With the Canadian federal election coming to its conclusion, many eyes are turning to the last government’s proposals for internet and copyright policy reform. Unfortunately, some of these were quite concerning, such as an “online harms” proposal that the Electronic Frontier Foundation called “dangerously misguided“; all Canadians should learn more about this proposal and use Open Media’s tool to let the government know what you think. Fortunately, other policy actions, such as the Consultation on Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, present more promise.

Internet Archive Canada recently made a submission in response to this AI consultation. As mentioned in the submission—and as recognized in the consultation paper​​ itself—AI raises a fundamental and recurring copyright question: how to ensure the law keeps pace with technological change. In our view, what history suggests as an answer is not interminable legislative tweaks, but rather flexible copyright frameworks, including flexible limitations and exceptions like the fair use doctrine. The Supreme Court of Canada has shown a wonderful and enduring commitment to a flexible conception of fair dealing—most recently in the York University v. Access Copyright case. Why not continue down this path and simply reaffirm the flexible and open nature of fair dealing in Canada today?

The artificial intelligence consultation itself helps prove the point. The Government has been considering taking action on artificial intelligence since a review of the Copyright Act commenced all the way back in 2017 (itself set in motion years earlier). In the years between then and now, should Canada’s technology industry have taken a wait-and-see approach, while others made extraordinary investments in AI? Why spend half a decade or more tweaking narrow legislation when broadly flexible limitations and exceptions can and do fill this gap? And flexibility provides a host of other benefits, including for AI itself. For example, AI is not immune from the ancient maxim, garbage in, garbage out, to say nothing of the bias and other similar problems with AI. As a result, it is important that AI researchers and others be able to analyze datasets both before and after ingestion, and that copyright not stand as an undue obstacle to this work. Legal frameworks empowered by flexible copyright limitations and exceptions, such as controlled digital lending, can help facilitate this process. 

In the end, the AI consultation offers much to be thankful for, including an open and transparent process and many good ideas. We look forward to continuing to work with our Canadian friends and neighbors to ensure good copyright policy and strong libraries in the 21st century and beyond.

The post A New Day in Canada appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Registration is now open for the Library Leaders Forum 2021, our annual gathering of experts from the library, copyright, and information policy fields. Following the success of last year’s virtual Forum, which brought together hundreds of attendees from all over the world, we will again host a series of online workshops, presentations, and discussion sessions over four weeks in October. Register now!

This year, we are focusing our discussions around the theme, “Digital Ownership & the Future of Library Collections.” As more content moves digital, and as publishers refuse to sell ebooks to libraries in favor of restrictive licensing models, librarians wonder, “What will our library collections look like?” We will explore this question and related issues throughout the Library Leaders Forum sessions and conference workshops, which include:

Library Leaders Forum

Session I: Community Dialogue
October 13 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET – Register
In our first session, hear from library leaders as they navigate the challenges of the ebook marketplace, and their concerns about the future of library collections as content moves digital. We’ll also be joined by copyright experts and publishers for a panel discussion on digital ownership.

Session II: Community Impact
October 20 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET – Register
In our second session, we’ll explore the impacts that digital collections have had for libraries during the pandemic. Hear firsthand from educators & librarians about the value of digitized library collections for the patrons, students, and communities they serve. We’ll also feature new developments at the Internet Archive, and how these advances help connect digital learners with books, articles, and other resources. We’ll finish the session by awarding the Internet Archive Hero Award 2021.

Conference Workshops

Controlled Digital Lending: Unlocking the Library’s Full Potential
October 7 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET – Register
Last month, Library Futures Foundation released a new policy document, “Controlled Digital Lending: Unlocking the Library’s Full Potential.” Library Futures Foundation developed this document in consultation with the Intellectual Property and Information Policy (iPIP) Clinic at Georgetown Law. The document covers all the benefits, innovations, and goals that are the basis of any controlled digital lending system and makes the crucial connection between CDL and issues of equity. It expands beyond the legal rationale laid out in the Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) White Paper by clarifying the core principles that are the foundations of a library’s mission to provide access to materials to serve the public good.

This session will provide an opportunity to hear from the authors of the policy document, to engage in a virtual discussion, and to give your feedback on how this document may be useful to your community.

Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending
October 12 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET – Register
The Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program empowers libraries to lend digital books to patrons using Controlled Digital Lending. Attendees will learn how CDL works, the benefits of the Open Libraries program, and the impact that the program is having for partner libraries and the communities they serve.

