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Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks

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The following guest post from humanities scholar Katie Livingston is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once made of thin, flimsy pieces of plastic decorated with an old barn and windmill, the cover has long since fallen off and some of the pages are loose. The book is held together by three red rubber bands. My Grann explains that the plastic binder got brittle and began to fall apart—the rubber bands are her solution. The pages of the cookbook are yellowed from years of use. At least three generations of women in my family, including myself, have flipped through these pages, leaving them stained with the oils from their fingers and the drippings of in-progress recipes. Most importantly to me, they scribbled in the margins. My family’s edition of Down Home Cookin’ has reached a critical mass of notes in the marginalia such that it no longer counts as a simple copy of a cookbook: it is my Grann’s cookbook, our family cookbook. Holding it in my hands in my apartment in California (my Grann kindly agreed to mail it to me) feels off. It feels so delicate here, out of the context of her home, her kitchen, in the little cupboard where she has kept all of her cookbooks since I was a child. Now, it is more like a museum piece, something precious and precarious, meant to be handled with care, preserved, analyzed.

This sense of its history, of its fragility, of its potential for disintegrating, is why the cookbook is worth preserving, worth reading, worth moving from that little kitchen in Apache, Oklahoma, to my little kitchen in the Bay Area, to this page, to the archive. This is why all family cookbooks are worth preserving. As time presses on, this small print county cookbook, and others like it, are becoming pieces of personal family ephemera, fading into obscurity the way that other domestic objects—bills, receipts, manuals, phone books, baby books, children’s drawings, to do lists—do. Time has worked on this cookbook as my grandmother has worked from it. The pages are thin, brittle, and covered in age spots. I can imagine all the printed copies of Down Home Cookin’ tucked away in the kitchen drawers of Oklahoma women, slowly degrading, either through excessive use or mere forgetfulness.

Finding a replacement for these books is not easy. To procure a new copy, you have to mail in the old-fashioned way: to an address printed on the title page. This is the paradox of Down Home Cookin’: to obtain a copy of Down Home Cookin’, one must already have a copy of Down Home Cookin’. If one turns to the internet for permanence and reproduction,as we are apt to do these days, little can be found. Searching now reveals a few used editions floating around on eBay and one on Amazon. Unsurprisingly, the Amazon copy is marked with notes and stains. The seller writes: “pencil writing inside front cover, black marker writing on upper corner front cover written ‘(pie crust p.367’), diagonal crease on bottom back cover, and a couple of yellowed (grease?) stains on bottom of a few pages.”

If these books are not scanned, digitized, and archived, we lose not only the text of Down Home Cookin’, but also the contributed labor and knowledge of the women who owned them. Clearly, the owner of the Amazon iteration was fond of the pie crust on page 367. In another version for sale on eBay, the owner inscribed the cookbook with “C Cake” and “Caret Cake” in two locations, presumably as a reminder that this particular cookbook had her favorite carrot cake recipe.

Digitizing and archiving cookbooks challenges the assumption that a scanned book is nothing more than a poor replacement for an official ebook, something easily bought and immediately downloaded, read on a Kindle or an iPad. Scanning and archiving cookbooks documents not only their content, but also the hands that they have passed through; each copy has its own unique revisions and adjustments. Take, for instance, the annotations in the Internet Archive’s scan of A Selection of Tested Recipes, a community cookbook from Howe, Indiana. Not only does the scan capture handwritten addendums to recipes, but also pages in which the owner has added her own recipes. In an unused copy of this cookbook, these pages would otherwise be left blank. But the process of scanning and archiving these previously owned objects quite literally allows us to see the hand of the homemaker at work. 

That history is not visible for the cookbook’s digital analog: the recipe blog, perhaps the most ubiquitous means of publishing and accessing recipes today. Blogs offer little in terms of permanency and even less in terms of making the labor of recipe development visible. Though many of us have been raised on the popular phrase, “the internet is forever,” recipe blogs frequently disappear from the internet. Their content is perhaps even more precarious than that of the physical cookbook, no matter how obscure. Even more troublesome: edits, revisions, addendums and the work of recipe formation are not made evident in the form of the recipe blog. Edits become invisible, embedded in the revision history of the backend of a WordPress document rather than made visible to the naked eye.

