research and short essays about cultural loss and the critical importance of preservation and access # | Continue reading
offline since June, the semantic search engine for thousands of vintage shareware/compilation CD-ROMs is back online # | Continue reading
The Emularity project became a ridiculous success, making vast collections of software and systems instantly available to millions in the browser # | Continue reading
print-only and out-of-print books will remain available, but this is still a huge loss # | Continue reading
We stood up for the digital rights of all libraries today in court! The Southern District of New York heard oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the lawsuit against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending, brought by 4 of the worl … | Continue reading
This piece was first published by TIME Magazine, in their Ideas section, as Amid Musk’s Chaotic Reign at Twitter, Our Digital History Is at Risk. My thanks to the wonderful team at Time for their editorial and other assistance. As Twitter has entered the Musk era, many people are … | Continue reading
This year we are welcoming works from 1927 into the public domain in the United States, including books, periodicals, sheet music, and movies. Big events of 1927 include the first transatlantic phone call from New York to London, the formation of The Academy of Motion Picture Ar … | Continue reading
A developer came to me a week ago with a project they’d been working on for over a year. The proposition of what they offered and the importance of what it would mean to historical software at Internet Archive was so compelling that within 48 hours, we’d announced it to the world … | Continue reading
Carl Malamud is a man with a mission: To make public information freely available to the public. For more than three decades, Malamud has not just talked in theory about why government materials should be online—he has taken action to digitize and upload massive amounts of data h … | Continue reading
It’s been over two years since a group of large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over our lending programs. After an expensive and lengthy discovery phase, arguments have now been fully briefed in the district court. What might we learn from the proceedings so far about … | Continue reading
Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org and a champion for making government information accessible to all, will receive the 2022 Internet Archive Hero Award. He will be presented the award at next week’s evening celebration, “Building Democracy’s Library.” The Internet Arch … | Continue reading
A new digital rights management (DRM) technology that is open source—and embraced by publishers—is gaining traction in the library eBook world. Readium LCP was developed five years ago to protect digital files from unauthorized distribution. Unlike proprietary platforms, the tec … | Continue reading
On Friday, October 7, the Internet Archive filed a reply brief against the four publishers that sued Internet Archive in June 2020: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. This is the final brief in support of our motion for sum … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. | Continue reading
Brewster Kahle, Chairman of the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, November 2015 [NYtimes story, Motherboard, BoingBoing. Liquidation.] All deposits are safe, all loans performing, great and dedicated staff, wonderful members. So why difficult? Despite five years of effort, $ … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District … | Continue reading
Guest post by Kay Savetz, professional web publisher and amateur Atari historian For years I hunted for the answer to the question: who wrote the adverting tagline “Have you played Atari today?” Atari started using it in print advertisements on April 1, 1982. Soon after, the word … | Continue reading
Thought leaders from libraries, academia, and civil society gathered at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C., on June 23 to discuss how to best advance policies that improve the ease, affordability and equity in how people access knowledge in the digital age. Convened by the … | Continue reading
For more than 20 years, the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive has monitored television news, preserving more than 9.5 million broadcasts totaling more than 6.6 million hours from across the world, with a continuous archive spanning the past decade. Today just a small sli … | Continue reading
The pending sale of Twitter to Elon Musk has generated a buzz about the future of social media and just who should control our data. Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, moderated an online discussion April 28 “Goodbye Facebook, Hello Decentralized So … | Continue reading
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised “Online Streaming Act” comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new … | Continue reading
(CC photo credit) The Internet Archive is requesting donations of Ukrainian books and books useful to Ukrainians. The books will be preserved, digitized and lent (for free to one user at a time) over the Internet. The Internet Archive is prioritizing the digitization and hosting … | Continue reading
Government documents from microfiche are coming to archive.org based on the combined efforts of the Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, and other library partners. The resulting files will be available for free public access to enable new analysis and access techniqu … | Continue reading
[announcement video, Wired] The Internet Archive has transformed 130,000 references to books in Wikipedia into live links to 50,000 digitized Internet Archive books in several Wikipedia language editions including English, Greek, and Arabic. And we are just getting started. By wo … | Continue reading
11 years ago, on the site longbets.org, a friendly wager was made between two mavens of the web: Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey. The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant … | Continue reading
