In the wake of a rapid-fire cyberattack on the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle reassured participants at the 2024 Library Leaders Forum that the organization’s data is safe, and employees are working around the clock to fully restore services.
“It’s been a little challenging,” said Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian on being hit on October 8 with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach towards rebuilding and strengthening our defenses. Our priority is to ensure that the Internet Archive is stronger and more secure.”
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is up and running, Kahle told those at the October 17 virtual forum. Other services are progressively coming back online—although some are in a read-only mode for now.
The Internet Archive is not alone in being the target of a malicious cyberattack: The British Library and Calgary Public Library have also been victims, said Chris Freeland, moderator of the forum and director of library services.
“This is a critical moment for libraries, including our own. As a library system, together, we are facing unprecedented challenges with book bans, defunding, and now cyberattacks,” Freeland said.
Still, the Internet Archive staff and community partners remain focused on digital preservation and providing access to needed materials that serve the public interest.
Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.
Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.
“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”
The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.
The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.
“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”
Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.
“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”
The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.
The Archive posted an open letter to publishers in the lawsuit to restore access to the books that have been removed from the digital library. To date, more than 120,000 people have signed, adding heartfelt messages about what the impact of the loss has meant.
“We own these books,” Freeland said. “We just want to let readers read.”
To build public awareness and support on these issues, Jennie Rose Halperin is developing a coalition to lobby the U.S. Congress for a commemorative National Public Domain Day. She invited interested parties to join in the effort through Library Futures, the organization where she serves as executive director.
Some independent publishers are selling ebooks directly to libraries through BRIET, a new project of the Brick House Cooperative, David Moore, a writer and technologist, said at the forum.
Halperin is working alongside Charlie Barlow, executive director of the Boston Library Consortium, on Project ReShare to develop an open, standards-based, community-owned set of tools for digital lending.
Barlow has long been an advocate of controlled digital lending through BLC, and just released a report outlining CDL workflows and technologies for responsible sharing, he said at the forum. He also is working on a new consortium toolkit for CDL implementation. The report and resources can be downloaded at www.blc.org/cdl.
Also at this year’s LLF, Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance, encouraged authors to review the organization’s free legal resource guides on copyright and fair use so they see their work more widely disseminated.
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.
The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time.
We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure.
Last month, the UBL announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. We are happy to report now that The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection.
The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. As Leiden University Libraries has limited space for growth in its stacks, it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions. The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy. The Internet Archive will now take over this collection from the UBL, and will take care of its future preservation and access. The UBL is pleased that The Internet Archive is able to give this collection of foreign dissertations a second life.
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.
***
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.
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.”
***
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.
In a world where digital access to knowledge is increasingly vital, the island nation of Aruba has taken bold steps to ensure its cultural heritage is preserved and accessible for generations to come. We are thrilled to announce that Aruba will be honored with the 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award at our annual celebration on October 23 in San Francisco and online.
The Internet Archive Hero Award is 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. Recipients of the award exemplify the values of openness, accessibility, and collaboration that are essential to a free and informed global society. Previous recipients have included librarian and copyright expert Michelle Wu, public access advocate Carl Malamud, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the Grateful Dead.
Aruba’s Commitment to Preservation and Access
Aruba’s commitment to preserving its history and culture through digital initiatives has been nothing short of visionary. Earlier this year, the nation launched Coleccion Aruba, a digital heritage portal that provides free global access to its historical materials and cultural treasures. The initiative ensures that Aruba’s rich history—its documents, artifacts, and stories—are accessible to the world, helping to safeguard its national identity in the digital age. You can learn more about the launch of this groundbreaking collection here.
In another historic first, Aruba became the first country to officially endorse the Statement Protecting Digital Rights of Memory Institutions, recognizing the importance of libraries, archives, and museums in preserving digital cultural heritage. By supporting this statement, Aruba set a powerful precedent for nations worldwide to protect the digital rights of libraries and memory institutions. You can read more about Aruba’s leadership in this area here.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, praised Aruba’s commitment to the digital preservation of cultural heritage, describing the nation’s efforts as “a beacon of hope in the global movement to safeguard history in the digital era.” In his reflections on Aruba’s leadership, Brewster wrote that “Aruba’s bold support of library digital rights shows what is possible when nations value not just their own history, but the global importance of memory institutions. Their commitment sends a strong message: culture, knowledge, and history belong to everyone.”
