Governments produce an abundance of information and put that information in the public domain, but often the public can’t easily find or access it. The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project is helping by preserving critical information and publications produced by governments: federal, state, provincial, and municipal– and making them available to anyone wanting to build new services on them.
Since the program’s launch in 2022, the Internet Archive has built on this already strong foundation by becoming a designated Federal Depository Library—joining 1,100+ peer libraries—and by utilizing Democracy’s Library as a means to connect to libraries, archives, and patrons with purpose.
Although it would be convenient to tie the practice of preserving government information to the messy birth of the United States, grounded as it was in principles around liberty and democratic process, we lack pithy quotes from the founders on this exact topic. What we do see is recognition in the very first Congress that citizens needed access to documentation of the business of their government.
In 1789, the House of Representatives provided for the printing and distribution of the laws and proceedings of the new Congress. From this modest beginning, the US Government rapidly rose to become the largest publisher in the world. Over the following century, a series of legislative milestones followed: the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1860, and the Government Printing Act of 1895, which centralized GPO’s authority as the primary channel for distributing the federal record.
Taken together, these efforts reflect a consistent, if imperfectly realized, principle: that government information belongs to the people and that information should be freely distributed to its citizens for their own use. It is important to note that libraries were identified as the natural and primary means of getting that information into the hands of citizens.
Who are the audiences for government information?
First and foremost, government itself; it is essential that law and policy makers understand prior law and policy. With an abundance of outputs, governments are not always the best record keepers and frequently turn to libraries to find appropriate documentation.
Second, we see serious researchers (including journalists) as those that rely on access to government information. These users seek authoritative sources and want assurances around provenance and reliable sources; libraries provide that authority.
Third, we see curious and motivated citizens. Users in this category include genealogists but can also include people like property owners seeking to understand current or prior ordinances in their jurisdiction, or people seeking to understand the history of their house or neighborhood.
Finally, an emerging category of user is machines; research methods mediated and assisted by computers have been on the rise for some time, but with the advent of LLMs and generative AI tools, a human assisted by a machine is emerging as a distinctive category of user. Looking across these categories, we can assert that government information not only belongs to everyone, but it is for everyone.
Why is Democracy’s Library important today?
Democracy’s Library is more than just collections – it is also a movement to bring people together in common cause, to take action, and to build momentum around increasing access. The Information Stewardship Forum, hosted by the Internet Archive in March, was one such gathering and we look forward to more in the future.
One of the themes that emerged from the Information Stewardship Forum is that, especially in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment, public access to government information cannot be left to chance. As the United States marks 250 years, Democracy’s Library exists to make sure it isn’t. Please join us.
Let us know how we can help you by collaborating to digitize and preserve collections, to build services on existing collections, and to support each other in areas of mutual interest. I welcome your emails at any time. I will be attending GODORT meetings at the June 2026 American Library Association meeting in Chicago, and you can find me there, as well as at the CNI meeting in December in Washington DC, or at our headquarters in San Francisco anytime you are in town.
Digitization project in progress! Signage at the NOAA Library.
This is the story of two libraries supporting one another to ensure physical preservation and broad access to great research collections.
The first is the NOAA Library, an institution that was established in the early 1970s, building on the inheritance of previous US Federal agency libraries, including those of the National Weather Service, United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The NOAA Library primarily serves the employees and affiliates that have full access to the library’s e-resources and physical holdings. Members of the public can access NOAA publications through the NOAA Institutional Repository or the NOAA Library’s digitized holdings.
The second is the Internet Archive. Having recently celebrated its 30th birthday, the Internet Archive has strong capabilities in digitizing materials at scale as well as safeguarding physical materials in physical archives.
Both libraries are part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). NOAA received the honor of being named the FDLP Library of the year in 1999, while the Internet Archive is the new to the network, having joined in 2025. NOAA’s current FDLP status as a digital access partner made connecting with the Internet Archive a natural decision.
The NOAA Library and the Internet Archive have been working together collaboratively since 2022 when NOAA first donated materials they no longer deemed to be in scope as per the Library’s collection development policy. This collection, however, fell into the Internet Archive’s mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge by acquiring, digitizing, and hosting materials just like this. Since that time, the two libraries have continued to collaborate, sharing a goal and vision of making these materials more available. NOAA collections fit nicely into the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library, which seeks to give broad access to government publications, including those from US Federal agencies and other parts of government.