From her home in Wellington City, New Zealand, Siobhan Leachman is devoted to doing what she can to make it easier for the public to access information about scientific discoveries. In particular, she wants to highlight the contributions of women in science. Leachman is a volunte … | Continue reading
As a teenager in the 1940s, Ben Smith became a huge fan of swing and big-band music — especially the masterful Duke Ellington, known for the classics “Mood Indigo” and “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Smith started collecting Ellington records in 78rpm format in high school and continued d … | Continue reading
From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, there is a growing movement to challenge books in schools that some suggest are inappropriate for students. Concern goes beyond explicit content; it now includes opposition to LGBTQIA material, the history of racism, and material that may c … | Continue reading
Join the Live Stream of our Anniversary Celebration now! Universal Access to All Knowledge has been the dream for millennia, from the Library of Alexandria on forward. The idea is that if you’re curious enough to want to know something, that you can get access to that information … | Continue reading
The kind of materials that Stanford English professor Margaret Cohen uses in her work, including the history of ocean travel in the period known as the “Age of Sail,” can be difficult to find. Books and illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries needed in her research and tea … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court of Canada has decided the much-anticipated York University v. Access Copyright case, reaffirming—in an unanimous opinion—that “public access to and dissemination of artistic and intellectual works” are “a primary goal of copyright.” We join our friends at the Ca … | Continue reading
As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg's invention. By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better-- smart … | Continue reading
As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg's invention. By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better-- smart … | Continue reading
As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg's invention. By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better-- smart … | Continue reading
Guest blog by Professor Tom Gally If you’ve spent much time reading 19th-century novels, you’ve probably run across characters doing the same thing—that is, reading novels. In Barchester Towers, Eleanor sits “in the window to get the advantage of the last daylight for her novel.” … | Continue reading
The Library of Congress announced that Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, has been named to the Copyright Public Modernization Committee (CPMC), with a mission to help modernize the technology-related aspects of the U.S. Copyright Office. More … | Continue reading
As a law librarian and author, Ben Keele wants to share his expertise on copyright with as many people as possible. His book, The Librarian’s Copyright Companion, 2nd edition (William S. Hein, 2012), coauthored with James Heller and Paul Hellyer, covers restrictions on use of cop … | Continue reading
Amidst the speculative boom for NFTs and crypto-currencies, one decentralized technology foundation is taking the long view by investing in deep history and the far future. Today, the Filecoin Foundation announced a 50,000 FIL grant to the Internet Archive – the largest single d … | Continue reading
Fans of science fiction learned last week that the word “robot” was first used in 1920—a full three years earlier than originally thought. The “massively important yet obvious” change in date was confirmed with a search of the Internet Archive, which has a digitized first edition … | Continue reading
For a long time, we’ve felt that the growing, diverse, global community interested in building the decentralized Web needed an entry point. A portal into the events, concepts, voices, and resources critical to moving the Decentralized Web forward. This is why we created, getdweb. … | Continue reading
In her 20-year career in the tech industry, VM (Vicky) Brasseur has championed the use of free and open source software (FOSS). She hails it as good for businesses and the community, writing and presenting extensively about its merits. To spread the word, Brasseur has made her bo … | Continue reading
In July, we announced our partnership with the Archives Unleashed project as part of our ongoing effort to make new services available for scholars and students to study the archived web. Joining the curatorial power of our Archive-It service, our work supporting text and data mi … | Continue reading
Looking for a research paper but can’t find a copy in your library’s catalog or popular search engines? Give Internet Archive Scholar a try! We might have a PDF from a “vanished” Open Access publisher in our web archive, an author’s pre-publication manuscript from their archived … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive is wholly dependent on Ubuntu and the Linux communities that create a reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech), rapidly evolving operating system. It is hard to overestimate how important that is to creating services such as the Internet Archive. When … | Continue reading
The Internet Archive has reached a new milestone: 2 million. That’s how many modern books are now in its lending collection—available free to the public to borrow at any time, even from home. “We are going strong,” said Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive and dire … | Continue reading
Years ago, the Internet Archive was honored to work with the Patrick J McGovern Foundation to bring some of the important publications of International Data Corporation onto the Internet for free public access. Today we are excited to bring a better looking version of the Compute … | Continue reading
On January 1st, 2021, many books, movies and other media from 1925 will enter the public domain in the United States. Some of them are quite famous — jump ahead to see lists of those well known books and movies that you can enjoy on the Internet Archive — or take the scenic route … | Continue reading