“In the case of my Grann’s cookbook, her work and trial and error are evident. The recipe takes on the feeling of a living document.”

Katie Livingston, humanities scholar

In the case of my Grann’s cookbook, her work and trial and error are evident. The recipe takes on the feeling of a living document. Her cookbook is filled to the brim with her own clippings from news articles, her addendums, chicken scratch indicating revisions of revisions, photocopies of her mother’s recipe cards, and even her assessments of various recipes (“good,” she says in the margins of the Farmer’s Haystack Pie recipe, “not great”).

The cookbook, especially the community-made cookbook, does not just represent the labor and meaning-making of a single home or a single family; it acts as a tool to bind together and co-create the identities of small groups and sub-communities. While the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook has worked as a tool for nation-making (my Grann, along with thousands of other teenage girls her age, worked off that cookbook in home economics class), Down Home Cookin’ is representative of a regionally specific co-created identity of women and homemakers in Grady County, Oklahoma. As the political scientist Kennan Ferguson puts it in Cookbook Politics: 

These [community] cookbooks emphasize the material, the gustatory, the domestic, and the creative; they do so in order to regularize, communicate with, form, and inspire the women who are their presumed readers. In other words, they intensify. By being written, collected, sold, and passed from hand to hand, they make both the sense of belonging and the sense of community more intense (79). 

The Grady County Extension Homemakers are not ignorant to the fact of their cookbook as a tool for community building and the “intensification” of certain values and goals. The book is very clearly inscribed with its intent: to help women “gain knowledge and improve their skills in home economics and related areas so that the family unit may be strengthened, develop leadership skills, provide community service, promote international understanding, and meet new people” (454). There is even a charge that members are “friendly, helpful, full of ideas, eager to learn and believe in the home” (454).

“Preservation allows us to be critical and precise in our critiques of communal identity formation. It is not the case that all ideologies baked into the cookbook are ubiquitously good.”

Katie Livingston

Preservation allows us to be critical and precise in our critiques of communal identity formation. It is not the case that all ideologies baked into the cookbook are ubiquitously good. Ferguson touches on how many community cookbooks seem to “reinscribe the virtues of caretaking, housework, even domestic obeisance for both the book’s audience and for the authors themselves” (79). What can, on the one hand, be read as veneration for the homemaker and her work, on the other hand can also be read as a re-inscription of traditional gender roles, the gendered division of labor, and even a certain kind of nationalism through the production and maintenance of the suburban nuclear family.

Cookbooks are not only concerned with the domestic, the familiar, and the communal, but also with the Other, the foreign, and the unknown. There is an impulse, at least in the American cookbook, to bring “otherness” into the home and domesticate it for one’s own use, enjoyment, and consumption. It seems no mistake to me that the Grady Homemaker’s Extension Council promotes “international acceptance” alongside reinforcing the home, or that the 90s edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook seeks to include “more ethnic and regional favorites, such as stir-fries and gumbos, instead of standard meat and potato fare” (4).  My Grann’s cookbook contains the sections “Mexican” and “International” as a means of diversifying the offerings. And while the results are humorous (some of my favorites from this section include “Hong Kong Chicken Casserole,” in which cream of mushroom soup is a key ingredient, and “Mexican Spaghetti Casserole”), one can’t help but wonder what their inclusion means in the context of the whole.  

While these versions of taking the foreign into the domestic can be read as a good-faith effort to seek understanding and acceptance, older cookbooks take on a more voyeuristic, exploitative tone. Otherness is a popular theme in the Internet Archives’ most viewed cookbooks. Alongside the comforting title, Things Mother Used to Make” you’ll also find Southern recipe cookbooks with Mammy figures on the cover and Chinese cookbooks whose contents offer little more than several variations on “chop suey.”  If we lose these cookbooks, we risk erasing legacies of racism and culinary appropriation that proliferated throughout the twentieth century. Preservation, then, is not only about venerating our cultures and communities, but also understanding our past and present and turning a critical gaze on them when necessary.