What the Award Means for Aruba
Reflecting on the award, the Minister of Finance and Culture, Mrs. Xiomara Maduro remarked, “We thank Internet Archive for this great honor of recognizing Aruba’s hard work and efforts in preserving and making our cultural heritage accessible through the Coleccion Aruba online platform. This award is a significant encouragement to continue our work in safeguarding our culture and history. Thank you for supporting our efforts to keep our rich cultural heritage alive and accessible for our future generations.”
Mrs. Astrid Britten, Director of the National Library Aruba: “We are beyond excited and deeply honored by this recognition from the Internet Archive. What began in 2018 with Mr. Peter Scholing at the National Library of Aruba, and our partnership with the Internet Archive, has grown into something truly remarkable. The launch of Coleccion Aruba earlier this year marks a significant milestone in our journey, and it’s inspiring to see over 150,000 digital items—more than the number of inhabitants on our island—shared globally. The involvement of the National Archives of Aruba (under the leadership of Mr. Raymond Hernandez and Mr. Edric Croes), UNOCA (Ms. Ray-Anne Hernandez), and other key partners since 2022 has strengthened our mission to ensure that Aruba’s cultural treasures are preserved and accessible, not only for our own people but for audiences far beyond our shores. Aruba’s dedication to preserving digital history and ensuring access to knowledge for all has set a new benchmark for collaboration, through innovation and partnership. This acknowledges Aruba’s impact in digital preservation.”
Mr. Raymond Hernandez, Director National Archives of Aruba: “On behalf of Coleccion Aruba, the National Archives of Aruba is deeply honored to receive the Internet Archive Hero Award. While we were never in pursuit of any awards, this recognition is a profound encouragement for the work we have been doing to preserve and share Aruba’s rich cultural heritage. This together with all of our partners as well. As a small island in the Caribbean with limited resources, our mission to make our national archives accessible to all has been driven by the belief that open access to knowledge is essential for our community and beyond. With the support of the Internet Archive, we are inspired to continue on this path and hope to serve as a model for other small island states in development, especially in the Caribbean. This award reinforces our commitment to creating a future where information is freely accessible to all, and we are sincerely grateful for this support.”
Mrs. Ray-anne Hernandez, Managing Director UNOCA (A funding agency that cofinances Art & Cultural Projects in Aruba): “We are incredibly honored and grateful to receive the Hero Award from the Internet Archive. This recognition celebrates not only our commitment to preserving and sharing Aruba’s rich history and cultural heritage but also the invaluable collaboration with the founding partners of Coleccion Aruba: the Library of Aruba and the National Archives of Aruba. Together, we have worked passionately to make our collective history accessible to the world, and this achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the support and contributions of our many partners, both big and small. This award inspires us to continue our work with even more dedication, striving to conserve and promote Aruba’s national heritage for future generations. We are driven by our shared passion for culture and history, and we look forward to further collaborations that will continue to enrich our community and beyond. Thank you again for this prestigious recognition.”
Join Us in Celebrating
Aruba will officially receive the 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 23, 2024, in San Francisco. The event, themed “Escaping the Memory Hole,” will focus on the role of libraries and archives in preserving cultural history in the face of vanishing media. We invite you to join Aruba’s representatives and the institutions behind Coleccion Aruba for this special occasion as we celebrate this remarkable achievement and the global importance of preserving knowledge. Register now for the virtual celebration.
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. 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. 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.
On Sept 4, 2024, the US Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the lower court ruling in the lawsuit filed against us by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. While the Internet Archive is disappointed by this opinion—it was never the Internet Archive’s intention to get into a lawsuit over lending digitized books—we respect the outcome.
To date, we have removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org (and therefore also openlibrary.org). While we are reviewing all available options, this judicial opinion will lead to the removal of many more books from lending. It is important for the Internet Archive and all libraries to continue to have a healthy relationship with publishers and authors.
Please be assured that millions of digitized books will still be available to those with print disabilities, small sections will be available for those linking into them from Wikipedia and through interlibrary loan, books will continue to be preserved for the long term, and other protected library uses will continue to inform digital learners everywhere.
The Internet Archive is also increasing its investment in digital books from publishers willing to sell ebooks that libraries can own and lend. While this is currently from a small number of publishers, the number is growing and we see it as a future for the long term sustainability of authors, publishers, and libraries. Encouragingly, the Independent Publishers Group recently endorsed selling ebooks to libraries. The growing number of libraries purchasing and owning digital books brings fair compensation to authors and publishers, along with permanent preservation and access to author’s works for communities everywhere.
We respect the opinion of the courts and, while we are saddened by how this setback affects our patrons and the future of all libraries, the Internet Archive remains strong and committed to our mission of Universal Access to All Knowledge. Thank you for your help and support.
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.
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.
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.
The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.
Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.
Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.
Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.
In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.
Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.
“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”
These authors can fill in gaps from researchers with a different perspective than those who documented the stories from outside, she said, adding that’s why digital preservation is so important. While many African folklore texts are in the public domain in the United States, much of the anthropological and historical texts with commentary from both African and non-African scholars that provide the necessary context for these folktales are not, Nde said. “In many instances, these important auxiliary texts are out of print, which means access via the Internet Archive is the best way scholars not located in the West might ever be able to access them,” Nde said. “I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”
For Gibbs, online access to digitized books is critical to the volunteer work she does since retiring from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma. She compiled A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive, a curated bibliography of hundreds of folktale books that she has shared with the public through the Internet Archive.
“For me doing my work, the Internet Archive is my library,” said Gibbs, who lives in Austin, Texas. “There are books at the Internet Archive that I can’t get at my local library or even in my local university library. Some of these books are really obscure. There just physically aren’t that many copies out there.”
Being able to check out one digital title at a time through controlled digital lending opened up new possibilities. In her research, she can use the search function with the title of a book, name of an illustrator or some other kind of detail. Now in her digital research, she can use the search function to perform work that she couldn’t do with physical books, such as keyword searches, with speed and precision. The collection also has been helpful in her recent project at Wikipedia to fill in information on African oral literature, such as proverbs and folktales.
“Digital preservation is not only preservation, it’s also transformation. Because when things have been digitized, you can share them in different ways, explore them in different ways, connect them in different ways,” Gibbs said. “So, I connect different versions of the stories to one another, and then I can help readers connect to all those different versions of the stories. But now, because of the publishers’ lawsuit, many important African folktale collections and reference works are no longer available for borrowing at the Archive.”
What would it mean to lose digital access to these folktales? “It would be the end of my work,” said Gibbs. “My whole goal is to make the African folktales at the Archive more accessible to readers around the world by providing bibliographies, indexes, and summaries of the stories. But now the publishers are shutting down that public access.”
“The stories were embodied in the traditional storytellers and in their communities, and the continuity of that tradition over time has been so disrupted,” Gibbs said. “The loss is just staggering. The stories that were recorded are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of stories in the hundreds of different African languages…We can’t afford to let this kind of loss happen again in the digital world.”
Gibbs adds that just as museums are repatriating artifacts from colonized countries, the original stories of African countries need to be made available to their communities. “Digital libraries like the Internet Archive are a crucial way to make these stories available to African readers.”
Preservation of African folklore is not just important for research purposes, but also for self-exploration and reflection. When examining African folklore, Nde often asks: “What can these stories tell me about myself?” she said. “Speaking from my own experience, African folktales are an underexplored resource for understanding the cultural history of African peoples,” Nde said. “Mythology and folklore are how people make sense of themselves as people on this planet.”
We want to hear from you: How does the appellate court’s decision affect your reading or research? What does it mean to you that 500,000+ books are no longer available in our lending library?