How many books can I check out at once? Find all the information you need to know about borrowing books from the lending library in our online tutorials and get reading!
Learn More
Follow #LearnWithIA on Twitter throughout the month of August for additional tips & resources!
The Supreme Court of Canada has decided the much-anticipated York University v. Access Copyrightcase, reaffirming—in an unanimous opinion—that “public access to and dissemination of artistic and intellectual works” are “a primary goal of copyright.” We join our friends at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, CIPPIC, and all throughout Canada in applauding this important decision.
The Access Copyright case was centered around the question whether educational institutions in Canada were required to pay certain tariffs to Access Copyright. Access Copyright had argued that its tariffs were mandatory for educational institutions, and recently attempted to raise them from $3.38 to $45 per student, per year, along with a variety of other changes. In response, York University argued that its use was fair dealing and, as a result, that it was not required to pay a tariff or any other fee for such use. After a lengthy court battle, the Supreme Court of Canada has now ruled in favor of York, holding that the tariffs are not mandatory and emphasizing the importance of “protect[ing] users from the potentially unfair exertion of . . . market power” by big copyright interests like Access Copyright.
While the Court did not address the specifics of York’s own fair dealing, it was sure to emphasize “the nature of fair dealing as a user’s right” in Canada. As the Court explained:
Copyright law has public interest goals. . . . [T]he public benefits of our system of copyright are much more than “a fortunate by-product of private entitlement” [citation omitted]. Instead, increasing public access to and dissemination of artistic and intellectual works, which enrich society and often provide users with the tools and inspiration to generate works of their own, is a primary goal of copyright. “Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole” (Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc., [2002] 2 S.C.R. 336, at para. 32, per Binnie J.).
Copyright can only serve its true purpose when due attention is given to user’s rights and the public interest. But all too often, in courts around the world, the public interest is not fairly addressed. The Access Copyright decision helps ensure that Canadian courts do not make this mistake; as Professor Michael Geist has noted, it “removes any doubt that the Supreme Court remains strongly supportive of user’s rights in copyright.”
When Marygrove College closed, they donated the entire library to the Internet Archive for preservation & digitization.
During the pandemic, perhaps you have been cleaning out some bookshelves in your house. Or maybe you are a librarian, planning to be back in your building for the first time in more than a year and restarting collection management activities.
If you are wondering what to do with your excess materials, the Internet Archive can help. The nonprofit library accepts donation books, records (CDs, LPs, 45rpm, 78rpm, cylinders), films, and microforms that it does not already have in its collection. The Archive preserves one copy of everything it receives and tries to find good homes for duplicates. Then, as funding allows, the Archive digitizes the materials and helps them reach a wider audience online.
“No donation is too far away or small to be considered by the Internet Archive.”
Liz Rosenberg, donations manager, Internet Archive
At a recent webinar, staff from the Archive explained the process for donating and encouraged the public’s help as it works to provide universal access to everything ever published.
“No donation is too far away or small to be considered by the Internet Archive,” said Liz Rosenberg, donations manager. She has helped coordinate donations of entire libraries, including collections from Marygrove College in Detroit and Bay State College’s Boston Campus.
Donation Process
To find out more about what’s involved with physical donations, Rosenberg suggests going to the Help page for details about shipping instructions or dropping off donations smaller than about 20 boxes. All others are asked to complete a physical item donation form to provide all the information to make a larger donation happen, including where the items are located, an accurate count, and other special considerations for the offer.
Part of the donation of 18,000 records from a collector in Washington D.C.
Once submitted, staff begin the planning process to determine if the collection is in a format that can be accepted, if there are duplicates, and the project timeline. Arrangements then can be made for packing and shipping. In the case of larger collections, the Archive typically is able to provide assistance with transportation costs.
Sometimes donors pack their own items and then the Archive pays for the shipping. That was the case for a recent donation of 18,000 records from a music enthusiast in Washington D.C. The donor was looking for a “forever home” for his beloved vinyl and the Archive was happy to schedule a pickup and preserve the rare collection, Rosenberg said.
Why Donate?