What we preserve says a lot about what we value, what we want to bring with us in the future, and what we want to leave behind (for example, I could do without a recipe for Vienna sausages rolled in barbeque sauce and crushed Fritos). The humble cookbook may at first appear an inconsequential tool of everyday home life, but in it, one can read shifting ideologies, values, and tastes. A cookbook can make clear, through a simple collection of recipes, what a community is and isn’t, and what people seek to take into themselves and what they exclude. The pages of a cookbook can reveal the history of an individual, a family, a community, or a nation. It can make evident work that is often otherwise invisible or discarded. Most importantly, it can make you say (as Judie Fitch puts it in praise of her own recipe for Brisket Marinade): “This is really good.”

About the author

Katie Livingston is an English PhD candidate at Stanford University. With a focus on American literature from 1840-1940, Katie researches class mobility in the novel, women’s literature, and local color/regionalist fiction.

When she isn’t immersed in writing or teaching, Katie enjoys exploring the outdoors as a backpacker, hiker, and climber. She also finds joy in baking cakes, indulging in campy horror films, and spending time with her cat, Loaf.

Vanishing Culture: On Filmstrips

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The following guest post from film archivist Mark O’Brien is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Eastman stock filmstrip, with its chemical binder in the process of breaking down.

In 1999, I was working in information technology at a school district in rural upstate New York, and dreaming of writing angst-ridden, sample-laden music that might help people understand what it felt like to be me. Autism was not well-understood when I was a child, and I was simply left to try to pretend to be normal. One day I walked into the school’s library and saw an entire wall of shelves being emptied. The district was getting rid of old educational multimedia, most of it filmstrips.

Filmstrips were like slideshows, but on a continuous strip of 35mm film, published equally by independent publishers and juggernauts like Coronet, Jam Handy, Disney, and Hanna-Barbera. By the 1960s, most had soundtracks on record or cassette. A beep or bell sound on the recording told the projectionist to move the filmstrip forward one frame. Today, most people incorrectly call 16mm motion pictures “filmstrips,” but they were in fact a separate and distinct thing all of their own.

Instinctively aware that the records and tapes probably contained cheesy, anachronistic material that could also be manipulated in the music I dreamed of making, and also aware that no one else had probably thought to dig through filmstrip soundtracks, I quickly pled my case to the librarian, and she let me take them all home.

I gleefully digitized all the records and tapes over the next few months. At the time, I had a good turntable and cassette deck, a professional audio interface, and experience working with audio. I got a couple of filmstrip projectors too, and hosted a few get-togethers with friends where we laughed at the filmstrips’ authoritarian, buttoned-down nature, the out-of-time fashions and styles, and the failed attempts to try to seem cool to a high-school-aged audience. We pretended we were on Mystery Science Theater 3000, chastising the images on the screen. While everyone else was simply throwing filmstrips away, I had discovered a cultural artifact and viewing experience that aligned perfectly with the subversive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Sample film from the Uncommon Ephemera collection at Internet Archive

While I began to dream of some way to digitize the film and, perhaps, put it together with the audio in a pre-YouTube world (“Maybe I could learn Macromedia Flash!” I thought. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.) — I had neither the money nor the smarts to get it done. I hung onto the filmstrips for a few years and, feeling like a failure, finally threw them and the soundtracks away. Due to my ignorance and storage space constraints, the only thing left of those soundtracks are MP3s. These two atrocities – saving only MP3s instead of lossless audio, and throwing away the filmstrips, most of which I still haven’t found again – haunt me to this day.

Fast forward to 2018. After a long bout of fatigue, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I got the offending gland removed, but the fatigue did not abate. Still in rural upstate New York, I only had access to doctors who would say “your bloodwork looks correct, it’s not my problem.” I had no choice but to learn to live with the fatigue and, paradoxically, scramble to find something that could financially sustain me and accommodate my medically required non-traditional schedule.

I forget now, but something made me look into filmstrips again. Surely, between 1999 and 2019 someone had taken up this cause and I wouldn’t need to, right? In fact, just the opposite was true, and it shocked me: no one was saving them. I bought some on eBay and started to experiment.

