Tag Archives: national library week

Happy National Library Week 2024!

At the Internet Archive, we’re celebrating the power of libraries to transform lives and communities during this year’s National Library Week (April 7-13, 2024). From preserving the past to shaping the future, libraries are vital hubs of knowledge, connection, and inspiration.

To mark this special week, we’re shining a spotlight on our incredible admin team. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, ensuring our events and virtual spaces are welcoming to all members of our global community.

Join us in thanking them for their dedication and hard work! Watch the video to meet the faces behind the scenes and learn more about how we strive to make knowledge accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Check out more about National Library Week here: https://www.ala.org/conferencesevents/celebrationweeks/natlibraryweek

National Library Week 2023: Brenton, user experience

To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.

Brenton Cheng learned to program in BASIC on an Apple II Plus at age 9. His mother was one of the earliest computer programmers and his dad was a marketing consultant for technology products in Portola Valley, California. By age 12, Cheng had written a series of animated games that he put together in a hand-assembled software package. It sold about four copies.

Now, Cheng is a senior engineer at the Internet Archive, where he leads the user experience (UX) team. “Our goal is to give our patrons a great experience on the Archive.org website while making sure that under the hood, our technologies are as simple, robust and maintainable as possible,” said Cheng, who has been at the organization for seven years.

Despite his early computer exposure, Cheng wanted to study something more tangible in college. He pursued mechanical engineering and earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s from Stanford University. Along the way, he developed a love of contemporary dance and improvisation. Inspired by the creativity of movement, he veered toward biomechanical engineering in graduate school. 

Entering the job market, Cheng said he wanted a flexible schedule so he would be able to take workshops and occasionally go on tour with dance companies. He was a freelance computer programmer for about a decade, then worked at Astrology.com and NBCUniversal for another 10 years. 

In 2016, Cheng said he was drawn to the Internet Archive by its mission, reputation and people. “Being in the dance world, I was constantly surrounded with all kinds of eclectic, eccentric, fascinating, brilliant people,” he said. “There were certain common elements in the way the Archive embraces and benefits from diversity. I found many artists and engineers working in novel ways. That felt very much at home.”

From his experience working with improvisation in dance, Cheng said he loves trying to create the conditions within which people contribute their best work and feel good about what they’re doing. His team is focused on fighting for users and constantly making the website better for the public. “I also serve the digital librarians who are collecting and providing content for our patrons,” Cheng said. “I am giving them the tools, platform and environment to do their magic.” 

Tell us something about your role at the Internet Archive that most people wouldn’t know about.
Simultaneously with supporting the Archive’s mission and helping our patrons, I am always holding in the back of my mind the subtext of a “small team, long term.” These ideas guide choices around process, technologies and architecture. We regularly discard choices that would entail too much complexity or require too much on-going, hands-on maintenance. And we try to resist rushing features out the door that will only add to our technical debt later.

What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive?
I set up a wiki to allow scholars to submit transcriptions of scanned Balinese palm leaves.

What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive?
Creating a team that likes working together, is resilient through conflicts and pushes each other to keep getting better.

What are you reading?
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. It’s a contemporary writing style manual that incorporates cognitive science and linguistics and acknowledges the evolving nature of language.

National Library Week 2023: Caitlin, events

To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.

If there’s an event at the Internet Archive, there’s a good chance Caitlin Olson had her hand in it. And with about 80 events last year, including 40 in-person, that keeps her plenty busy. 

“I’m a helper by nature and my role involves wearing a lot of hats,” said Olson, senior executive assistant for seven years. 

While not a librarian by training, Olson said she enjoys supporting librarians and their work. Olson provides support for webinars online and parties at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco. She also assists Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle in his work, helps staff with IT issues (including migrating to remote work during the pandemic), and pinch hits when needed. 

“I’m the go-to person for most questions because if I don’t know the answer, I likely know who will,” Olson said, who prefers working behind-the-scenes and is known as a fixer who keeps a calm head. “Brewster says I help soothe the organization. I often can jump in and solve a problem.”