For donations of 50 or more items, the Archive can create a collection to both honor the donor and make their donation accessible all in one place. “The ability to access all of their media in one place really reassures our donors that they will still have access to their items even once they’re no longer in their physical possession,” said Rosenberg. Some stories behind major contributions are covered by the Archive in its blog.
Better World Books, a socially responsible bookstore that has a longstanding relationship with the Internet Archive, regularly donates books for preservation and digitization. It receives many of its books from library partners around the world. The Archive accepts many materials that BWB will not.
Internet Archive team members having fun with the task of packing & shipping an entire library collection from Bay State College.
“We love more than anything to get large collections—entire intellectual units, such as a reference collection that is curated,” said Chris Freeland, a librarian who works at the Archive. “It helps us round out our collection, and helps our patrons. If someone has a collection that no longer fits their collection development priorities, think of Better World Book or the Internet Archive for those materials.”
The Archive is open to over-sized items, such as maps, and books that do not have to have an ISBN number. What about loose periodicals? The Archive does not want a few scattered issues but does have interest in long runs of a magazine.
Once digitized, patrons with print disabilities can access the materials and some are selected to be accessible via Controlled Digital Lending and for machine learning research. Together, we can achieve long term preservation and access to our collective cultural legacy.
The Internet Archive is pleased to announce it has joined the The Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project, a mutually supportive resource-sharing cooperative whose 120 members include public and private academic libraries from across the country. As a member of the IDS Project, the Internet Archive expands its ability to support libraries and library patrons by providing access to two million monographs and three thousand periodicals in its physical collections available for non-returnable interlibrary loan (ILL) fulfillment.
“The Internet Archive is a wonderful addition to the IDS Project’s team of libraries. It is a great honor to be able to help IA reach more libraries and more patrons through the integration with IDS Logic,” said Mark Sullivan, Executive Director of the IDS Project.
If you want to learn more about the IDS Project and the Internet Archive, I will be speaking at the 17th Annual IDS Summer Conference on July 29th.
In addition to the IDS Project, the Internet Archive is also piloting a program with libraries through RapidILL. If there are other resource sharing efforts that we should investigate as we expand our ILL service, please reach out to me at brewster@archive.org.
Libraries have historically been trusted hubs to equalize access to credible information, a crucial role that they should continue to fill in the digital age. However, as more information is born-digital, digitized, or digital-first, libraries must build new policy, legal and public understandings about how advances in technology impact our preservation, community, and collection development practices.
This panel will bring together legal scholars Ariel Katz (University of Toronto) and Argyri Panezi (IE University Madrid/Stanford University) to discuss their work on library digital exhaustion and public service roles for digital libraries. They will be joined by Lisa Radha Weaver, Director of Collections and Program Development at Hamilton Public Library, who will discuss how library services have been transformed by digital delivery and innovation and Kyle Courtney of Library Futures/Harvard University, a lawyer/librarian who wrote the influential Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, signed by over 50 institutions. The panel will be moderated by Lila Bailey of Internet Archive.
Hansen, D. R., & Courtney, K. K. (2018, September 24). A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books. https://doi.org/10.31228/osf.io/7fdyr
Panezi, Argyri, A Public Service Role For Digital Libraries: The Unequal Battle Against (Online) Misinformation Through Copyright Law Reform And The Emergency Electronic Access To Library Material (March 26, 2021). Forthcoming, 31 CORNELL J.L. & PUB. POL’Y _ _ (2021), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3813320
Whenever I’ve had a book published I have celebrated every sale. But the biggest cause for celebration – the sale that always made me most proud – was when a library acquired a copy or two. Individuals may purchase a book, shelve it or pass it along to a friend, and thereafter it disappears. Libraries are forever.
Fran Moreland Johns
This is the belief that underscores my enthusiasm for the Internet Archive. While the Atlanta Public Library may one day cull my book to make room for someone else’s, those words I labored over and so treasure, whether anyone else ever treasures them or not, are safe with the Internet Archive. And may it thrive and prosper.
Johns writing cutlines under the rapt gaze of Richmond Times-Dispatch photographers. Disclaimer: Johns quit smoking in 1964.