I also continued to do research — wait, what do you mean 35mm film scanners cost $700,000?! No wonder these things aren’t getting saved! Still, I wondered if there was some way I could do it on equipment I could afford. I was hopeful maybe I could scan them somehow, put them together in a video editor and post them to YouTube and people would enjoy them, and maybe they would support me through Patreon.

Learn more about Mark O’Brien & Uncommon Ephemera
– Uncommon Ephemera website: https://uncommonephemera.org/
– Internet Archive collection: https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera

But I quickly realized this wasn’t preservation as much as it was triage. Most filmstrips were printed on Eastmancolor, a film stock which is now notorious for self-destruction. First, the cyan and yellow dyes fade, destroying fine detail and leaving the film an intense shade of red. Then, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place begins to disintegrate. Once this happens, the dye layers move and smear, destroying the images on the film. The speed at which this happens is dependent on the environmental conditions in which the film was stored. All Eastmancolor film is now red, most of it can no longer be properly color-corrected, a lot of it is in the beginning stages of binder breakdown (called “vinegar syndrome”), and some filmstrips are already physically lost.

Realizing this wasn’t traditional preservation, and researching the methods by which a small number of others had saved a small number of filmstrips, I came to an uncomfortable decision: the only way to get this done with limited economic resources was to use a flatbed scanner that accepted 35mm negatives, and carefully cut them to fit in the scanner’s film negative adapter. I’ve heard this makes “real” preservationists wince, but they had thirty-plus years to digitize the format on the right equipment. If I do not do this work now, these filmstrips, containing K-12 and university educational media, business and industry training films, presentations for religious organizations, and sales films used by insurance companies, Amway, and other organizations would be completely unviewable in less than a decade.

With my obsessive-compulsiveness on full alert, I began learning how to make high-quality scans, and developed a process in a video editor to make the filmstrips behave like they did when viewed on a projector, with their characteristic visible movement of the film between frames. In 2019 I was still a long way from being a good preservationist; some of the filmstrips I digitized at the beginning were still discarded after I got a good scan. Today, I try to keep everything just in case.

I left YouTube for a while in 2022, when Scholastic, one of the largest children’s book publishers on earth, tried to get my channel deleted. Turns out they bought the assets of a defunct filmstrip publisher whose work I was trying to save. So not only had no one preserved these things, but a corporation hoarding bankruptcy assets now threatened the very point of preservation in the first place: making history available for viewing. That’s when I moved my primary home to the Internet Archive, who have been unequivocally wonderful to me.

“Sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place.”

Mark O’Brien, film archivist

Without filmstrips, our memory of American culture in the 20th century would be severely lacking. They provide historical perspective, cultural context, and reflect the successes and failures of our education system. They are original sources, unaffected by the space constraints and biases of historians and content aggregators. And they’re fun, full of anachronism, awkward photography, non-theistic proselytizing, and so much incredible hand-drawn artwork that runs the gamut from gorgeous to insane to psychedelic to “my three-year-old drew this.” I feel they could be equally attractive to historians and meme makers, squares and cool kids, the religious and nonreligious, fans of education and fans of comedy.

For this essay, I was asked to explain why preserving filmstrips is important. And that’s why I’ve told you this story; sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place. As an independent and self-taught archivist, it’s disheartening when I have an interaction with people who admonish me about my credentials (I don’t have any), my affiliation with a university (I flunked out of one once, does that count?), or my methods, borne out of necessity and urgency. It’s heartbreaking when people on a “lost media” subreddit flame me for saving “lost media no one cares about,” or when universities and institutions dismiss what I do while simultaneously beating their chests about the important work they’re doing. And it’s ignorantly classist when someone suggests I just wait until I have $700,000 to scan them “correctly.” (I assure you, there will be no Eastmancolor film left on the planet in preservable condition by the time that money comes around.)

Eastman film stock with fading dyes.

While I continue to improve my processes, I am regularly disappointed at how much of what I do isn’t actual preservation: it turns out to be mostly raising awareness, setting boundaries, scraping for a dozen YouTube views here and there, and shouting into the void that is social media — none of which I am particularly good at, having what is effectively a social learning disability which challenges my ability to be an effective communicator.