Liz Rosenberg, who leads the physical donation program, describes the relationship this way. “A lot of folks do not know that we preserve physical materials. So when NOAA reached out to explore this kind of collaboration we were so grateful for the opportunity to help preserve valuable resources from their collections. Our partnership has blossomed over years of collaboration with wonderful NOAA librarians, and we are excited to be bringing broader digital access to their unique collections.”
Ben Hope, director of the NOAA Library also values the partnership. “Libraries are at their best when they combine stewardship with access,” says Hope. “Our partnership with the Internet Archive ensures that NOAA’s scientific and historical collections are not only preserved for future generations, but also made more discoverable and accessible to researchers, educators, and the public worldwide. Together, we are extending the reach and impact of NOAA’s knowledge far beyond the walls of any single library.”
Collections boxed up on site.The Internet Archive “Away Team” and NOAA collaborators celebrate.Loading collections onto the truck.
Please check out the digital collections as we are collaboratively building. The NOAA collections contain a wealth of resources around weather, fisheries, deep sea exploration and more! https://archive.org/details/noaa
If you are interested in donating materials or know of other potential collaborations, please contact us.
As soon as people started walking in the door, I breathed a sigh of relief. After months of careful (some might say obsessive) planning, we were kicking off the inaugural Information Stewardship Forum, 2026. Over three days in March, we opened the doors of the Internet Archive to 120 people who work tirelessly to preserve and give access to government information in the United States. They traveled to San Francisco representing different vital facets of this work: libraries, archives, journalism, research, policy, nonprofits, funding, and technology. Participants also reflected different parts of the government information ecosystem (which includes federal, state and local stakeholders).
The Forum was constructed as a space for participants to share tools, workflows, and lessons learned from digital and physical preservation efforts, and to support practical knowledge exchange across domains and disciplines to ensure that government data remains accessible, trustworthy, and resilient in a rapidly changing information landscape. The preservation of government information has long been carried out by libraries and archives but in the current moment, this work carries a sense of weight and importance.
Internet Archive was a natural host for this event, having long supported preservation and access to government created information and publications: through web archiving efforts including Archive-It; by participating in the the End of Term Crawl; through digitizing government produced publications; and by serving as a depository library in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). In 2022, Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library was launched, built on a straightforward but urgent premise: governments have created an abundance of information and put it in the public domain, but the public can’t easily access it.
Of course the Internet Archive is but one of many stakeholders; scaffolding has been established by institutions including the U.S. Government Publishing Office (buttressed by more than 1,000 FDLP depository libraries), the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress, alongside countless state and local agencies, archives; and thousands of government information librarians and other specialized data stewards.
Held under Chatham House Rule, the forum created space for candid discussion across plenaries, lightning talks, Birds of a Feather sessions, and closing conversations. It also created ample room for people working on related problems to compare notes, test ideas, and begin seeing the field less as a set of isolated projects and more as a community of collaborators. One theme surfaced again and again: preservation is not a solo endeavor. Preserving public information is not only a technical challenge. It is also an organizational, legal, financial, and civic one. Some high level themes emerged across our three days spent in community.
Not only is government information being lost, but the the stewardship ecosystem itself remains fragmented and under-described. Mapping this space – who is doing what, and identifying key information assets will be a critical part of this work going forward.
Recognition that stewardship is more than storage. Saving material is only the beginning. Continuity, trust, and usability are also important components of preservation.
The emergency response or triage mode that has animated many recent efforts are not sustainable; this work has been indispensable, but fragile. Building on work done on an emergency basis without feeling confined by it is a challenge for moving this work forward.
Public records laws and access frameworks exist, yet information is still removed, obscured, or made difficult to use over time. Data may remain technically public while being trapped in formats or interfaces that frustrate long-term use. Worse, government information may be inappropriately constricted behind paywalls.
A related concern was the growing use of web harvesting restrictions in response to concerns about use by AI companies. While understandable in many contexts, those restrictions can also impede public interest archiving and make preservation harder precisely when long term capture is most needed.
Local government information was identified as especially vulnerable, as were climate data, health data, and disaggregated data that allows communities to see themselves in the record.
Advocacy matters; the more people who can be drawn in to understand what is at stake and can participate in stewardship, even in modest ways, the more resilient the system becomes. One attendee framed this practical challenge as “How can we have easy to use tools that will allow others to invest in this work?” Tools for participation!
