The following interview with singer-songwriter Elliott Adkins is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Elliott Adkins has a passion for recording old songs that have largely been forgotten. The 23-year-old musician was inspired after finding boxes of sheet music in his parents’ basement when they moved from his childhood home in Atlanta last year.
“I thought it would be cool if somebody took the time to record these obscure pieces of music that had never been recorded…so I did,” Adkins said. “I put it online really not expecting much of it, but it took on a life of its own.”
Most of the collection of more than 1,000 pieces of music, which were his late grandmother’s, are old enough to be in the public domain. That allows him to remix, record and share the music. Adkins records himself singing and playing the songs on guitar, posting the never-before recordings online. His video of the 1927 song, “Yesterday,” went viral on Instagram and propelled his social media presence.
“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy,” Adkins said. “There are people who had great ideas in the past, but the way our copyright system is set up, it’s hard to expand on those ideas. The public domain allows you to have a certain amount of time to make as much money as possible…then it becomes something greater than yourself. It removes the ego from art.”
Adkins said he’s drawn to these vintage tunes, in part, because he “naturally craves mystery” and likes the challenge. It’s a stretch to figure out the music, understand the lyrics, and put his own twist on the songs, he said. He unpacks the history of the songs and often shares some of their backstory in his videos.
“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy.”
Elliott Adkins, singer-songwriter
“I find the [old] songs to be a lot more sophisticated than popular music today, with their chord progressions and harmony,” Adkins said. “There’s a blend of genres – early jazz and forms of classical music – that’s very interesting.”
In October, Adkins was invited to perform at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration in San Francisco. He made musical history singing “Tell Her I’ll Love Her,” an English sea song from the early 1800s. It was the first time the song had ever been recorded. Adkins was the closing act for the event, playing his guitar and singing before a live audience—and getting the crowd, which surpassed 400 people, to sing along.
“It was great. I could tell the audience was primed for anything I was going to throw at them,” said Adkins. “It was nice to have such an attentive audience. There was an ideology attached to what I was performing, a mission behind it, and those people were very much ready for that.”
Tell Her I’ll Love Her (audio) The audio version of “Tell Her I’ll Love Her” is available under CC0, meaning you can “copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” DOWNLOAD NOW
Adkins, who also writes original alternative country and Americana music, said he’s become fascinated with the community of music preservationists he’s encountered since venturing into this niche of music. He’s met people old and young, online and in the Atlanta area who are committed to reviving forgotten songs.
Staff at the Internet Archive spotted Adkins on Instagram and reached out to invite him to participate in the October event. Since much of his material he uses is in the public domain, he’s said he’s a “big fan” of the Archive and was happy to collaborate on the project.
A few songs were considered before the decision was made to go with, “Tell Her I’ll Love Her.” Adkins worked on the arrangement, wrote new lyrics, and said he practiced it for 30 minutes every day leading up to the performance in San Francisco.
The feedback after the performance has been overwhelmingly positive and Adkins said he’s picked up new followers on social media as a result of the event.
“It’s a way to get in touch with the past,” Adkins said. “Most people, especially my age, are so unaware of what music sounded like 100 years ago. It’s really cool to see what songs did make it, what songs didn’t.”
Adkins said he enjoys thinking of new ways to present the old tunes.
“I see music as something that is constantly trying to be pushed forward,” he said. “I think you can grab a lot more people if you adjust it for the modern audience.”
At the end of his Internet Archive performance, Adkins led the audience in singing additional verses to the sea song that he wrote just for the event:
Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song A song that may be old, but is not yet gone The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read So, celebrate with us, speak of days of yore Here we all are gathered to maintain what came before So, it isn’t just my ghost that can visit this sweet shore
Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song A song that may be old, but is not yet gone The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read ‘cause some will remember though the world may forget Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song (So, thank y’all very much for singing right along)
The following guest post from legendary software designer Jordan Mechner is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
In 1993, I was trying to learn everything I could about the 1914 Orient Express, to help our team recreate it accurately in The Last Express (the game I did after Prince of Persia). We were dumbfounded when the French railway company SNCF told us they’d dumped most of their pre-war archives for lack of warehouse space in the 1970s. The train timetables, floor plans and photographs we coveted had gone to landfill.