However, pressing questions remain: how do I convince people it’s not only important, but urgent to save whatever of this format is still out there? How do I get help instead of gatekeeping from other archives and institutions? How do I compensate preservationists who help for their time? How do I compete for attention and financial support on platforms that thrive on viral, rage-bait, and us-versus-them content? Can one person, working as hard as he can on something important but not popular, ever do enough, in an age of content creators with a hundred employees and millions of followers, to even be seen?

I hope these words reach some people, but I’m acutely aware of just how many thousands it takes to truly spread the word about something in the modern age. I have more than 2,000 filmstrips left to scan, most from a few generous donors, and I estimate that’s about ten years of full-time work. Most are printed on Eastmancolor. It will probably take longer to save them than they have left. I am saving as many as I can, but I fear unless I find a way to more effectively communicate the urgency of it all, I won’t be able to save them all. I think it would be shameful if those things got in the way of saving filmstrips, a critical and cool part of our past.

About the author

Mark O’Brien lives in upstate New York with his wife, who you can follow on X at @MrsEphemera, and their cat Charlie, who they got at a yard sale.

Vanishing Culture: On the Importance of Remembering Forgotten Books

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The following guest post from author and editor Brad Bigelow is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

In Herbert Clyde Lewis’s novel Gentleman Overboard, Preston Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling early one morning on deck of a freighter bound for Panama and falls into the Pacific Ocean. No one notices his absence for hours, by which point any hope of rescue is lost. “Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” he cries. “But of course, nobody was there to listen,” Lewis writes, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.”

There’s only one way to succeed as a writer: be read. A lucky few will continue to be read long after their death, earning lasting status as major or minor figures in the literary history of their time. Most, however, will be forgotten—many for good reasons, perhaps. Others, however, are forgotten due to nothing more than bad luck. Mistiming. Poor marketing. The lack of a champion. A prickly personality. Illness. Old age. War. Politics. Whatever the reason, fate often plays mean tricks on writers by taking away their audience.

Brad Bigelow, author and editor

But the same fate plays a mean trick on us as readers, too. Much of how literature is studied and taught rests on the assumption that classics are classics because they represent the best work of their time. And on the corollary that the texts that have been forgotten deserved it. After decades of searching for and celebrating the work of neglected writers, I know that neither is true.

There’s a fine line that separates the writers whose works win a place in the literary canon and the many others whose don’t, and it’s a line drawn by chance, not by the critical evaluation of any judge or jury. The difference rarely has anything to do with literary merit. Sadly, talent often matters less than connections, opportunities, good fortune, or unlucky accidents. But to discover this truth, one must look beyond literature’s well-traveled paths and discover the riches to be found in the vast landscape of forgotten books.

The Internet Archive plays an essential role in this process—indeed, it’s revolutionized our ability to discover works that have been forgotten. Let me illustrate by contrasting two books I’m currently working to bring back to print.

The first is a 1939 novel by Gertrude Trevelyan called Trance by Appointment. I learned of Trevelyan in 2018 when I read her first novel, Appius and Virginia. At the time, there were at least a dozen used copies of the book available for sale online. Within a week or so of looking for the book and at the cost of under $20, I was able to have a copy in hand. I found the book so striking in style and substance that I sought out the rest of Trevelyan’s oeuvre, eight novels in total. Although most were extremely scarce and expensive, I was able to purchase them. There were no copies, though, of her last novel, Trance by Appointment. In fact, the only copies in existence were those in the four registry libraries supporting British copyright law of the time. I was only able to read the book by traveling to London, getting a reader’s card from the British Library, and sitting with the library’s sole copy at a table in the Rare Books room. From the condition of that copy, it was apparent that no one had ever opened it since it was added to the collection. Obtaining a copy of the book for the purpose of reissuing it was even more problematic.

A few years later, I stumbled across a review of a 1940 novel by Sarah Campion titled Makeshift. Intrigued, I went looking for a used copy. There were none. Like Trance by Appointment, virtually the only library copies were in the British registry libraries. No longer living a train ride away from London, I was about to give up hope until I checked the Internet Archive. And lo, there was not only a copy of Makeshift but copies of other equally rare novels by Campion. I used the archive’s borrowing capabilities and quickly read Makeshift, gripped by its uniquely caustic narrator and her story of being caught up in the diaspora of Jews from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. With a little research, I was able to locate Campion’s son (her real name was Mary Coulton Alpers) and obtain permission to reissue the book as part of the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press.

