“When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love” by Swilk
Swilk, a queer Oakland-based weaver and installation artist, invites the community to the Internet Archive for a special show: an immersive art exhibit that breathes life into historic HIV artifacts. The piece, titled When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love, invites the public to connect the modern world to a history that was almost lost.
The Archive hosts thousands of historic HIV/AIDS documents and web resources in its collection. These weavings are programmed to respond whenever one of the resources compiled for this project are uploaded, downloaded, or saved. As the public interacts with this history, the motors fire, making the weaving breathe and pulse. Most of these resources, and the voices that filled them, have since been scrubbed, or altered off the internet.
The 80s and 90s were fraught with the suppression of lifesaving AIDS resources. When the internet became public, this all changed. Activists for the first time could distribute information without needing permission from distributors. Those isolated could find other people with a positive diagnosis and cope in community with one another. The internet played a critical role in HIV/AIDS activism, and as it slowly disappears from the world and the web, the Internet Archive has been instrumental in holding onto this history.
Swilk’s work highlights the importance of the modern world connecting with our queer history, and invites the audience to reflect on its relevance today.
“I grew up queer in an environment that taught me that to have HIV was a death sentence. It took me years to find the queer history of the HIV epidemic. It took me longer to learn about options like PreP. The more I learned about my history, and those that came before me, the more at home I felt in myself. This history, and the actions of those that made it, have bolstered my safety in the world at large.”
When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love will be shown in the Great Room, the Internet Archive’s repurposed chapel space, on November 9, 2024 from 7pm-9pm. The event is free and open to the public. Music and food provided. Limited edition screen prints will be made at the reception, people are invited to bring paper and fabrics to print on.
About Swilk:
Swilk is an Oakland-based weaver who has exhibited work around the world. They are a Genderqueer artist whose work centers queer history and the emotional experience of home. Their work has been exhibited and awarded in a number of spaces, including the CICA Museum in South Korea, Barcelona’s El Poblenou District, and a number of international artist residencies. They are the winner of the Featured Public Project grant for the world’s largest open arts competition (ArtPrize 2022).
The following guest post from Aaron O’Donovan (aodonovan@columbuslibrary.org), Columbus Metropolitan Library Special Collections Manager, is part of a series written by members of the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices.
As a local history and genealogy department in a public library, our materials run the gamut from books from the 1700s about the creation of our country to yearbooks of local high schools that patrons like to peruse for nostalgia’s sake. In addition to our approximately 90,000 reference books, our archives room holds approximately 2,500 linear feet of photographic material, records, and manuscript material. We are constantly seeking new opportunities to expand access to our collections for our patrons, and when the opportunity arose to digitize materials as part of the Community Webs program, I knew what I wanted to digitize first: local neighborhood newspapers of Columbus.
We joined the Community Webs program in 2017 to archive important cultural and local government websites of Columbus, Ohio. The catalyst for the project was the belief that we had done a good job of telling the story of Columbus in its first 150 years, but we were missing telling the story of the evolution of the city of the more recent past, as well as failing to record the present. With the object of capturing more recent changes to our city, we focused on archiving our city government website, as well as archiving social service websites, especially those helping new immigrants in our city. Because of the Community Webs program, we were able to take a snapshot of the diverse populations that were making their homes in Columbus, and the medium of web archiving was the only way we were able to tell the stories of these new immigrant communities including the Somalian, Nepalese, Bhutanese, and Mexican populations. To further this focus on migration patterns into Columbus, we felt it was important to make our neighborhood newspapers that we had on microfilm accessible because the neighborhood newspapers featured stories and obituaries on immigrant populations who came to Columbus in the mid-19th century and early 20th century.
The newspapers had been preserved on microfilm for decades, but we were never able to digitize them due the time commitment involved for a project that size. During my time in the local history field in Columbus, it has become clear to me that our library patrons crave hyper-local history material that personally connects their stories to the place they live. While general local history topics about Columbus are popular, nothing is more popular in our library than content generated from Columbus neighborhoods. To finally get an opportunity to digitize neighborhood newspapers and make them accessible to our patrons was one that I could not pass up.
The most important newspaper for the library to digitize was the Columbus Call and Post, a historic Black newspaper that served Columbus from 1962-2007. For years patrons have asked us if the newspaper was digitized, but unfortunately all the library had was microfilm starting in 1972, which was very difficult to browse and ultimately did not serve our patron’s needs for accessibility. Because the Internet Archive performed optical character recognition (OCR) on the text of the newspapers, researchers can now use keyword searching to find an address, a business name, or search for personal names to find news stories that mention the people and places that they hold in their memory.