An important concrete outcome from this convening is Preservation of Government Information: A Call to Action. Shared as a draft during the Forum, this text serves as a manifesto of sorts, and gives broader language to themes that surfaced throughout the event: that public access to government information cannot be left to chance, that archive-ready publication should become a norm, and that preserving public information must be treated as a civic obligation. Individuals and organizations are urged to sign and express their support for the document.
So why did I breathe that sigh of relief when we opened the doors at 300 Funston Avenue? I could see the positive body language – recognition, surprise, delight, handshakes, hugs and exclamations that come when people are in community with those they recognize as their people. Across the three days, this emerging community had the opportunity to coalesce, to learn together, and to recognize that they are part of a broader stewardship ecosystem, one that will need stronger coordination, communication, and community. There are still many challenges in this space, but there is a firm resolve to ensure that access to government information remains open and accessible to the public.
The Information Stewardship Forum 2026 was designed to surface the shared problem space, and to facilitate connections, and it was rewarding to see it unfold into a gathering where people were actively identifying concrete collaborations, naming shared principles, discussing infrastructure and standards; fortunately attendees did not need to wonder about how to keep the energy alive after going home; they were able to join and engage in an online community space established by Internet Archive that ensures that the conversation and community can continue.
Graphic recording by Jasmin Pamukcu, Cusp Consulting.
Thanks to a generous gift of materials from the Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, and the Internet Archive’s mission to digitize and provide universal access to knowledge, we are pleased to share more than 125,000 U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs. These materials which span nearly two centuries of American law are now freely accessible online.
Why This Matters
Most people are familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court opinions as public documents. But the opinions are only part of the story. Behind every landmark ruling lies a vast archive of briefs, petitions, appendices, and supporting records; these are the the arguments, evidence, and voices that shaped each decision. The Supreme Court may receive 7,000-8,000 petitions each year, but only grants a writ of certiorari to hear the case for about 80 cases. This collection includes records and briefs received by the court, both those granted certiorari and those denied certiorari; the latter category is much more voluminous than the former. Until now, these important public documents have only been available in limited ways — in print form in a limited number of law libraries, and in other formats in other libraries but not generally available for all people to freely access.
That has now changed. As part of Democracy’s Library, the Internet Archive’s large-scale effort to preserve and open government information, this collection includes records and briefs spanning cases from 1830 through 2019, making it one of the most comprehensive archives of freely available Supreme Court materials ever assembled in one place.
What’s Now Available
The collection covers three kinds of materials:
The first is the official records from the lower court(s): the trial transcripts, evidence, and procedural documents that travel with each case up through the federal judiciary.
The second is the briefs: the petitions, responses, amicus filings, and supporting appendices submitted by the litigants themselves and by interested third parties. These briefs are the raw material of American constitutional argument. They capture the perspectives of individuals, corporations, civil society organizations, and government agencies pressing their cases before the nation’s highest court.
The third category is the opinions (for cases that are heard by the Supreme Court): the ultimate decisions reached by the highest court in the United States, demonstrating the logic and reasoning of the court.
Taken together, they form a detailed documentary record of how legal arguments, social concerns, and political priorities have evolved over nearly two hundred years of American life.
Three Cases, Three Windows Into History
To understand what this collection makes possible, consider three landmark cases — one celebrated, one lesser-known, and one that provides a relevant window into the importance of public access — that together show why access to the full record matters.
Linda Brown Smith, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, Harry Briggs, Jr., and Spottswood Bolling, Jr. — all plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education during a 1964 press conference. Image from the Library of Congress.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional is one of the most studied decisions in American history. But the briefs filed in Brown reveal dimensions that the opinion itself does not capture. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled social-science evidence, testimony from psychologists, and firsthand accounts from families to argue that separation was inherently unequal — not just legally, but psychologically. The record shows the Kansas district court’s own finding that segregation harmed Black children psychologically and that the practice was widely understood as a statement of racial inferiority. Testimony provided by sociologist Dr. Wilbur Bookover framed this issue:
In American society we consistently present to the child a model of democratic equality of opportunity… At the same time, in a segregated school situation he is presented a contradictory or inharmonious model. He is presented a school situation in which it is obvious that he is a subordinate, inferior kind of a citizen… the segregated schools perpetuate this conflict in expectancies, condemns the negro child to an ineffective role as a citizen and member of society.