Trance by Appointment will be reissued in 2025 by from Boiler House Press (UK).

Both Trance by Appointment and Makeshift will be reissued in 2025, but the simple difference in the level of effort involved in getting access to the two books demonstrates the extraordinary value of the Internet Archive. It has, for essentially the first time in mankind’s history, made a library of material of incredible depth and richness available to the billions of people worldwide for whom Internet access has become a basic part of their lives.

The Internet Archive transforms our understanding of literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in much of the American West is practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. And even more if you get out of the car and hike any of the thousands of trails that lead into the wilderness. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of our landscape is what you can’t see from the freeway.

And literature is like that. The canon of well-known classics, the books one can find in just about every library and bookstore, the books most commonly studied and written about, is like the freeway system of literature. These works have, until recently, been our most accessible and most heavily traveled routes through our literary landscape. With the creation of the Internet Archive and the steady incorporation of material into its collection, a huge amount of our literary landscape—by now a large share of the published material from the seventeenth century on—is just a few clicks away from over half the people in the world. I look forward to seeing many amazing forgotten books and writers get rediscovered and celebrated anew as more readers come to realize that so much of the literature that has historically been remote and inaccessible can now be found just steps from their front doors.

About the author

Brad Bigelow edits NeglectedBooks.com and the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press (UK). He is the author of the forthcoming Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts from the University of Nebraska Press.

Vanishing Culture: Preserving African Folktales

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The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Selections from Laura Gibbs’ “A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive“

Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.

Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.

Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.

Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.

Helen Nde, author & African folklore scholar

In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.

Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.

“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these [African folklore] texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

Helen Nde, author

These authors can fill in gaps from researchers with a different perspective than those who documented the stories from outside, she said, adding that’s why digital preservation is so important. While many African folklore texts are in the public domain in the United States, much of the anthropological and historical texts with commentary from both African and non-African scholars that provide the necessary context for these folktales are not, Nde said. “In many instances, these important auxiliary texts are out of print, which means access via the Internet Archive is the best way scholars not located in the West might ever be able to access them,” Nde said. “I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

For Gibbs, online access to digitized books is critical to the volunteer work she does since retiring from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma. She compiled A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive, a curated bibliography of hundreds of folktale books that she has shared with the public through the Internet Archive.

Laura Gibbs, author & African folklore scholar, showing a book she owns that is no longer available on archive.org.

“For me doing my work, the Internet Archive is my library,” said Gibbs, who lives in Austin, Texas. “There are books at the Internet Archive that I can’t get at my local library or even in my local university library.  Some of these books are really obscure. There just physically aren’t that many copies out there.”

Being able to check out one digital title at a time through controlled digital lending opened up new possibilities. In her research, she can use the search function with the title of a book, name of an illustrator or some other kind of detail. Now in her digital research, she can use the search function to perform work that she couldn’t do with physical books, such as keyword searches, with speed and precision. The collection also has been helpful in her recent project at Wikipedia to fill in information on African oral literature, such as proverbs and folktales.

“Digital preservation is not only preservation, it’s also transformation. Because when things have been digitized, you can share them in different ways, explore them in different ways, connect them in different ways,” Gibbs said. “So, I connect different versions of the stories to one another, and then I can help readers connect to all those different versions of the stories. But now, because of the publishers’ lawsuit, many important African folktale collections and reference works are no longer available for borrowing at the Archive.”

What would it mean to lose digital access to these folktales?  “It would be the end of my work,” said Gibbs. “My whole goal is to make the African folktales at the Archive more accessible to readers around the world by providing bibliographies, indexes, and summaries of the stories. But now the publishers are shutting down that public access.” 

“The stories were embodied in the traditional storytellers and in their communities, and the continuity of that tradition over time has been so disrupted,” Gibbs said. “The loss is just staggering. The stories that were recorded are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of stories in the hundreds of different African languages…We can’t afford to let this kind of loss happen again in the digital world.”