After graduating from high school in a small town in northern California, Olson said she gravitated to the Bay Area for college, so has both the “country mouse” and “city mouse” experience. After a stint in journalism, she was drawn to the Internet Archive. “I wanted to work for a place where people felt passionate about what they were doing—and I found that here,” Olson said.

What’s an aspect of your job that you especially like?
I work with our ceramicist who creates all of our statues for the Archive. Fun Fact: after you work here for three years, you get a statue made in your likeness (if you want).

What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive? 
Our annual Public Domain Day events and the book talks we host in collaboration with The Booksmith

Favorite collection at the Internet Archive?
The Attention K-Mart Shoppers collection 

What are you reading?
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach, which is about what happens when animals commit crimes, and From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty, which is a book that explores death-care in different cultures and it’s written by a badass mortician. 

National Library Week 2023: Liz, donations

To celebrate National Library Week 2023, we are introducing readers to four staff members who work behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, helping connect patrons with our collections, services and programs.

Liz Rosenberg first worked with the Internet Archive in the early days of the Great 78 Project. She helped design the digitization workflow of 78rpm records and estimates transferring 30,000 sides of records herself.

The self-described “record lady,” Rosenberg said the project was the perfect entrée to the organization. She graduated from Drexel University with a degree in music industry technology, with a specialty in audio recording and production.

In 2020, Rosenberg was officially hired by the Internet Archive in patron services and later asked to lead the organization’s physical donation program. She continues with the Great 78 Project, overseeing monthly uploads, resolving metadata issues and coordinating digitization of donated collections with partners at George Blood LP.

“The Internet Archive is a place that I had always dreamed of working,” Rosenberg said. “I really looked up to the mission of the Internet Archives so when the opportunity came up to work for them directly, I couldn’t have said yes faster.”

As donations manager, Rosenberg receives inquiries from individuals and librarians about donating their physical media to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization, from single items to collections of millions of objects. She has overseen the donations of small folk music collections, individual collectors’ passion projects, and college libraries including Bowling Green State University and the University of Hawaii. 

The individual collector contributions often are triggered by the death of a loved one. “Those tend to be sensitive situations for families,” she said. “But they are grateful to almost be able to spend time with them through the preservation of their collection and be able to go and visit whenever they want. That’s very special.”

Rosenberg keeps a “warm and fuzzy thank you file” on her computer from donors that she said keeps her motivated to encourage others to share their collections, like the message below:

Dear Liz,

You are amazing! Thank you for your kind guidance and generous ways. Seeing the dedication today has brought a difficult and costly task of storing these books over such a long period of time to this heartfelt moment and for such a worthy cause. I am in the middle of grading portfolios and preparing for a solo art exhibition so, as usual, I need to juggle the books in between. I will be in touch soon but, again, I just wanted to let you know how wonderful you and your organization are 🙂

in kindest regard, Karen

What is the most rewarding part of your job?
For me, it’s really about preserving stories. I feel such a connection to donors that I work with when I get to hear the story of how a collection was created. We want to preserve those stories alongside the media itself. And that’s really such a privilege.

What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive?
Presenting on behalf of the Internet Archive at the 2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Conference. A recording of the presentation, as given to the Internet Archive staff shortly after the conference, can be found on the Internet Archive here.

What’s your favorite item at the Internet Archive?
This transcription recording of a child playing accordion: https://archive.org/details/78_four-leaf-clover_sonny-walikis-and-his-squeeze-box_gbia0001730a. We transferred this record without knowing who the performer was or anything about their history. The family of Sonny Walikis actually found the recording in our collection shortly after their family member had passed away and reached out to tell us the history of the recordings. I always think of this record as the best example of why we preserve media – to connect people to lost stories and help memories live on.

What’s your favorite collection at the Internet Archive?
The 78rpm record collection! archive.org/details/georgeblood

What are you reading?
The Tower of Swallows by Andrzej Sapkowski

What is your secret talent?
Morphing into a children’s choir! I was a recording studio intern and we had children booked to sing the part but they got too distracted in the booth. So I sang all of the parts slowed down 10% and we sped them up to make me sound “child-like”. The results are one of my only vocal credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlKhVhuTiik.