Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library offering access to millions of free books, movies, and music, plus an archive of 400+ billion web pages.

[internetarchive]

Save The Date: Netlabel Day - July 14th

The Internet Archive has a large (over 58,000 items) and growing collection of netlabels. Recently we received a message asking to help announce a new global event, Netlabels Day. Please support it if you are part of the netlabels world.

Record Store Day was created on 2007 to celebrate the record stores in the USA and the rest of the world. In that celebration, independent bands and labels released music exclusively for that day on vinyl, seizing the revival of that format. This was the base of the Netlabel Day, a sort of distant relative of RSD, that hopes to install a new tradition releasing digital music every July 14th from now on.

This initiative was born in Chile thanks to Manuel Silva, from M.I.S.T. Records, and it reunites more than 50 labels from all over the world. All genres are present: Rock, pop, electronic, noise, ambient and many many more - free and just for you!

We will upload every single release on Archive.org, because we love this platform. We always use it and we’ve never experimented any issues with it. Every album will be available for free on WAV and FLAC via direct download, or torrent as well.

The most important thing is to include everyone in this idea. We will close the call on June 1, so if you have a netlabel and you want to be part of this, please email us to [email protected]. If you are an independent artist without any label associated, you can release your music with us too and be listened to along every participating netlabel, so just contact us from May 15 to June 1.

Everyone is invited. Be part of this madness!

Links: http://netlabelday.blogspot.com http://www.facebook.com/netlabelday http://www.twitter.com/netlabel_day

[internetarchive]

Since the beginning of the year, the Internet Archive has been making a large amount of DOS-based games and programs run in the browser, much like our Console Living Room and Internet Arcade collections. Many thousands of people have stopped by and tried out these programs, enjoying such classics as Llamatron 2112 or Dangerous Dave. With countless examples of DOS programs going back spanning 30 years, there’s lots of great software to try out and experiment with. Here’s a great place to start.

If you want to just try out the software, we’re done here. Go into our stacks and have a great time!

Otherwise, read on!

[internetarchive]

The Evolving Internet Archive

The new version of the archive.org site has been evolving over the past 6 months in response to the feedback we’ve received from thousands of our awesome users.

If you haven’t been following along, you can review a little bit of the journey through these blog posts:

Building Libraries Together: New Tools for a New Direction (10/28/14)

Redesigning Archive.org (11/5/2014)

What’s New with V2 (2/12/2015)

Why change the site at all?  The posts above help answer that, but in brief:

35% of our ~3 million daily users are on mobile/tablet devices, and the classic site is not easy to use on small formats.

The new tools we want to offer our users would be difficult to implement in the old site architecture.

The classic site was built a long time ago, using methods that are outdated.  Finding programmers who have the skills to work in that environment is becoming increasingly difficult, and the ramp up time for new employees is painful.  The redesign has given us an opportunity to start pulling the front end (what you see) apart from the back end, so they can evolve separately.

Blue represents people in classic archive.org (v1), red represents people in the new version (v2)

Currently about 85% of archive.org users are in the new version. Over the next few weeks we will be asking the remaining 15% to try it out.  For the time being, users will be able to exit the new archive.org and return to the “classic” version — but the classic will not always be available or supported, so please give the new version a try and give us feedback if there are things on the site that you don’t like, can’t find, or that seem like bugs.  (When you click “exit” you will have an opportunity to give us feedback.)

We have made several video tours that introduce you to the new site. I recommend starting with the site tour.

View it and the rest of this post at blog.archive.org.

[internetarchive]

The Data Made Me Do It kicks off at Internet Archive March 13! Saskia Sassen, Omar Khan & Katina Michael speak with Etienne Turpin.

[internetarchive]

Historian Tells Developers to "Steal From Work" - IGN

Jason Scott of Internet Archive makes a case for saving gaming's relics from destruction.

Our lovely Jason featured at IGN.

[internetarchive]

If you're curious about the changes you've been seeing in the beta version of archive.org, this blog post has all the details. Try https://archive.org/v2 for yourself!

[internetarchive]

FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules For 'Open Internet'

The FCC approved the policy known as net neutrality by a 3-2 vote, with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler saying the agency will ensure that no entity "should control free open access to the Internet."

Great news, and a perfect excuse to throw a party!

[internetarchive]

Awww... it's true, the archive is one big room full of happy! Join us for a Friday lunch when you're in town.

[internetarchive]

You are Invited to a Party: Victory for the Net

Dear Friend of the Open Internet,

JOIN US!

FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, wants to do something monumental: reclassify broadband access providers under Title II of the Communications Act.

Translation: we’ve made huge progress in the fight to protect the Open Internet. And it’s time to celebrate!

The Internet Archive & Electronic Frontier Foundation invite you to VICTORY FOR THE NET! An evening of celebration, conversation, and sharing what’s next. The party will be Thursday, February 26 at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, from 6-9 p.m.

The FCC still has to vote on Chairman Wheeler’s proposal and we don’t know the exact details yet. What we do know is that we’ve all worked hard to get the agency on the right track at last. We’re not done yet, but we have a lot to celebrate.