Digitizing the microfilm of the Call and Post also complemented another project we began several years ago when we partnered with the King Arts Complex to digitize the photograph archive of the iconic newspaper, which was donated to the organization in the mid-1990s. Many of the photographs in the collection have little to no information attached to them (information written on the back of the photographic prints, the name of the photographer, etc.). Digitization of the Call and Post provided additional information to match and apply to the photographs in the archive, adding an enhanced level of searchability and accessibility to this collection. The collections work together to preserve Black history in a way that was not possible before because much of the content from the Call and Post was unique and rare. Being able to bring this newspaper back into the public consciousness has been a thrilling experience for us.
As the project continued to take shape, we felt it was important to represent Columbus neighborhoods geographically, which also enabled us to represent different economic and ethnically diverse communities throughout Columbus history. Our most accessed newspaper thus far has been the Hilltop Record, a title which focused on a local neighborhood with strong Appalachian ties and has a long history of covering the issues of working-class citizens on the westside of Columbus. Other digitized community newspapers include :
· TheLinden NE News showcases stories from north Columbus, an area that has experienced several demographic shifts throughout its 100 years of history.
The rarest newspapers digitized for this project were also some of the oldest newspapers that were preserved on microfilm in our collection. Among those titles are the Ohio Columbian(1853-1856), an anti-slavery newspaper that reported on Underground Railroad activities as they were happening in Ohio and surrounding states. It has potential for illuminating our understanding and knowledge of individuals that were involved in assisting enslaved people seeking freedom in the 1850s. Other newspapers with great research potential include early (and shorter) runs of Black newspapers that have not been digitized before this project including The Columbus Recorder (1927),The Columbus Voice (1929), which was edited by Florence W. Oakfield,and The Ohio Torch (1928-1930), the longest running newspaper for the Black community during the 1920s. We are excited to report that researchers are already using these resources to better understand Columbus history more objectively and completely.
With this support from the Internet Archive and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we have been able to help our local users find information that was not available elsewhere. Recently, we had a researcher request an obituary from June of 1964 when our two major newspapers were on strike. Thankfully, the South Side Spectator had been digitized and was available through the Internet Archive. Our librarian was able to locate the obituary that was only available in that newspaper. We also got this enthusiastic email from a regular library patron after we informed them that we had digitized the Hilltop Record and it was now keyword searchable on the Internet Archive: “OH MY GOSH! ARE YOU SERIOUS!?! THAT’S FANTASTIC! Have I told you lately how much I love you guys? You rock my world! Thank you so much for everything you do. I am so grateful for everyone in Local History & Genealogy.”
Moreover, the librarians are using the digitized newspapers in regular programming, furthering our promotion of these new digitized collections. Every month the library hosts a virtual Black Heritage Collection Spotlight on a notable person or topic from Black history in Columbus. The images and news articles from the digitized Call and Post are used frequently for the program, and we look forward to learning about more ways the digitized newspapers are used in local research to highlight and deepen our community’s connections to Columbus’ past.
The Internet Archive and Community Webs are thankful for the support from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission for Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections, which will digitize and provide access to a diverse range of local history archives that represent the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities throughout the United States.
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.
Public event and book talk for author Nathan Schneider’s latest publication, Governable Spaces.
Libraries are a cornerstone for civic engagement. The Internet Archive is carrying on that tradition by hosting in-person gatherings at its Funston Avenue headquarters in San Francisco, including candidate forums and public interest events.
“Our goal is to connect with folks who are related to the mission: the universal access to all knowledge,” said Even Sirchuk, community and events manager for the Archive.
This fall, the Internet Archive opened its doors to the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, Mission Local, and SFGovTV to hold forums with candidates for the San Francisco District 1 Board of Supervisors, San Francisco sheriff and an event on politics and money, explaining the funders behind propositions on the California ballot in the November election.
“It’s great to have a funky building that can host us. And it introduces people to a venue or service they might not actually have been exposed to—educating people on what the Internet Archive does.”
Danielle Diebler, volunteer for the League of Women Voters of San Francisco
At a moment when the public is seeking information and connection, libraries are institutions that provide access to resources, programs and public spaces for all members of a community, according to the American Library Association (ALA). As one voter engagement PDF guide from ALA highlights, “Libraries are nonpartisan, but they are not indifferent.”
The Internet Archive wants its building to be more than space for books and servers—to also serve as a community resource, Sirchuk said. By opening its doors to nonprofits for free and providing needed tech support, organizations can host these events in person, which many could not otherwise afford to do.
Danielle Diebler, a volunteer with the League of Women Voters of San Francisco for nearly a decade, said she was pleased to find the Internet Archive as a venue. It is conveniently located, near public transportation, outfitted with the technical support needed to live stream and record—and free to the nonprofit.
“It’s great to have a funky building that can host us,” Diebler said. “And it introduces people to a venue or service they might not actually have been exposed to—educating people on what the Internet Archive does.”
Indeed, the Archive has been a resource to the League, helping digitize its historical documents.
With an in-person gathering, Diebler said, citizens have the opportunity to walk up to candidates and ask questions—something that is not possible over Zoom.
“It’s such a big election this year with so much on the ballot,” she said. “It’s even more important to have accessible resources and understand where candidates stand on important issues.”
Emily Capage, organization administrative associate with the ACLU in San Francisco, who partnered with the League on the forums, said it was important for voters to have a place to learn about the candidates.
“People don’t often get to see them face to face. It’s our right to be able to learn and be educated,” she said. “Local politics matter. It affects our day-to-day lives more than larger national policies.”
For the money and politics event in October at the Internet Archive, Joe Rivano Barros was invited to speak. He is a senior editor of Mission Local, an independent news site based in the Mission District, and has been tracking who is funding the various ballot initiatives. “People just don’t know or get information from the campaign itself,” he said. “We shine more light on money and politics.”
There’s something about an in-person event, where people make an effort to attend, that elevates the quality of the conversation, he said. “The Internet Archive is great because it’s vast and has the tech all set up,” Barros said. “They’ve been very generous.”
In the newsroom, Barros said he regularly taps into resources available through the Internet Archive, such as archived campaign websites, and he also submits materials to be preserved. “It’s a wonderful tool for journalists,” he added.
Sirchuk added that the Internet Archive is focused on preserving written knowledge, but it also values oral history. “That information doesn’t get spread if there isn’t a forum for that knowledge exchange,” he said. “And what’s cool about the forum as a format is that you can compare knowledge in real time, listen to four or five responses to see which connects with you and then do more research.”
The events at the Archive are recorded, backed up and added to the online collection for anyone to access at their convenience for free.
Anson Ho, production supervisor for SFGovTV, live streamed and recorded the fall forums at the Archive building. He appreciated the good audio, lighting and infrastructure provided.
“It’s such an amazing opportunity that they have the community space,” Ho said. “San Francisco is very dense and sometimes it’s hard to find public spaces that big to have people come and gather.”
Capage of the ACLU added that, as a nonprofit operating on a tight budget, it’s hard to find affordable venues for events. She’s grateful to partner with the Internet Archive, she said, and hopes to use the facility again in the future.
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 Internet Archive held its annual celebration on October 23, with leaders showing resilience—and finding support—to carry out their work, despite recent attacks.
Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian, praised the hard work of staff to restore services following a cyberattack in early October. That hit came on the heels of a court decision limiting the library’s ability to lend hundreds of thousands of books, while another lawsuit from the recording industry looms.
Watch the recording:
“Libraries are under attack,” Kahle said. The pushback—including book banning, defunding, and publishers’ refusal to sell ebooks to libraries—makes it difficult for the library system to evolve and serve new generations of users, he said.
“We need to assert the rights of digital libraries to do our work, to take these bad news situations and secure our support within the legislature and the judiciary,” Kahle said, encouraging audience members to get involved.
The eclectic gathering at the non-profit’s Funston Avenue headquarters, a former church converted to library and community space, expressed confidence in the organization and its vital role in providing access to knowledge.
Supervisor Connie Chan presents Brewster Kahle with a San Francisco Board of Supervisors Certificate of Honor celebrating the Internet Archive at the library’s annual event on October 23, 2024.
“Our democracy and our humanity all count on your support for Internet Archive,” said San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who took the stage to make a surprise Proclamation supporting the library. “Please continue to celebrate them today and every day.”
In the recent publisher lawsuit against the Archive, author Maria Bustillos said the courts got it wrong when it protected profits over the interests of society as intended in copyright law. She is a founding editor of The Brick House, a cooperative of writers and artists who support publishers selling ebooks to libraries.
“I became a writer for the chance to be part of a literary tradition many centuries old, a literary tradition protected by libraries,” Bustillos said. “I make money by my writing, but I don’t want money that comes at the expense of the values that made me a writer in the first place.”
Editor and writer Maria Bustillos.
Attacks on the Internet Archive and other libraries are strikes against freedom of information, she said, calling on the public to fight for the future of libraries. “It falls to people with conscience and brains and a sense of history to rise up to protect libraries. That is our task now,” Bustillos told the crowd. Encouraging her fellow authors, Bustillos implored:
“Writers: RAISE HELL! Let’s work together to make sure that all publishers will sell, not rent, our ebooks to libraries. That way, libraries will stay libraries.”
The celebration included honoring the island nation of Aruba with the Internet Archive Hero Award, presented annually to individuals, organizations, or nations that have shown exceptional leadership in expanding access to knowledge and supporting the digital preservation of cultural and historical materials.
“This award is significant encouragement for us to continue preserving our cultural identity and history together. We are not only safeguarding our heritage but also empowering our community, both here and abroad.”
Xiomara Maduro, Minister of Finance and Culture, Aruba
Earlier this year, the nation launched Coleccion Aruba, a digital heritage portal that provides free global access to its historical materials and cultural treasures. Aruba was the first nation ever to partner with the Internet Archive to provide long-term preservation of its entire national archives. The digital materials are stored on a server that will be kept on the island.
Mrs. Xiomara Maduro, Aruba’s Minister of Finance and Culture, accepted the award in San Francisco, alongside librarians and archivists from the country involved with the digitization project.
From left: Peter Scholing, Edric Croes, Xiomara Maduro, Aruba’s Minister of Finance and Culture, Astrid Britten, and Raymond Hernandez.
“This award is significant encouragement for us to continue preserving our cultural identity and history together,” Maduro said. “We are not only safeguarding our heritage but also empowering our community, both here and abroad.”
The recognition serves as a spark to motivate other nearby islands to digitize their collections, she added—something that would not be possible without the technical support of the Archive.
“It means a world of difference to us,” said Peter Scholing, information specialist/researcher at BNA (the national library in Aruba), of the Internet Archive’s backing. “It is not about just giving us a digital platform but also now, with this award, people can see and read about Aruba and our history and language.”
The Internet Archive partners with several countries to preserve government materials and make them publicly available. At the event, Loren Fantin staffed a table to promote Democracy’s Library, with 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006 with more than half a million documents.
People were drawn to the celebration to learn more about the organization that they’ve relied on over the years in a variety of ways.
While he’d never been at the Archive’s headquarters, Joe Dummit said he is a huge fan and has spent many hours online downloading its resources—particularly its film collection. He and Emily Giddings, who recently moved to San Francisco, used vintage film clips when making music videos (including “I Can Dance”) for their Indie pop rock band, Zigtebra.
“We are happy to support it because the archive of culture is so worth preserving, the weirdness and uniqueness of people,” Giddings said.
Sage Ryan of San Francisco said he also uses archival video from the collection to make video collages, and uploads his music for preservation online. He recently toured the Funston Avenue headquarters and came back to the event to find out more for a possible documentary project on the Internet Archive—who uses it and how it affects people’s lives.
Revelers danced in the street at the annual celebration.
Robert Anderberg came from San Jose for the celebration. He’s a game developer who said he enjoys accessing old video games preserved by the Internet Archive that don’t exist anywhere else.
Anderberg said he was also motivated to attend to learn more as he’s building a decentralized social network in his spare time. “In order for people to build communities online, they have to give up all of their agency to companies,” he said. “I want to build something where people are in control of their own communities.”
The Internet Archive has been a valuable learning tool, said John Fuqua of South City, who uses it to look up old magazines, websites and other resources. He added: “The Internet Archive is an incredible place doing an incredible mission of saving things. Information wants to be free!”
Brewster Kahle, at left, guides celebrants through a tour of the Physical Archive in Richmond, California.
“Welcome to the Physical Archive!”
On a tour October 22, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, shared his enthusiasm for the industrial building in Richmond, California, that serves as a forever home for millions of items donated for digital preservation. He walked curious visitors through the life cycle of books and media being collected and scanned as part of the mission to provide universal access to knowledge.