This is all a very long way from my literary beginnings on a Royal portable typewriter. I wrote for newspapers and magazines – the Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA Today, National Real Estate Investor to cite just a few of the wildly different multiple dozens – from the early 1950s into the technologically bewildering 2020s. Eventually I added an MFA in short fiction to my BA in Art and veered into short stories, with a few tiny publication successes, including Dying unafraid (1999) and Perilous Times: An inside look at abortion before – and after – Roe v Wade (2013). When the internet came along, I tiptoed in via a blog for news aggregate site True/Slant.com which eventually morphed into today’s franjohns.net. With a little luck my short story collection, Marshallville Stories, will be published in 2022; the Internet Archive will get one of the first copies.
I’ve been following the conflict between U.S. publishers and the Internet Archive with some degree of horror and dismay. Publishers, I realize, are in business to make money and thereby stay in business. Do they not want people, as many people as possible, to read the books they publish? After the first flurry of sales (perhaps excluding the blockbuster books that will make big bucks for authors and publishers alike, may they also thrive and prosper) does it not follow that publishers would want their books to enjoy long and successful lives? That, at least, is the hope I believe most authors harbor. I can’t claim to speak for other authors, but this I know is personally true: I write for the joy of writing, and in the hope of being read. I’d be surprised if there were many writers out there who don’t feel the same.
So let’s hear it for libraries. And for the one that’s unique among all others, the Internet Archive.
***
Fran Moreland Johns has been writing (for newspapers, magazines, online sites) since the 1950s, and blogging since she was introduced to the idea via a paid blog for news aggregate site True/Slant in 2009. Her roots are in small town Virginia and her heart is in hometown San Francisco. She currently blogs on Medium.com and www.franjohns.net. You can read Dying unafraid (1999) online through the Internet Archive’s lending library.
Photo by Rory Mitchell, The Mercantile, 2020 – CC by 4.0
(L-R) Brewster Kahle, Tamiko Thiel, Carl Feynman at Thinking Machines, May 1985. Photo courtesy of Tamiko Thiel.
A Library of Everything
As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg’s invention hundreds of years before.
By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better–smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the Library not just searchable, but organizable; make it so that you could navigate your way through millions, and maybe eventually billions of web pages.
The first step was to make computers that worked for large collections of rich media. The next was to create a network that could tap into computers all over the world: the Arpanet that became the Internet. Next came augmented intelligence, which came to be called search engines. I then helped build WAIS–Wide Area Information Server–that helped publishers get online to anchor this new and open system, which came to be enveloped by the World Wide Web.
By 1996, it was time to start building the library.
This library would have all the published works of humankind. This library would be available not only to those who could pay the $1 per minute that LexusNexus charged, or only at the most elite universities. This would be a library available to anybody, anywhere in the world. Could we take the role of a library a step further, so that everyone’s writings could be included–not only those with a New York book contract? Could we build a multimedia archive that contains not only writings, but also songs, recipes, games, and videos? Could we make it possible for anyone to learn about their grandmother in a hundred years’ time?
From the San Francisco Chronicle, Business Section, May 7, 1988. Photo by Jerry Telfer.
Not about an Exit or an IPO
From the beginning, the Internet Archive had to be a nonprofit because it contains everybody else’s things. Its motives had to be transparent. It had to last a long time.
In Silicon Valley, the goal is to find a profitable exit, either through acquisition or IPO, and go off to do your next thing. That was never my goal. The goal of the Internet Archive is to create a permanent memory for the Web that can be leveraged to make a new Global Mind. To find patterns in the data over time that would provide us with new insights, well beyond what you could do with a search engine. To be not only a historical reference but a living part of the pulse of the Internet.
John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead & founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, accepting the Internet Archive Hero Award, October 21, 2015. Photograph by Brad Shirakawa – CC by 4.0
Looking Way Back
My favorite things from the early era of the Web were the dreamers.
In the early Web, we saw people trying to make a more democratic system work. People tried to make publishing more inclusive.