We are joining hands with our friends and co-hosts from: Free Press, 18 Million Rising, Center for Media Justice–home of the Media Action Grassroots Network, Common Cause, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Fight For the Future,Media Alliance, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Public Knowledge, San Francisco Bitcoin, San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, The Greenlining Institute, The Utility Reform Network and to take stock of how far we have come, and where we are headed in the movement to protect the Open Internet.

Hope to see you next Thursday! RSVP Today!

Brewster Kahle Founder & Digital Librarian Internet Archive

[trixclibrarian]

Rick Prelinger’s latest film: No More Road Trips? {5 minute presentation at the Creative Capital Artist Retreat}

from the New York Film Festival Description of No More Road Trips?:

Artfully assembled from thousands of home movies and amateur films, No More Road Trips?, the latest film from archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger (Lost Landscapes of San Francisco; Lost Landscapes of Detroit), explores the highways and byways of a period in American history that may well be in our rearview mirror. Focusing on road culture and the idea of “peak travel,” the film is a participatory experience that depends upon audiences to provide the soundtrack and narration. No More Road Trips? is a perpetual work in progress, a piece that cannot be completed until you, the audience, lends your voice to the images to this one of a kind interactive cinema experience.

the Prelinger Library and The Internet Archive (& way back machine) are places anyone can access this sort of raw material 

(see video below (Bonobo Cirrus) for an amazing example of a music video made from Prelinger’s movie archive)

for me the glory of this project is nested and layered. i love the fact that he is using the ephemera of everyday people (the home movies) to make a movie experience that is ultimately ephemeral, unique, and entirely dependent upon the audience at each showing. so it’s recursively ephemeral. on top of that it creates a context in which a collective group must participate in the production of the art — that experience is the most valuable, exciting thing for me. this truly collectively made and experienced art —- being a maker of the moment is a large part of the experience of the moment - for everyone involved. sigh. want. 

[internetarchive]

Charlie Hebdo Archive-It Collection. A collaboration between AIT, Bibliotheque nationale de France, and other IIPC organizations.

[amy-eaton]

Is the internet archived?

I was cleaning out my inbox today and found a ton of articles I had sent myself to read. I had a bit of time and really wanted the clarity of a small inbox so I decided to read them. Two were deemed too long, but I happily made my way through the six remaining articles. My favourite one was The New Yorker’s article The Cobweb about archiving the internet.

I generally assume that anything I publish online can be found by anyone and will remain there forever (at least for a very long time). What I did not think about was who would take care of archiving all of these things and how long they would actually be kept for. I highly recommend reading the article, but if you’re short of time, here are a few of my favourite snippets.

No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t.

Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. Facebook has been around for only a decade; it won’t be around forever. Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress.

A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.”

…if Memento and projects like it work, the Web will have a time dimension, a way to get from now to then, effortlessly, a fourth dimension. And then the past will be inescapable, which is as terrifying as it is interesting.

"Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,” Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. “You can see it."

[internetarchive]

When considering your personal privacy and goals for putting out information, assuming what you publish will be archived in some way is probably a good idea. While the Internet Archive makes an effort to respect any request (including robots.txt preferences) for avoiding archiving something, someone out there could still screenshot your content, save a copy for themselves, and there are plenty of bots that scrape online content for many reasons - Google caches, spambots use content to aggregate for their posting, and so on. 

So while there's always a risk that we may lose important resources when a server goes down, there's also that flipside you mention that anything posted to the internet can be saved - in fact, it has to be locally on your machine somewhere just to view it, even if it's 'temporary'!

Glad you enjoyed the article about us!

[anitanh]

The Tourmaline. Its Relation as a Gem; Its Complex Nature; Its Wonderful Physical Properties, Etc., Etc.; With Special Reference to the Beautiful and Matchless Crystals Found in the State of Maine (1873). Found in the Internet Archive by AnitaNH

[internetarchive]

Some beatiful pages!

[internetarchive]

New job opportunities at the Internet Archive!

Senior Engineer: Search and Data Management

Wayback Machine Senior Engineer

Software Project Engineer 

Junior Accounting Specialist 

[internetarchive]

Beautiful photos from our Internet Archive London scanning operation in the Euston Scan Centre, courtesy of Motherboard. 

On the top floor of the Wellcome Library, 12 people sit in the darkness of blackout blinds, illuminated by the white LEDs of a scanning machine. This is the Euston Scan Centre, currently home to a team from the Internet Archive. They are part of an ambitious project to digitise the 19th century book collections of 10 UK libraries relating to the topic of medicine. They each aim to scan 800 pages an hour. They‘ve scanned over 2.5 million since they started with a full staff in October, and will have done 16-17 million by 2016.

Read more at Motherboard!

[internetarchive]

Excerpt from Brewster's presentation delivered on February 11, 2015 at the Ford Foundation-hosted gathering: NetGain, Working Together for a Stronger Digital Society

You can see more at the blog post here.

[internetarchive]

Presentation by Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Digital Librarian at Ford FoundationNetGain gathering, — a call from 5 top foundations to think big about prospects for our digital future.