— Dr. Wilbur Brookover, expert witness, trial testimony (1951).
The U.S. government filed an amicus brief urging desegregation — a striking signal of the federal government’s position at a pivotal moment in the civil rights era.
Less well-known than Brown, but no less significant, Loving v. Virginia is the case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Mildred and Richard Loving — a Black woman and a white man from rural Virginia — married in Washington, D.C. in June 1958 and returned to live as husband and wife in Caroline County, Virginia. Warrants were issued for their arrest the following month, and they were charged with the felony of having married across racial lines and returned to the state. A judge suspended their one-year prison sentences on the condition that they leave Virginia for twenty-five years.
The briefs make clear what was at stake beyond the criminal charge: the voiding of their marriage under Virginia law, the potential illegitimacy of their children, and the loss of inheritance rights, Social Security benefits, and other protections contingent on a legally recognized union. Language from the briefs illustrates the pain of separation and disruption that these laws caused for couples like the Lovings who were “prohibited from establishing a family abode and raising their children in places where they and their family have often been long established and where many blood relatives still reside.” Brief for Appellants, Loving v. Virginia (1967). To understand the legal and social world those briefs were arguing against, it helps to read the 1965 written opinion of Judge Leon Bazile from the Circuit Court of Caroline County, Virginia denying the Lovings’ earlier appeal — a document accessible in this collection. In it, he explained his reasoning:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” These views were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court two years later.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Lovings’ conviction in 1967, holding that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” The briefs that built that argument — and the lower-court records that documented what the Lovings were up against — are now open to all.
In September 1978, a judge in Hanover County, Virginia cleared a courtroom during a murder trial, expelling reporters from Richmond Newspapers along with all other members of the public — the first time in the courthouse’s 243-year history that such a closure had occurred. A Richmond newspaper challenged the closure, and the case produced the U.S. Supreme Court’s first explicit ruling that the First Amendment guarantees the public and press a right to attend criminal trials. An excerpt from the documents make it clear why access to trials is so important:
“Imagine an America in which secret trials had been held in the prosecutions of Aaron Burr, John Peter Zenger, or John Thomas Scopes; of John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan; of the Chicago Eight, the Watergate Seven, or the Wilmington Ten.” — Brief for Appellants, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia (1979).
The briefs filed by the newspaper’s attorneys make an open access argument that extends naturally to legal records of every kind:
“The right of the individual to attend and observe any criminal trial… is of constitutional dimension because its derogation would undermine the logic of the constitutional scheme — a logic that relies crucially upon the publicity and openness of the state’s ultimate confrontations with its citizens.” — Brief for Appellants, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia (1979).
If the public has a constitutional stake in observing civil and criminal proceedings, it has an equal stake in reading the arguments that shaped those proceedings. This collection makes that possible for the first time at scale — not just for scholars with institutional access, but for anyone.
Who Benefits
Opening this collection to all matters. Legal scholars and historians can now trace the evolution of constitutional doctrine without traveling to law libraries or paying for access to expensive databases. Journalists investigating civil rights, criminal justice, or government power can dig into the primary record. Law students can study cases that never made it before the court, and can discover not just how the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, but how the best advocates in the country made their cases. And curious citizens — anyone who wants to understand how the American judicial system works through the highest court in the land — can read these documents for themselves.
A basic democratic principle is also at stake. Public confidence in legal institutions depends on free public access to legal records. When significant portions of the constitutional archive exist only behind paywalls or in specialized collections, the historical record becomes available only to the few. Records and briefs are not peripheral materials — they are essential ingredients in the judicial decisions comprising our nation’s law. Making them freely available is a matter of civic accountability, not just scholarly convenience.
What’s Next
The collection is available now through the Internet Archive, fully searchable and freely downloadable. Whether you’re tracing the history of a constitutional doctrine, researching a case that affected your community, or simply curious about the arguments behind a ruling you’ve heard about, we invite you to explore. This archive of American constitutional argument is now truly open to everyone. This collection falls under the auspices of Democracy’s Library which is built on a straightforward but urgent premise: governments have created an abundance of information and put it in the public domain, but the public can’t easily access it.