Resource Sharing with the Internet Archive
October 27 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET – Register
Learn about the Internet Archive’s new resource sharing initiatives and how your library can participate.

The post Library Leaders Forum 2021: Digital Ownership & the Future of Library Collections appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

This is the third in a series of guest blog posts exploring the real-world implications of the Decentralized Web Principles.

By Kelsey Breseman

Kelsey Breseman is a Rita Allen Civic Science Fellow at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, where she works on environmental accountability, data ownership models, and intentional community. Kelsey has founded and managed tech startups, and has a history of activist leadership for progressive causes. She has a B.S. in Neural Engineering from Olin College and is currently working on a M.S. in Data Science from UT Austin.

I originally entered the decentralized web space through a problem with trust and power. I’m a member of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), an organization that sprang up in the wake of the Trump administration in an effort to prevent a climate-denialist administration from reducing public access to critical government-held data about the environment. In the EDGI working group then called Archiving, we were looking at ways to back up datasets such that scientists would be able to use them as proof — implying a strong chain of provenance — even if the original source were to remove access.

The question was, how could we ensure that data for the protection of the environment was owned by the people in a trustworthy way? The decentralized web offered broad distribution and a blockchain-backed provenance. So the decentralized web can — at least theoretically — help to protect the environment through the preservation of critical data.

But oft-cited statistics show Bitcoin proof-of-work transactions use energy at rates higher than some nations. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which made headlines as they exploded in use in the digital art market, similarly nudge our already beleaguered climate further toward apocalypse (this was discussed at the DWeb meetup this past May). Regardless of whether you see the projections as overblown or realistic, it is certainly true that, as with any new and growing tech, there is significant energy use from decentralization technology.

The basic pattern is the same across the technologies: proof-of-work is an inherently and intentionally energy-inefficient process that is the basis for Bitcoin’s stability as a currency; as the value of the currency rises, mining (which performs the energy-intensive proof-of-work process) becomes financially incentivized; high energy consumption increases carbon emissions, oil and coal extraction and burning, and so on. And so, decentralized web technology contributes to the destruction of habitability on our planet. Most articles you’ll find about this discuss cryptocurrency and NFTs, but our use case of decentralized and highly duplicated file storage isn’t immune. Aren’t we asking for more files to be stored on more servers, with more aggregate uptime and thus more energy use?

In this context, do we now need to protect the environment more directly from the decentralized web?

The Decentralized Web principles released earlier this year by the Internet Archive, DWeb Nodes, and other members of the Decentralized Web community include:

Ecological Awareness

1. We believe projects should aim to minimize ecological harm and avoid technologies that worsen environmental health.
2. We value systems that work towards reducing energy consumption and device resource requirements, while increasing device lifespan by allowing repair, recycling, and recovery.

Though this principle could apply equally to any project — of course we should minimize ecological harm — it’s worth a brief exploration of the implications in the decentralized web space.

Energy use is an acknowledged issue with the decentralized web, and especially decentralized ledger (cryptocurrency) technologies, so there is a fair amount of writing in this space. Here, I’ll break down the most common takes I’ve seen folks bring up to address the ecological (usually energy-centric) impacts of this tech:

Carbon-Neutralize the Approach

This is the idea that the high energy use of decentralized web technologies is okay as long as you make sure the energy comes from renewable resources. In practice, this looks like the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, the Crypto Climate Accord, or the Energy Web Foundation: leveraging the collective power of energy users to create a demand for low-carbon energy that triggers a transition of the grid to renewable infrastructure. You’ll often see the phrase “net zero” — we’ll emit carbon, but then try to balance it out.

Transition to renewables is absolutely necessary, but as an answer to high energy use, it falls short. In grid-level discussions of renewable energy adoption, we see a lot of celebration that renewables are a growing percentage of our energy source. For example, U.S. states set “renewable portfolio standards” (RPS) defining a percent-renewable energy source for their grid infrastructure, and it’s fairly common for states to exceed their targets. California, for example, had a goal of 33% renewables by 2020 which they had already exceeded by 2018.

What often gets passed over however, is that year over year, energy demand grows so much that this typically means a growth across all sectors of energy generation, from solar to coal. What we’re celebrating, then, is not a displacement of coal/actual reduction in carbon emissions, but that new demand is being covered by proportionally more renewable sources than we’re used to.

Growth in global energy demand, from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy showing a general trend of growth across all sectors, including coal — even as renewables grow disproportionately.

