“Welcome to the Physical Archive!”

On a tour October 22, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, shared his enthusiasm for the industrial building in Richmond, California, that serves as a forever home for millions of items donated for digital preservation. He walked curious visitors through the life cycle of books and media being collected and scanned as part of the mission to provide universal access to knowledge.

“We wanted to go and digitize everything, ever, and make it as available to everybody as we possibly could. How hard could it be?” Kahle said. After setting out to get one digital copy of everything published, the Archive found donors often didn’t want the physical copies back. That meant finding a secure location to fill shipping containers with the materials including books, music, videos, periodicals, magazines, microfilm, microfiche, CD-ROMs, and interactive laser discs.

The annual tour highlighted the storage space, film preservation lab and demonstrations of sorting and scanning processes. The free event also included exhibits of rare books, vintage records and technology from the vast collection.

“I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s just mind-blowing,” said Klein Lieu, an engineering manager for a software company in Oakland who attended the event. “You walk through the shipping containers and it’s like the modern-day Library of Alexandria. You don’t want it to burn down.”

Lieu, 34, is a monthly donor who said he’s used the Internet Archive since he was 8 years old—randomly looking up old blogs and websites he made of his favorite cartoons as a kid, and later for academic purposes. In the film lab, he marveled at footage of New York City from the 1950s that was being digitized. “I’m in awe of the entire experience,” he said. “Millions and millions of these stories, art works, and code that is all preserved is actually very touching.”

Jen Mico, a film scanner, described the importance of the archival process to visitors at the event.

“It’s really important to have an actual human here being the bridge between the film, which was created 70 years ago, and creating this digital file, which will be disseminated to whoever wants to see it. It’s pretty great,” Mico said.

For Natalie Orenstein, the event was a chance to see up close a resource that she uses regularly as a journalist in Oakland. She said she turns to the Internet Archive for local historical information and to see whether a group has sneakily changed its website or materials. Covering the recent election and tracking campaign financing, she said it’s also been useful to watch the political TV ads the Archive has preserved.

Orenstein said it was striking to see the archive of physical materials—especially since she thinks of Internet Archives as primarily a digital organization. “I respect that they value the original product, as well as its digitized form,” she said. “It’s only worth preserving if you value what it was originally.”

Indeed, for many, seeing the tangible artifacts makes archiving more real and motivates them to explore more of the collection.

Zoli Bassoff of San Rafael said he had not heard much about the Internet Archive before coming to the event but likes the idea of having access to a variety of media. “I was interested in how they receive it, process, and get it on the internet. I wanted to learn about the process,and that was just as interesting as the actual media itself,” he said.

In the special collections exhibit at the open house, Jennifer Waits, a podcaster and writer from  San Francisco, was drawn to the old records and audio paraphernalia. She is involved with a project to curate a college radio collection as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Waits is reaching out to college radio stations to digitize playlists, program guides, the Journal of College Radio and other materials. Instead of going to individual campuses, this centralized digital collection will be a useful resource for historians and scholars.

“It’s amazing to be able to offer to scan materials and provide this long-term back up,” Waits said. “We have things from a number of radio stations, so you’re starting to see college radio in the context of others from the same period of time to see what they have in common. I hope the collection grows and grows.”

“I knew in principle [the Physical Archive] existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”

John Skinner, Wikipedian and party attendee

The Wayback Machine provides a nostalgia trip for Jen Osgood of Oakland, who likes to look up old blogs and websites from when she was in college. The Internet Archive is also a good resource for art projects, too, and one of the few places she can find old botanical illustrations, she said. Touring the physical archive, she said, gave her a new appreciation of the collection. “It’s an amazing wealth of knowledge,” she said.

John Skinner said he comes from a family of librarians and works as a technologist creating websites so the event was an intersection of his interests. Spending much of his time editing Wikipedia pages, he said he frequently uses the Internet Archive for research and citations.

What was his impression of the physical archive? “It’s astonishing,” Skinner said. “I knew in principle it existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”