Thank you to Leslie Street, Director, Wolf Law Library, William & Mary Law School for helping make this possible. Special thanks to the Free Law Project and CourtListener for providing metadata to enrich records in this collection.
Democracies depend on an informed and engaged citizenry — and in the digital age, that means equitable, reliable access to public information online. To help make this vision a reality, the Internet Archive is building Democracy’s Library, a free, open, online collection of government research and publications from around the world.
To bolster the U.S. component of this effort, the Internet Archive welcomes Merrilee Proffitt as the director of Democracy’s Library, US. Merrilee brings decades of experience in library collaboration, digital initiatives, and open knowledge partnerships that will help shape and scale this growing national collection.
Building an open, digital public resource
As director, Merrilee will guide the expansion of Democracy’s Library in the United States—working with libraries, archives, and civic institutions to make publicly funded information freely available and discoverable online. This work continues the Internet Archive’s long-standing commitment to universal access to knowledge, while supporting democratic engagement through transparency, accountability, and shared understanding.
“Governments have produced an extraordinary wealth of information in the public domain,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. “Democracy’s Library helps ensure that this knowledge truly serves the public good.”
A career dedicated to collaboration and access
Before joining the Internet Archive, Merrilee served as senior manager of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, supporting collaboration among leading research libraries worldwide. She previously worked with the Research Libraries Group and at the University of California, Berkeley, where she managed digital library initiatives that brought rare and unique materials from the Bancroft Library and other collections online.
Throughout her career, Merrilee has been a strong advocate for connecting libraries and archives with the global open knowledge ecosystem. She has deep experience partnering with the Wikimedia community to make library collections more visible and reusable across the web. Drawing on experience advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries and archives, she is committed to building a Democracy’s Library that reflects the diversity of the communities it serves and the many perspectives that strengthen democratic engagement.
When she’s not collaborating to open access to knowledge, Merrilee enjoys cycling (including riding her bike to the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco), and baking sourdough bread.
Louis Brizuela says managing the microfiche digitization center for Democracy’s Library gives him a sense of pride. “I feel like I’m making a difference,” said the 28-year-old who lives in the Bay Area. “We’re scanning and preserving all this really cool content.”
Brizuela and his six-person team are currently digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s. The documents are stored on microfiche cards, a flat, film-based format commonly used from the mid-20th century for preserving and accessing paper records, which requires a specialized reader for viewing—making the information contained on the cards difficult to access. “It’s useful for law students or anybody – and it’s free to use without borders,” he said. “Also, it’s valuable for the sake of archiving so information doesn’t get lost.” Next, Brizuela said he’s looking forward to receiving a donated collection of microfiche with images of Sanskrit Buddhist tablets.
Anyone can watch the crew in action on a livestream of the microfiche scanning operation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG9hiWSrSD4). Activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm and 4:00pm-midnight U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays. Mellow lo-fi music plays in the background during working hours and continues with various video and still images from the Internet Archive’s collections rotating on the feed when the digitization center is closed.
During the livestream, one camera is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera; another other provides a close-up view of the material. Each page is processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections. Researchers and readers can easily access and download the documents freely through Democracy’s Library.
Brizuela said the staff has embraced the public window on their work. He joined the Internet Archive in February and hired people who were willing to be on camera and understood the potential benefit of the exposure. “It’s not like ‘Oh, Big Brother is watching’,” he said, noting the employees have fun with the situation. “We’re not robots. We do show our characters. We’re human.”
The team is leaning in, Brizuela said, suggesting they dress up in costumes for Halloween and maybe wearing elf hats at Christmas to add a festive touch to the project. They also answer questions in a live chat with viewers.
Brizuela comes to this position from a varied career working in the military, medical fields, retail and web development. He’s long had an interest in photography, particularly shooting and developing his own 35mm film. So, Brizuela said, it was not hard to pick up how to operate the custom-built scanner and oversee the digitization process.
Louis Brizuela stands in front of a custom-built microfiche scanning workstation.
Every morning, the team huddles up in the small digitization center to talk about the previous day’s completed pages and map out the upcoming work. Brizuela watches over and QA’s the scanning done by the team. Depending on the type of collection, each scanner can scanhundreds of cards a day.
Brizuela describes the vibe in the microfiche digitization center as pretty relaxing, with staff members chatting and interacting while they work. Often, they have headphones to listen to an audiobook or podcast. “If they are listening to music, sometimes they bust a dance move, or bob their head to get in the groove. People enjoy seeing that,” Brizuela said.