And of course, even renewable infrastructure has an ecological cost (e.g. materials extraction) — so though decarbonization of our energy infrastructure is an important objective, any proposed solution that doesn’t attempt to decrease energy demand is underwhelming.

Try Something with Less Energy

As mentioned above, cryptocurrencies traditionally rely on energy-intensive proof-of-work as a mechanism for stability. Like the gold standard, the currency works because it is difficult to obtain, and increasingly so over time. Also like the gold standard, it’s something we may have the choice to move on from, hopefully in ways that serve our values.

The most famous foray into this change is proof-of-stake. Proof-of-work relies upon calculations that increase in complexity as the blockchain grows, requiring miners to purchase hardware and electricity as a cost of mining. Proof-of-stake is a more direct form of reinvestment; it ties up a miner’s existing coins as stake against the transaction.

Proof-of-stake is most touted for its much lower energy profile than proof-of-work. Altcoin uses it; Ethereum is switching to it; Bitcoin may or may not ever make that transition. These choices tend to be values-based. Proof-of-work’s original claim to fame was as a solution to the problem of double spending, where the same coins could be spent twice, destroying the integrity of the currency. Adherents to proof-of-work over proof-of-stake cite the importance of Bitcoin’s long-running stability across years of worldwide usage. Proof-of-stake is newer and less widespread; it’s impossible to declare it equally reliable yet, though it seems plausible that it might be. If so, the energy reduction would be worthwhile.

Make a Judgment Based on Values and Worth

Rather than asking in isolation how much carbon emissions decentralized web technologies create, many re-frame to draw a baseline. They ask, how do emissions from cryptocurrencies compare to emissions from traditional banking?

I haven’t come across a truly excellent breakdown of ecological cost for cryptocurrencies versus centralized banking, or even a hint of an attempt to compare emissions per dollar equivalent. However, there does exist some good comparative discussion, both of the costs of the two industries and of the value they provide (here’s an article from NASDAQ, for example).

I’m pleased to see the discussion. Cryptocurrencies are in many ways a practical protest against the power and control of traditional banks and government control. If the aim is to disrupt and displace, it’s important to compare the impacts of the two industries.

There’s much to critique in traditional banking. Quite apart from the ecological costs of day-to-day business, fossil fuel divestment has been a critical strategy of the climate movement, whether at the university endowment level or the personal ask to stop using Wells Fargo in response to their financial involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline. People argue from both ecological and justice perspectives that disruption of traditional banking is a net positive. Others accept the ecological cost of decentralized finance tech as worthwhile, even if only for the trust and security of a chain of provenance.

When we create something new, we hope to make a meaningful improvement. We hope at worst that the cost of our prototype yields something worthwhile: an important learning. It should encapsulate a way of thinking that is different, in some critical way, from what exists. I remain attracted to the decentralized web space because I see so many people in it who are both thoughtful and taking action. People are reading books about power, about money, about justice, and making new protocols — both technical and human — that seem like they could fundamentally change the way our world works, and the way we work together within it.

But how can you know what is a sci-fi fantasy and what is grounded truth? As an expatriate of the Silicon Valley tech world, I know how easy it can be to get embroiled in the pitch: working so hard to earnestly convey that your startup is the key to changing the world. It’s a machismo-filled drive to oversell in order to stand out, to raise your VC seed, such that you yourself become over-convinced that the niche technology you’re developing is the one true way to save the world.

Take a second. Breathe. Think about busyness as a tool of oppression: the urgency that keeps you from ascertaining the full truth, taking the time to determine which systems are most in need of dismantlement. I know, I’m a radical; this is our language. But from what I’ve seen, most people get into DWeb for reasons that are at root more political than technological: you want some kind of change, some kind of power to people (decentralization), some kind of accountability (blockchain) and some way to claim identity-centric control (crypto). Admitting that, it’s not too much more radical to double-check the theory of change: do our technologies really serve the goods they claim to? How, and how can we ensure they do?

The DWeb principle at hand doesn’t make a value judgment with respect to energy use; its entreaty is awareness. It takes conscious work to think through the potential impacts of your (technical) choices, and I would ask that of you: slow down. Think it through. Make a decision about worth and value, rather than letting the flash and urgency of innovation sweep through you. The only way to know is to take the time to find out.

The post Ecological Awareness for the Decentralized Web appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone?

The Internet Archive, Library Futures Foundation, and Creative Commons invite you to join us for a virtual book talk with Peter B. Kaufman, about his book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge.