Watch a demo trailer for The Last Express
Like most kids of my generation, I grew up assuming that things like books, video games, music and movies, newspapers and magazines, once published, wouldn’t just disappear. If I ever wanted to revisit that 1981 issue of Softalk magazine, or read The Manchester Guardian‘s front page the day World War I broke out, surely some library somewhere would have a copy?
In reality, cultural artifacts are findable only so long as someone takes on the active responsibility to preserve, catalog and share them. Once gone, they’re gone forever. Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception.
That summer of 1993, as a last resort, we placed a classified ad in a French railway enthusiasts magazine: “Seeking information about 1914 Orient Express.” One issue later, our phone rang.
The voice on the other end proposed that we meet in their club, in the basement of Paris Gare de l’Est. We passed through a glass door marked “No Access” to discover a cavern of rooms filled with vintage railway posters, books, and the biggest working model train set I’ve ever seen. Our informants—a pair of retired French railway employees—were waiting.
We explained what we were looking for, and what SNCF had told us. A glint appeared in the two gentlemen’s eyes. The elder of the pair leaned forward. “They think they destroyed the archives,” he said. “We took ‘em home. We’ve got ‘em.”
Resources PlayThe Last Express, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser. PlayPrince of Persia, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser. Learn more about Mechner and his body of work at https://www.jordanmechner.com/
If you’ve played The Last Express, you know that they came through for us. Our Smoking Car Productions team in San Francisco was able to spend the next four years creating a faithful interactive 3D recreation of the historic luxury train, thanks to two trainmen in Paris who’d preserved a part of their company’s legacy that management didn’t consider worth saving.
Thirty years later, The Last Express has in its turn become a relic. The cutting-edge 1990s technology we used to model and render the train is now antiquated, like 1890s steam engines. Today, retro-computing enthusiasts, academics, online libraries and archives volunteer their resources to curate and preserve games like The Last Express, and the documents and artifacts that contain the behind-the-scenes stories of how they were made.
Sadly (but unsurprisingly), it’s rare for game development studios and media companies who own the underlying materials to prioritize preservation of their legacies any more than the SNCF did in the 1970s. Old server backups are routinely deleted. Internal information about a title’s development is often unfindable a decade later even if management asks for it.
As a game developer, I’ve been in the rare and fortunate position of being able to archive and share source code, assets and development materials from many of my games. One reason is that my publishing contracts let me keep the copyrights (unusual even in the 1980s, almost unheard of today). In 2012, the Strong National Museum of Play agreed to receive a large pile of cartons that were taking up significant shelf space in my garage. When I turned up a long-lost box of 3.5” floppy disks containing Prince of Persia’s 1989 source code, a team of experts descended on my house with a carful of vintage hardware to extract and upload it to github. Wired magazine sent a reporter and photographer to cover the event. Few game studio employees can expect such privileged treatment.
Play Prince of Persia
A more ordinary course of events is exemplified by the abrupt closure of Game Informer magazine in August 2024. Its website with three decades’ worth of industry coverage disappeared overnight from the internet—removed by its parent company, GameStop, with no advance warning to the magazine’s subscribers or even to its staff. In this case, a robust network of game fans and journalists (and the Wayback Machine) quickly sprang into action to archive past issues. But similar erasures happen constantly around the world, largely unnoticed by the public. Game studios, local newspapers, and other companies disappear every week, taking their history with them.
As a lifelong author, game developer and graphic novelist who makes my living primarily from royalties, I understand publishers’ desire to control and profit from content they own. But all of the games and books I’ve created were made possible by what came before—including other games, books, movies, and history I could access when I needed it, thanks to archivists and librarians. Their work is unsung, and often unpaid. I’d like to see it unpunished. Having benefited so much from their efforts, it’s painful to me as a creator to see them under attack.