Setting up a livestream is more complicated than just turning on a camera. That’s why the Internet Archive tapped into the expertise of Sophia Tung, a software engineer and online content creator, to help create the livestream for its microfiche scanning center, which launched May 21.
The 29-year-old garnered international media coverage for her livestream of robotaxis parked in a depot just below her San Francisco apartment as they jostled and honked – sometimes in the middle of the night.
“I put it up just sort of as a meme to get some attention. If I couldn’t do anything about it, then I might as well make the best of it,” Tung said of the livestream she posted on YouTube with Lo-fi music in the background. “People became fans of it and Brewster [Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian] reached out to see if I could do something similar with the Internet Archive.”
An avid user of the Internet Archive for years, Tung said she was eager to visit its Funston Avenue headquarters and work with the staff on the project. As a sign of our tech-connected times, it’s become popular to have a mesmerizing scene with mellow music playing on a second monitor as people work. Tung said she could envision a relaxing, but informative, feed showing the preservation process.
Sophia Tung
Tung met with the team who take microfiche – flat sheets of film that hold miniaturized documents – and turn them into digital images that can be accessed online. The team is now digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s.
After assessing the space with five active microfiche digitization stations,Tung decided on a three-camera setup for the livestream. One is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards under a high-resolution camera that captures multiple detailed images. Another is an up-close look of what actually happens on the machine. A third wide-angle camera covers the entire room and is blurred for security, but still conveys motion.
All team members are open to being on camera as they work, but Tung said she recognized privacy concerns may arise. She devised a pause button to be installed to stop the feed, momentarily dimming the “on air” sign in the room. Although initially concerned that employees might not like being on camera, Tung said staff were hired who agreed to the concept and they are on board with the livestream as a mixed media project.
Live activity with the scanners occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays. Ambient Lo-fi music plays continuously. After hours, other Internet Archive content runs on the video feed including silent films, lost landscape footage from everyday life, and public domain photographs from NASA and other sources.
The project has required a combination of engineering to make the infrastructure work 24/7, plus physical design integrating signage and broadcasting lights, which Tung says she enjoyed. Her goal was two-fold: to recreate the excitement of her last livestream and to shine a light on the individuals working behind the scenes at the Archive.
“I always thought about the Internet Archive as just some mysterious entity, trying to preserve what we as individuals cannot. It’s an invaluable tool for journalists and, basically, everybody,” Tung said. “Now, preservation is more important than ever. I think people just assume that it happens. Actually, it takes money, effort, machinery and people. I think it’s important to highlight all the people-hours that go into it.”
Tung produced an explainer video about the microfiche livestream project on YouTube. “The reception has been great so far,” said Tung, who is working on more features and possible additional channels to add to the stream. “I hope the stream brings awareness to the effort it takes to preserve all this important material. If we don’t preserve it now, we are going to lose it.”
All microfiche materials are added to Democracy’s Library, the global project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications.
Ever wonder how government documents, once locked away on tiny sheets of microfiche, become searchable and accessible online? Now you can see it happen in real time.
Today, the Internet Archive has launched a livestream from our microfiche scanning center (https://www.youtube.com/embed/wG9hiWSrSD4), offering a behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous work powering Democracy’s Library—a global initiative to make government publications freely available to the public.
“This livestream shines a light on the unsung work of preserving the public record, and the critical infrastructure that makes democracy searchable,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “Transparency can’t be passive—it must be built, maintained, and seen. That’s what this livestream is all about.”
Watch the livestream now:
What You’ll See
The livestream features five active microfiche digitization stations, with a close-up view of one in action. Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet. Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card.
Each page is then processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections—completed with metadata—so that researchers, journalists, and the general public can explore and download them freely through Democracy’s Library.
📅 Live activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays—with a second shift coming soon.
What Is Microfiche?
Microfiche is a flat sheet of film that holds dozens—sometimes hundreds—of miniaturized document images. It’s been a common format for archiving newspapers, court documents, government records, and more since the 20th century.
Why Is Microfiche Digitization Important?
“Materials on microfiche are an important part of our country’s history, but right now they are often only available online from expensive databases. We are excited that this project will digitize court documents from our collection and make them freely available to everyone,” said Leslie Street, Director of the Wolf Law Library of William and Mary College.
“Thousands of documents and reports from across the federal government were distributed in microfiche to Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries around the country from 1970 – 2022. While important for space-saving and preservation, microfiche has long been problematic for public access. So this digitization work of Democracy’s Library is incredibly important and will unlock free access to this essential historic public domain corpus to readers and researchers around the world!” noted James R. Jacobs, US government information librarian and co-author of the recently published book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.
Democracy’s Library is the Internet Archive’s ambitious project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications. From environmental impact reports to court decisions, these materials are essential for accountability, scholarship, and civic engagement.
The microfiche collections that will be digitized in this process include US GPO documents, Canadian government documents, US court documents, and UN publications. We are always looking for more collections to be donated.
Meet the People Behind the Work
From left: Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, with microfiche scanning operators Dylan, Louis, Elijah, Avery, and Fernando.
This digitization livestream was brought to life by Sophia Tung, appmaker & designer behind the viral robotaxi depot livestream on YouTube.
The digitization is overseen by scanning operators who are trained to handle physical library materials and digitization equipment.
Thanks also to Internet Archive staff who assisted this project, including CR Saikley, Merlijn Wajer, Brewster Kahle, Derek Fukumori, Jude Coelho, Anastasiya Smith, Jonathan Bloom, Bas Kloosterman, Andrea Mills, Richard Greydanus, Louis Brizuela, Carla Igot Bordador, and Ria Gargoles.
Thanks to Our Partners
Thank you to Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, University of Alberta, and Free Law Project for donating microfiche and helping advise this project.
If your library has microfiche or other materials to donate to the Internet Archive, please learn more about donating materials for preservation and digitization.
Support the Work
Preserving and digitizing these fragile, analog records is resource-intensive—and deeply worthwhile. Donate today to support the Internet Archive and Democracy’s Library.
Enjoy the livestream! Thank you for helping us preserve history and protect access to knowledge.
It’s that time again. The 2024 End of Term crawl has officially begun! The End of Term Web Archive #EOTArchive hosts an initiative named the End of Term crawl to archive U.S. government websites in the .gov and .mil web domains — as well as those harder-to-find government websites hosted on .org, .edu, and other top level domains (TLDs) — as one administrative term ends and a new term begins.
End of Term crawls have been completed for term transitions in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. The results of these efforts is preserved in the End of Term Web Archive. In total, over 500 terabytes of government websites and data have been archived through the End of Term Web Archive efforts. These archives can be searched full-text via the Internet Archive’s collections search and also downloaded as bulk data for machine-assisted analysis.
The purpose of the End of Term Web Archive is to preserve a record of government websites for historical and research purposes. It is important to capture these websites because they can provide a snapshot of government messaging before and after the transition of terms. The End of Term Web Archive preserves information that may no longer be available on the live web for open access.
We have a list of top level domains from the General Services Administration (GSA) and from previous End of term crawls. But we need volunteers to help us out. We are currently accepting nominations for websites to be included in the 2024 End of Term Web Archive.
Submit a url nomination by going to digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2024/. We encourage you to nominate any and all U.S. federal government websites that you want to make sure get captured. Nominating urls deep within .gov/.mil websites helps to make our web crawls as thorough and complete as possible.
On March 16, 2023, the Internet Archive hosted the “Democracy’s Library Workshop: Community Collaboration.” This event marked the first public presentation and discussion of the Democracy’s Library Project since its inauguration at the 2022 Annual Event, following several months of research, supported by the Filecoin Foundation, from November 2022 to February 2023. The presentation, a collaboration between Internet Archive staff and a visiting government official, aims to preserve government information and make it much more meaningfully accessible to the public. The event was live-streamed and can be viewed at the provided video link.
Presentation includes:
Brewster Kahhale, founder of The Internet Archive, providing an introduction and discussing why we need to “Build Our Collections Together.”
Andrea Mills, Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, discussing the incredible progress made in Canada working with their foundational partner, the University of Toronto, in digitizing government information.
Jamie Joyce, leading the Democracy’s Library initiative at Internet Archive in the U.S., reporting on the U.S. landscape analysis and stakeholder interviews.
To librarians and archivists: please know we are still collecting feedback from government information professionals. So if you are a librarian or archivist, we would love to hear from your experience. If you’re interested in sharing, please fill out this survey.