We also saw the other parts of humanity: the pornographers, the scammers, the spammers, and the trolls. They, too, saw the opportunity to realize their dreams in this new world. At the end of the day, the Internet and the World Wide Web–it’s just us. It’s just a history of humankind. And it has been an experiment in sharing and openness.
The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.
Brewster Kahle speaking at the 2019 Charleston Library Conference. Photo by Corey Seeman– CC by 4.0
Looking Way Forward
Over the next 25 years, we have a very different challenge. It’s solving some of the big problems with the Internet that we’re seeing now. Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource?
So many of us trust the Web to find recipes, how to repair your lawnmower, where to buy new shoes, who to date. Trust is perhaps the most valuable asset we have, and squandering that trust will be a global disaster.
We may not have achieved Universal Access to All Knowledge yet, but we still can.
In another 25 years, we can have writings from not a hundred million people, but from a billion people, preserved forever. We can have compensation systems that aren’t driven by advertising models that enrich only a few.
We can have a world with many winners, with people participating, finding communities of like-minded people they can learn from all over the world. We can create an Internet where we feel in control.
I believe we can build this future together. You have already helped the Internet Archive build this future. Over the last 25 years, we’ve amassed billions of pages, 70 petabytes of data to offer to the next generation. Let’s offer it to them in new and exciting ways. Let’s be the builders and dreamers of the next twenty-five years.
See a timeline of Key Moments in Access to Knowledge, videos & an invitation to our 25th Anniversary Virtual Celebration at anniversary.archive.org.
If you’ve spent much time reading 19th-century novels, you’ve probably run across characters doing the same thing—that is, reading novels.
In Barchester Towers, Eleanor sits “in the window to get the advantage of the last daylight for her novel.” AnnaKarenina waits for her husband “in front of the fireplace with her English novel.” And in Jane Eyre, Georgiana falls “asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel.”
What novels were they reading? While Eleanor might have been reading Jane Eyre and Anna might have been perusing Barchester Towers, it’s more likely that they were reading some of the thousands of other novels published in that century. Novels were the binge-watched television, the hit podcasts of the era—immersive, addictive, commercial—and they were produced and consumed in huge numbers.
Some of those novels are, of course, still read today. But for every Pride and Prejudice or A Tale of Two Cities, dozens more have been forgotten. In the 20th century, the novel came to be regarded as serious literature, something to be taught and studied, and attention narrowed to a limited number of authors and works. And as the books themselves aged, their paper turning yellow and brittle, libraries removed them from their shelves. With readers having access only to the reprinted “classics” that still made money for publishers, the vast majority of 19th-century novels were forgotten and unread.
Now, however, thanks to preservation and scanning by libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and elsewhere, thousands of those forgotten novels are available at the Internet Archive. The list below has links to fifty of them—mostly British novels published between 1800 and 1899—as well as to Wikipedia articles for many of the authors.
I compiled this list after reading a fascinating recent study by Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak about books regarded as classics by users of the book-rating site Goodreads. They found that readers today seem to read mainly the well-known canonical works. Jane Eyre, for example, has more than 1,700,000 ratings at Goodreads and over 45,000 reviews.
For the following list, I chose only 19th-century novels that, as of May 2021, have not been reviewed or rated by anyone at Goodreads. There are many such forgotten novels in the Internet Archive’s collections, and it’s likely that some of them have not been read by anyone for over a century.
Would you like to be the first?
Tom Gally lives in Yokohama, Japan, and teaches at the University of Tokyo. In 2019, he wrote about travel books found at the Internet Archive.
Last week the public interest Internet community lost one of its most passionate advocates, and I lost a friend. On July 7th, I learned that Sherwin Siy, Policy Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation and my classmate at Berkeley Law School, had suddenly passed away at the age of 40.
Sherwin and I began our public interest tech careers together when we were students at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. We were partners on a project helping the Internet Archive understand the legal landscape for archiving and making available television news. From that project and through the rest of my career, I learned so much from working with him, not just about substantive law and policy, but about collaboration and collegiality. He was thoughtful, patient, and kind. He was funny, and so very smart. He will be deeply missed.
You can find remembrances from other colleagues of his from EFF (here) and Public Knowledge (here).