“We wanted to go and digitize everything, ever, and make it as available to everybody as we possibly could. How hard could it be?” Kahle said. After setting out to get one digital copy of everything published, the Archive found donors often didn’t want the physical copies back. That meant finding a secure location to fill shipping containers with the materials including books, music, videos, periodicals, magazines, microfilm, microfiche, CD-ROMs, and interactive laser discs.
The annual tour highlighted the storage space, film preservation lab and demonstrations of sorting and scanning processes. The free event also included exhibits of rare books, vintage records and technology from the vast collection.
“I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s just mind-blowing,” said Klein Lieu, an engineering manager for a software company in Oakland who attended the event. “You walk through the shipping containers and it’s like the modern-day Library of Alexandria. You don’t want it to burn down.”
Lieu, 34, is a monthly donor who said he’s used the Internet Archive since he was 8 years old—randomly looking up old blogs and websites he made of his favorite cartoons as a kid, and later for academic purposes. In the film lab, he marveled at footage of New York City from the 1950s that was being digitized. “I’m in awe of the entire experience,” he said. “Millions and millions of these stories, art works, and code that is all preserved is actually very touching.”
Jen Mico, a film scanner, described the importance of the archival process to visitors at the event.
“It’s really important to have an actual human here being the bridge between the film, which was created 70 years ago, and creating this digital file, which will be disseminated to whoever wants to see it. It’s pretty great,” Mico said.
From left: Tanya Zeif, Sierra Watkins and Alice Tsui celebrate preservation at the annual event.
For Natalie Orenstein, the event was a chance to see up close a resource that she uses regularly as a journalist in Oakland. She said she turns to the Internet Archive for local historical information and to see whether a group has sneakily changed its website or materials. Covering the recent election and tracking campaign financing, she said it’s also been useful to watch the political TV ads the Archive has preserved.
Orenstein said it was striking to see the archive of physical materials—especially since she thinks of Internet Archives as primarily a digital organization. “I respect that they value the original product, as well as its digitized form,” she said. “It’s only worth preserving if you value what it was originally.”
Indeed, for many, seeing the tangible artifacts makes archiving more real and motivates them to explore more of the collection.
Zoli Bassoff of San Rafael said he had not heard much about the Internet Archive before coming to the event but likes the idea of having access to a variety of media. “I was interested in how they receive it, process, and get it on the internet. I wanted to learn about the process,and that was just as interesting as the actual media itself,” he said.
Party-goers watch a film from the Prelinger Archives that has been preserved and digitized.
In the special collections exhibit at the open house, Jennifer Waits, a podcaster and writer from San Francisco, was drawn to the old records and audio paraphernalia. She is involved with a project to curate a college radio collection as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Waits is reaching out to college radio stations to digitize playlists, program guides, the Journal of College Radio and other materials. Instead of going to individual campuses, this centralized digital collection will be a useful resource for historians and scholars.
“It’s amazing to be able to offer to scan materials and provide this long-term back up,” Waits said. “We have things from a number of radio stations, so you’re starting to see college radio in the context of others from the same period of time to see what they have in common. I hope the collection grows and grows.”
“I knew in principle [the Physical Archive] existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”
John Skinner, Wikipedian and party attendee
The Wayback Machine provides a nostalgia trip for Jen Osgood of Oakland, who likes to look up old blogs and websites from when she was in college. The Internet Archive is also a good resource for art projects, too, and one of the few places she can find old botanical illustrations, she said. Touring the physical archive, she said, gave her a new appreciation of the collection. “It’s an amazing wealth of knowledge,” she said.
John Skinner said he comes from a family of librarians and works as a technologist creating websites so the event was an intersection of his interests. Spending much of his time editing Wikipedia pages, he said he frequently uses the Internet Archive for research and citations.
What was his impression of the physical archive? “It’s astonishing,” Skinner said. “I knew in principle it existed. Every time I used the Internet Archive, my mind imagined something like this. Seeing it in reality is incredible.”
In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner. Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available.
Please note that these services will have limited availability as we continue maintenance.
Hackers disclosed archive.org email and encrypted passwords to a transparency website, and also sent emails to patrons by exploiting a 3rd party helpdesk system.
The safety and integrity of the Internet Archive’s data and patrons remain our top priorities. As the security incident is analyzed and contained by our team, we are relaunching services as defenses are strengthened. These efforts are focused on reinforcing firewall systems and further protecting the data stores.
We appreciate your patience and support as we work through these challenges. For ongoing updates, please follow our blog and official social media channels on X/Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