Gibbs adds that just as museums are repatriating artifacts from colonized countries, the original stories of African countries need to be made available to their communities. “Digital libraries like the Internet Archive are a crucial way to make these stories available to African readers.”

Preservation of African folklore is not just important for research purposes, but also for self-exploration and reflection. When examining African folklore, Nde often asks: “What can these stories tell me about myself?” she said. “Speaking from my own experience, African folktales are an underexplored resource for understanding the cultural history of African peoples,” Nde said. “Mythology and folklore are how people make sense of themselves as people on this planet.”

Vanishing Culture: On 78s

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The following guest post from audio preservation expert George Blood is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Thomas Edison produces the first machine that can record and playback sound in 1877. The flat disc is first patented in 1888. The concept is very simple: a sound wave is captured on the record as a physical wave in the disc, most often shellac (the shell of the lac beetle). Most discs spin at approximately 78 rpm, hence the name 78s. Other speeds, such as 80, 90 and 100 rpm are not uncommon. In addition to speed, the equalization and stylus size varies – either to improve the sound or to dodge someone else’s patent. In the 1950s they slowly give way to the LP or microgroove record, though in some parts of the world they remain common well into the 1960s.

Why is it important to preserve 78rpm discs?

The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.

The period of 78s doesn’t just parallel other historical developments. The sounds on 78s document cultural norms, performance practices, tastes, and the interests of people who, after centuries of drudgery and lives spent in the fields and hard labor, finally had free time. My mother liked to remind me that nothing tells you more about a person than what makes them laugh. The comedy routines and lyrics give us a window into a time when groups of people were preyed upon, disparaged, and disrespected in stereotypes and bigotry, which shines a mirror on how we can still do better to our fellow beings. We hear the buoyant sounds of the roaring ‘20s, a happy, hopeful time, of liberation and greed. Music borne of the heavy hand of oppression and poverty that conveys gospel, blues, and gives us jazz—all quintessentially American. On 78s, we can hear and learn of the other peoples of the world: of ragas and gamalans, performers who do not traverse great oceans, the cultures of foreign lands we could only read about. We can feel the despondency of the Great Depression in the songs that empathize with the struggles of a nation. Through 78s we can hear firsthand accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the angry, vile speeches of dictators, the songs that inspired a once divided nation to pull together in a common cause against evil, to fight for peace for our time, for days that will live in infamy. Bursting out of the war to end all wars, big bands, swing, then rock n’ roll. It makes one long to hear Bach play the organ, Mozart play the piano, Paganini play the violin, or Orpheus beg for the turn of Euridice, and know, that if we preserved these 78rpm recordings, future generations will understand our joys and pains, to have a window, through sound, into the arc of history, the slow advance of progress of the human condition.

To remember half of recorded history, it is important to preserve 78rpm discs.

About the author

George Blood is an expert in the audio and video preservation industry.

Coming this October: The Vanishing Culture Report

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This October, we are publishing The Vanishing Culture Report, a new open access report examining the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. 

As more content is created digitally and provided to individuals and memory institutions through temporary licensing deals rather than ownership, materials such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from streaming platforms. This means they are vanishing from our culture without ever being archived or preserved by libraries.

But the threat of vanishing is not exclusive to digital content. As time marches on, analog materials on obsolete formats—VHS tapes, 78rpm recordings, floppy disks—are deteriorating and require urgent attention to ensure their survival. Without proper archiving, digitization, and access, the cultural artifacts stored in these formats are in danger of being lost forever.

By highlighting the importance of ownership and preservation in the digital age, The Vanishing Culture Report aims to inform individuals, institutions, and policymakers about the breadth and scale of cultural loss thus far, and inspire them to take proactive steps in ensuring that our cultural record remains accessible for future generations.

Share Your Story!

As part of the Vanishing Culture report, we’d like to hear from you. We invite you to share your stories about why preservation is important for the media you use on our site. Whether it’s a website crawl in the Wayback Machine, a rare book that shaped your perspective, a vintage film that captured your imagination, or a collection that you revisit often, we want to know why preserving these items is important to you. Share your story now!