The Internet Archive’s recent removal of 500,000 books from its online library, after being sued by a group of big publishers who called scanning and lending their books piracy, is now the subject of an ongoing court case. The decision (which may come down to the U.S. Supreme Court) will have a major rippling impact on future preservation efforts and online archiving, including within the video game industry.
I believe in fair use, and I fear for a society in which our ability to document and preserve our history (including books and games we’ve purchased) is effectively hamstrung and blocked by large companies seeking to expand their control of digital platforms. For these reasons, I’m firmly on the archivists’ side.
I can’t help thinking that if the SNCF employees who took home those file boxes of train floor plans and route maps in the 1970s were to do the equivalent today—scan and upload them to a vintage railway enthusiasts’ website, say—they might well find themselves hit with a takedown notice and legal threats. Theft of intellectual property, violation of non-disclosure agreements, conspiracy to commit piracy. In today’s climate, I wouldn’t blame them for hesitating, or for letting their employer consign that history to oblivion.
The little corner of our world to which I’ve dedicated my working life—making video games, books and graphic novels—is just one small niche. But it depends on, and is connected to, all the rest. I hope that the French railway enthusiasts’ club still exists. I hope GameStop allows the readers and former staff who treasured their magazine to preserve its legacy without interference. And I hope the Internet Archive wins their case.
About the author
Jordan Mechner is an American video game designer, graphic novelist, and screenwriter. He created Prince of Persia, one of the world’s most beloved and enduring video game franchises, and became the first game creator to successfully adapt his own work as a feature film screenwriter with Disney’s Prince of Persia (2010). With game credits including Karateka, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, he is considered a pioneer of cinematic storytelling in the video game industry. Jordan made his debut as a graphic novel writer/artist with the autobiographical Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family (recipient of the 2023 Chateau de Cheverny prize). His graphic novels as writer include the New York Times best-selling Templar (with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland), Monte Cristo (with Mario Alberti), and Liberty (with Etienne Le Roux).
The following guest post from researcher Amanda Gray Rendón is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
When asked to consider women’s care labor, people likely think about feminized gender roles within “the domestic sphere” where labor has historically been invisible and undervalued. For women of color, the lines between public and private have often been blurred, as evidenced by the family photo of my great-grandmother picking beets in a field while caring for my two-year-old grandmother. Sixty years later the roles would reverse and my grandmother would serve as the primary caregiver for her mother with Alzheimer’s dementia. I could not begin to quantify in dollars the thirteen years of 24/7 care she provided our family.
In U.S. culture, women have historically been thought of as “natural” caregivers or predisposed to caring for others, so little to no concern has been given to assigning monetary value to the labor that women are expected to perform.
This begs the question: how can we adequately archive a history that is designed to be hidden and undervalued precisely because of how invaluable it is to our social, cultural, and economic fabric?
Women’s care work—both paid and unpaid—serves as the foundation on which the world’s postindustrial economies have functioned. Working mothers and caregivers often participate in what scholars refer to as the “double-day,” or the “double shift.” This is when (predominantly) women have an income-earning day job followed by unpaid caregiving labor they provide their families when they get home in the evening after “work.” Some have argued women’s care work has expanded into a triple shift whereby women have taken on more caregiving roles within their communities, adding significantly to gendered burdens of care.
The invisible, and at times isolating, nature of care work contributes to the precarity of archiving women’s care labor history. To preserve this aspect of our cultural history, it’s vital to engage with those performing care work, as well as to understand the different ways that community care work is performed. Documenting caregiver culture on social media allows us to identify the contributions that caregivers and care communities make, along with the barriers they face.
No one has helped me to understand this more than Cynthia “Cindy Ann” Espinoza. Cindy Ann and I met when we both attended Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio. She graciously offered to participate in my research when I spoke at a community education session on Alzheimer’s disease that the church sponsored in collaboration with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. We became Facebook friends shortly thereafter and I observed firsthand the virtual care work in which Cindy Ann participated, as well as the archive she had created of the “real world” care she provided her mother who passed from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia several years earlier.
On January 17, 2017, about a week before PBS aired the documentary Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts, Cindy Ann posted a video excerpt from the film to her wall on Facebook. The three-minute video, with 4.4 million views and over 5,000 comments, was originally posted to Facebook by Next Avenue, a PBS digital publication dedicated to issues facing individuals over 50 years old in the United States. The documentary follows Daisy Duarte, a Latina in Minneapolis, as she cares for her mother, Sonja, who is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia.
Next Avenue’s original post reads, “Millions of Americans will be able to relate to this story.” Cindy Ann identified herself as one of those millions of Americans almost five years after her mother’s passing from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia. Her post included the message, “I can relate to this woman in this story. Its the hardest thing to see ur parent dealing with Alzheimer”s ..but i did it for 9 yrs caring for my Mom i have no regrets. I would do it all again even if she didn’t remember who i was. I love & miss you dearly Mommy..” Cindy Ann watched Daisy wash her mother’s clothes, brush her teeth, apply her makeup, do her hair, show her how to hold a spoon, sit her in a recliner to watch television—all while exclusively speaking Spanish. The invisible care work Cindy Ann provided her mother nearly a decade before was publicly visible for the world to see.
I also related to the family portrayed in the film. As I viewed the video, I was reminded of my own experience helping my grandmother care for my great-grandmother when the three of us lived together in San Antonio. This personal connection prompted me to comment with a note of: “thanks for sharing.” I appreciated the connection Cindy Ann created in that moment.
Several of her other Facebook friends left comments in response to her post. There was one from an employee at a local adult daycare facility: “Yup and ur mama was a beautiful blessing for us at seniors 2000! I loved her so much <3;” and another from a current caregiver, “Aww I’m doing it right now. My heart aches every time I leave my mom. I pray for her mind to heal. It’s one of the ugliest diseases ever encountered! I pray they find a cure very soon.” Others were comments of support, such as: “Super hard, girl.” and “Amen.”
The commenters were all women who either acknowledged Cindy Ann’s experience as their own or validated it with words of empathy and support. That winter morning, Cindy Ann’s public Facebook page was a place where women came together to share a commonality of experience in an online space. The care community helped to make visible their friend’s caregiving labor, as well as their own—in effect becoming a part of care labor history.
Though the internet seems to be “forever”, the ephemeral nature of certain online spaces—such as social media pages and posts that can be deleted or websites that are no longer supported—necessitates an archival space such as the Internet Archive, which on May 9, 2017 captured the full-length documentary Cindy Ann posted about. Nowhere else on the internet can I access this film without a subscription, rental, or purchase. As a researcher, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable archival research tool that I rely on to provide accurate records of historical online spaces I can no longer access. However, we must find a way to better preserve social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and others where caregivers post and provide community care. The sheer volume of pages and posts may have made this a challenging task previously, but with new AI language learning models, we can begin to conceive of ways to more pointedly target and capture the rich history of online care communities and women’s virtual care work.
To preserve a more complete and inclusive history of women’s caregiving labor, digital archivists must seek out the spaces where women are performing the work. The Internet Archive serves as a record that women’s care communities exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist. Documenting the challenges women caregivers face, the support they need, and their shared spaces of communal experience helps to create a more complete historical record of their cultural impact for future generations.
About the author
Amanda Gray Rendón is a community-based researcher, writer, oral historian, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Narrative Medicine and Digital Health Humanities at Wheaton College. She received her PhD in American Studies with concentrations in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her work in academia, Gray Rendón was a project manager in implementation services for a medical software company followed by several years in case management for a mediation and arbitration firm in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of fellowships and appointments at several institutions, including the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Earlham College, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Saint Louis University. Her scholarship centers the lived experiences of Latina professional and family caregivers. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.
The following Q&A between writer Caralee Adams and journalist Philip Bump of The Washington Post is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post based in New York. He writes the weekly newsletter How To Read This Chart. He’s also the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
Caralee Adams: What does it mean for an individual journalist to have their work preserved? Why is it important to have easy access to news stories from the past?
Philip Bump: One of the nice things about my career has been that I’ve worked for outlets that I feel confident are doing their own preservation, like TheWashington Post. I’m not particularly worried about losing access to my writing. However, it’s less of a concern for me than it is for other outlets, unfortunately. It is unquestionably the case that I find the Internet Archive useful and use it regularly for a variety of things—both for its preservation of online content and collection of closed captioning for news programs.
Any recent examples of when you’ve found the Internet Archive particularly useful?
I use the search tool on closed captioning more than anything else. The other day I was trying to find an old copy of a webpage. I was writing about Donald Trump’s comments on Medal of Honor recipients. As it turns out, there is not an immediately accessible resource for when Medals of Honor were granted to members of the military. You can see aggregated—how many there are—but you can’t see who was given a medal and when they served. I actually used the Internet Archive to see how the metrics changed between the beginning of Trump’s presidency and by the end of it. I was able to see that there were medals awarded to about 11 people who served during the War on Terror, three who served in Vietnam, and one during World War II. Then, I was able to go back and double check against the Trump White House archive, which is done by the National Archives, and see the people to whom he had given this award. That’s a good example of being able to take those two snapshots in time and then compare them in order to see what the difference was to get this problem solved.
Why is it important for the public to have free public access to an archive of the news for television or print?
It’s the same reason that it’s important, in general, to have any sort of archive: it increases accountability and increases historical accuracy. The Internet Archive is essential at ensuring that we have an understanding of what was happening on the internet at a given point in time. That is not something that is constantly useful, but it is something that is occasionally extremely useful. I do a lot of work in politics and get to see what people are saying at certain points in time, which are important checks and accountability for elected officials. The public can know what they were saying when they were running in the primary as compared with the general [election]. The Archive allows anyone to be able to get information from websites that are no longer active. If you’re looking for something and you have the old link to Gawker or the old link to a tweet, you can often [find] it archived. The Internet Archive doesn’t capture everything—it couldn’t possibly do so. But it captures enough to generally answer the questions that need to get answered. There’s nowhere else that does that. There are other archiving sites, but none that do so as comprehensively, or none with an archive that goes back that far.
Has any of your journalism vanished from the public? Do you have any examples where you’ve been looking for something and it’s been missing?
Yes. One of the challenges is that multimedia content has often, in the past, been overlooked. There are old news reports that I’ve been unable to find because they’re on video in the era before there was a lot of accessibility and transcripts. Therefore, yes, there are certainly things like that which come up with some regularity. Also, particularly in the era of 2005 to 2015, there were a lot of independent sites that had useful news reports—particularly since we’re talking about the cast of political characters that have been around in the public eye at that point in time. It’s often the case that it’s hard to track those things down. Or if you’re trying to track down the original source or verify a rumor, you might need to dip into the Archive. There are a lot of sites from that era of “bespoke” blogs that the Internet Archive often captures.
How does limited access to historical data or previous coverage impact you as a journalist?
It is hard to say, because relatively speaking, I am advantaged by the fact that I live in this era. If I were doing this in 1990, [I’d use] basically whatever was at the New York Public Library and on microfiche. It is far better than it used to be, but the amount of content being produced is also far larger. It is both a positive and a negative that it is far easier to do that sort of research here from my desk at home than it would possibly have been 30 years ago. In fact, I was working on a project where I relied heavily on a local newspaper in a small town in Pennsylvania that wasn’t available online. I literally had to hire someone in the town to go to the library, find [coverage from] the particular date and the local paper and to get the scans done. It cost me hundreds of dollars, but that was the only way to do it. You can see how getting these things done is problematic and challenging.
When Paramount deleted the MTV News Archive in June, there was a lot of dismay, but some say it was frivolous, disposable, and kind of meant to be thrown away. How do you feel about that?
My first writing gig online was at MTV News in college, so that actually had a personal resonance for me. I was at Ohio State in the early to mid 1990s, and I got this little internship with MTV News. I wrote one piece about this band called The Hairy Patt Band. It ended up on the MTV News website. I was very excited. I haven’t seen that in 30 years. It’s one of those things where I wondered what ever happened to that story or if it exists anywhere, in any form. So, that [news] actually had resonance. It’s a bummer. Is it as important to maintain the archives of MTV News as it is The Washington Post? I’m biased, but I would say, no. But it is still a loss of culture—and it is a unique loss of culture. This was a unique and novel form of information that was emergent in the 1990s and now is lost. In the moment, its very existence captured the culture in a way that is worth preserving.
How do you feel about the future of digital preservation of news, data, and information?
I’m more pessimistic than I used to be. I came of age with the internet. When it was new, I used to describe it as the emergence from a new dark age. We had all this information and there was no more going back. All this existed. Everything was online, and we had archives. Now, we see, in part because the scale has increased so quickly that economic considerations come into play, and all of a sudden… the internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore. There are very few places that are doing what libraries do to capture these things on microfiche or store books for the public’s benefit. There is so much of it and that becomes the problem.
Why is it important to pay attention to this issue and preserve journalism for future reporters?
It is obviously the case that we are creating information, culture, and benchmarks for society faster than we can figure out how we’re going to make sure they’re preserved. I think that’s probably always been the case, except that what’s different now is that we are more cognizant of the process of preservation and the challenges of preservation. We expect there to be this thing that exists forever. We don’t yet know how to balance the interest in having as few things be ephemeral as possible, versus the value in doing that… maybe it’s not even possible to preserve everything in the way that we would want to at scale. We have created a process by which it is possible to record and observe nearly everything, and now we’re realizing that that is potentially in conflict with our desire to also store and preserve all this information indefinitely.
Anything you’d like to add?
I think it’s worth noting that preservation is one of the few areas in which I think artificial intelligence bears some potential benefit. One of the things that I’ve long found frustrating is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets, have enormous storehouses of information—not all of it textual. The New York Times must have, in its archives, photos of every square inch of New York City at some point in time over the course of the past 100 years. Artificial intelligence is a great tool for indexing and documenting. We now have tools that allow us to go deeper into our archives and extract more information from them, which I think is a positive development, and is something I’ve advocated for a long time publicly. Only with the advent of artificial intelligence does large-scale preservation become something that seems feasible. One can go through the National Archive and extract an enormous amount of information that is currently stored there in an accessible form, which saves someone from having to stumble upon a particular image. I think that is beneficial. I don’t think that necessarily solves the storage at scale issue, but it does address the fact that so much information is currently locked away and inaccessible, which is another facet of the challenge.
About the author
Caralee Adams is a journalist based in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a graduate of Iowa State University and received her master’s in political science at the University of New Orleans. After working at newspapers and magazines, she has been a freelancer covering education, science, tech and health for a variety of publications for more than 30 years.
The following guest post from digital librarian Peter Scholing is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Languages are living entities that carry the collective memory, culture, and identity of a people. For the people of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (the ABC islands), Papiamento is not only their official language and their native tongue, but also a vital part of this identity. However, in today’s rapidly evolving online landscape, where access to English and Spanish language content is easier than ever before, small scale languages like Papiamento may be hard to find, and the traditional (oral, written, analog) methods of language preservation are no longer sufficient.
The preservation of Papiamento now relies on the strategic use of digital tools to capture, store, and make accessible the rich body of written and audiovisual materials that embody the language. This essay will examine the essential role of digital preservation in maintaining Papiamento’s vitality, discuss the broader implications for language preservation in the digital age, and highlight the joint efforts of the Aruban heritage community and the Internet Archive in making this a reality.
Papiamento is a Creole language spoken primarily in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, blending elements from Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and African languages, as well as indigenous Arawak. It is a vital part of the cultural identity in these regions, serving as a unique linguistic bridge that reflects the diverse historical influences of the Caribbean. Papiamento is not just a means of communication, but a symbol of resilience and cultural pride for its speakers.
With Papiamento being a relatively small and regional language, publications in Papiamento are characterized by small print runs, limited availability beyond libraries in the long term, apart from the financial and logistical factors usually associated with small-scale (island) society and (relative) geographic remoteness.
And although the language is very much alive, very resilient, and widely spoken, it is not commercially viable or interesting for international markets. Such is (or was) the case for Papiamento in a digital sense as well: the smaller the language, the longer it takes for a language to be supported or included in software or online products.
The advent of artificial intelligence has made quite an impact in the world of documentary heritage, with one of the newest developments being handwritten text recognition (HTR).With new technologies like the AI-supported Transkribus, HTR technologies are becoming available not only to the bigger institutions in wealthy nations, but also to small island institutions such as Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Library) and Archivo Nacional Aruba (the Aruba National Archives), which adopted this new technology at a relatively early stage in 2019. The ability to add text layers to scanned manuscripts unlocked documentary treasure chests containing centuries of written records, correspondence, and prose—all within the reach of the Aruba institutions.
After a pilot project in 2022–2023, called “Coleccion Aruba,” between the Internet Archive, the National Library of Aruba, and the National Archives of Aruba, the Aruba subcollection of the Internet Archive became one of the first online platforms where full-text search for handwritten documents was made available. This functionality was completely integrated into its full-text search capabilities, with words and phrases in centuries-old documents becoming just as easy to find as words and phrases written down or spoken as part of the current news cycle. Few (commercial) archival platforms offer full-text search for handwritten sources separately, let alone fully integrated or at no cost, like the Internet Archive does.
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online resources and demand for digital access to information increased greatly: online access was not just expected, but became a basic necessity and a direct life-line for many people. Luckily, with Aruba being a small-scale society like, the library was able to meet this increased demand by rapidly operationalizing the “short lines” that exist between them and local book authors and publishers, by making available crucial resources, such as Papiamento language literary works and essential resources like daily newspapers —free of cost, to not only Aruban students, but also to the general public.
All things considered, future prospects look encouraging: Aruba’s institutions and the Internet Archive are in it for the long haul, and even intend to expand their efforts beyond the white shores of sunny Aruba.
Download Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.
Download Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
On August 13, 1961, the Sunday edition of The Honolulu Advertiser published its official Health Bureau Statistics (“Births, Marriages, Deaths”); on page B-6, in the leftmost column—just below the ads for luau supplies and Carnation Evaporated Milk—the twenty-second of twenty-five birth notices announced that on August 4, Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway had given birth to a son. The Honolulu State Library subsequently copied that page, along with the rest of the newspaper, onto microfilm, as a routine addition to its archive. Decades later, as Donald Trump and his fellow “birthers” tried to deceive the public about the birthplace of the 44th president, researchers were able to read the item in its original, verified context, preserved on its slip of plastic film.
A dramatic fate like that one awaits very few reels of microfilm, but the story underscores the crucial importance of authentication, and of archiving. Verifying and making sense of records—books, photos, government documents, magazines, newspapers, films, academic papers—is a never-ending task undertaken not only by historians but also by researchers, journalists, and students in every branch of learning: in the sciences, in medicine, in literature and philosophy and sociology. This is scholarship—the job of sieving over and over through the past, to research the truth of it, to reflect on and comprehend it, in the hope of providing people with useful observations, ideas, and help. That’s why we need records as detailed and accurate as we can make them; that’s the ultimate value of librarianship and archival work.
When people foolishly—and even dangerously—imagine that the past won’t matter to the future, the chance to preserve history evaporates. We live in times of increasing book bans and censorship and fast-deteriorating online archives. Some writers are even willing to deny the lasting value of their own work, shrugging off its place in a unique cultural moment. In July, when the archive of MTV News was summarily vaporized, contributor Kat Rosenfield wrote dismissively of her own work there:
So much of what we—what I—produced was utterly frivolous and intentionally disposable, in a way that certain types of journalism have always been. The listicles and clickbait of early aughts culture may differ in many ways from the penny press tabloids of the 1800s, but in this, they are the same: They are meant to be thrown away.
It’s a shocking thing, to hear a journalist say that the writing of the 19th-century penny press was “meant to be thrown away.” The rise of the penny press represents a key moment in the democratization of media; Benjamin Henry Day, founder of the first such newspaper in the U.S., TheNew York Sun (“It Shines For All”), is a towering figure in the history of journalism. (His son, Benjamin Henry Day Jr., invented Ben-Day dots!)
Day offered nonpartisan newspapers at a cheap price to a mass working-class audience—a fascinating mix of hard-hitting news, sensationalistic crime reports, and plain whoppers. The Sun ran a deranged report of winged people living on the moon, and it also broke the story of the Crédit Mobilier/Union Pacific corruption scandal in 1872, which brought down a whole herd of Republican congressmen, plus then-Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Day’s rivals, James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley, founders of The Herald and The New York Tribune, respectively, were no less momentous figures in the history of news media. Their sociological, cultural and political impact reverberates still: Bennett’s racist, segregationist views were hot issues in a New York Times story published just a few years ago, and a kaleidoscopically weird July op-ed in the Idaho State Journal called vice presidential candidate JD Vance “A Horace Greeley for Our Century,” despite the fact that Vance is a far-right reactionary conservative, in sharp contrast to Horace Greeley, who held openly socialist, feminist, egalitarian views.
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Pace Rosenfield, we can count ourselves fortunate that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved nearly half a million articles at MTV News; because of the Wayback Machine, future readers will have access to primary source materials on Peter Gabriel’s social activism, MTV News’s Peabody Award-winning “Choose or Lose” voter information campaign, early coverage of the allegations against pop icon Michael Jackson—and all the details and facts that will be available to provide crucial background and verification for stories we can’t yet imagine.
What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.”
Maria Bustillos, journalist and editor
The MTV News archive joins the archives of Gawker, the LA Weekly, and many other shuttered digital-native publications that would have disappeared entirely from the internet but for the Wayback Machine. Many leading journalists have greeted the Wayback Machine’s archival efforts with relief, and not only because it means preserving access to their own clips. They want all the receipts to be kept.
Tommy Craggs, a former executive editor at Gawker, expressed this idea back in 2018: “There should be a record of your fuck-ups and your triumphs, too.” He viewed Gawker’s archive as a valuable “record of how life was lived and covered on the internet for an era. Taking that away [would be] leaving a huge hole in our understanding.”
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What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.” The records we are keeping now—filled as they are with contradictions, uncertainties and errors—are all that tomorrow can inherit from today. Each teeming, incoherent moment succeeds the last, Now upon Now, wave upon wave of recordings and photographs, testimonials and accounts—true, false, and everything in between—gathered together by librarians and archivists and hurled forward like a Hail Mary pass into the future.
In other words, nothing is “meant to be thrown away.” Nothing. People may someday want to look into what happened in any part of the world, among any of its people, at any time; and every researcher, reader, and writer will have their own ideas, ideas that we might find incomprehensible now, about what’s worth keeping.
About the author
Maria Bustillos is an editor and journalist in favor of equality, press freedom, libraries, archives, beauty, and fun.
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 cookbookfromHowe, 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.
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.
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.
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.