Peter is joined by Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons, as they discuss how to create a universe of truthful and verifiable information. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A.

Get Your Tickets Here

Peter B. Kaufman is a writer, teacher, and documentary film producer, Peter B. Kaufman works at the Office of Open Learning at MIT. He previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. He has served as president and executive producer of Intelligent Television; a founder of the Audio-Visual Think Tank at Sound & Vision in the Netherlands; co-chair of the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank in the United Kingdom; co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists; a member of the Scholar Advisory Committee of WGBH’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting; a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences; and a consultant to the Library of Congress’s National Audiovisual Conservation Center, the largest archive of moving images and recorded sound in the world. The author of numerous articles on media and education, and a member of the editorial board of The Moving Image, he lives in northwest Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Catherine Stihler OBE has been an international champion for openness as a legislator and practitioner for over 20 years. Born in Scotland, Catherine was educated at St Andrews University, where she was awarded a Master of Arts (MA) with Honours in Geography and International Relations, and later a Master of Letters (MLitt) in International Security Studies. She also has a Master of Business Administration degree from the Open University. She stood for election as a Member of the European Parliament for Scotland in 1999, representing the Labour Party. At the European Parliament she became one of Scotland’s longest-serving and most respected legislators. Catherine was elected Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, founded the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform and the parliament’s All-Party Library Group, and was instrumental in securing graphic health warnings on cigarette packets across the EU. In 2019, Catherine was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen in recognition of her services to politics. In 2019, she stood down from the European Parliament to become Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Catherine transformed the Open Knowledge Foundation in just 18 months, redefining its vision and mission to produce a new strategic direction, reengaging its global chapters and increasing the worldwide profile of the organisation. In August 2020, Catherine was appointed chief executive of Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.

PRAISE:

“Peter B. Kaufman’s call for a new Enlightenment couldn’t be more timely, or more necessary. His polemic against those who purport to own knowledge shows that knowledge is freedom and can belong to all or to none. The choice is ours.” —Edward Snowden

“Mellifluous, intelligent, erudite—a pleasure to read.” —Charles Nesson, William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard

“Kaufman’s brilliant exposition of the need for an online Fifth Estate and his ardent support of an online creative commons are both timely and convincing. Everyone who draws on the web for research and intellectual inspiration should read this book.” —Michael Scammell, author, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography and Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic and founding editor, Index on Censorship

“Rigorous and eloquent … a passionate proposal.” —Kathelin Gray, Los Angeles Review of Books

The post The New Enlightenment: Discussion with Peter B. Kaufman & Catherine Stihler appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

“Jump Cut” is a model for open access journals. When the Internet Archive digitized older issues of “Jump Cut” from microfilm, we found that it had already been posted, in textual form, by the publisher. When we reached out to see if we could open up the microfilm version for free public access and download, they were enthusiastic. Here we wanted to share more background on “Jump Cut” and why openness is important for them.

From the beginning, Jump Cut was all about being accessible and uncensored.

Now, the alternative media criticism journal has achieved maximum exposure: All of its back issues are available digitally for free through the Internet Archive.

John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage launched the publication when they were graduate students at Indiana University in 1974. At first, they produced it themselves on typewriters and distributed it on inexpensive, tabloid newsprint.

“It was positioned as a counter-culture journal. Their impetus for creating it was to provide a voice to the disenfranchised, those not normally published in academic journals,” said Jeremy Butler, professor emeritus of TV and film studies at the University of Alabama. “This has involved writers from left perspective, underrepresented people of color, LGBTQ writers and others.”

Jump Cut has never accepted advertising and being independent has always been its driving principle. It is a cross between an arcane scholarly journal and a pop culture film criticism magazine that covers a range of topics, such as pornography, that would be considered taboo in mainstream publications, said Butler, who has written for the journal himself.

The journal uses language that is familiar to academics, but not too obscure as to turn off readers. As a peer-reviewed journal, Jump Cut is an avenue for scholars—particularly junior faculty with diverse perspectives—to publish and earn citation credits.

In 2004, the journal moved online and discovered an international audience. After Hess and Kleinhans died, Lesage wanted to preserve the publication’s history and plan for its future.

Butler, who was a doctoral student of Kleinhans at Northwestern University and recently retired from Alabama, helped Lesage convert and archive some of the text from older issues of Jump Cut. The Internet Archive provided a home for the files as an institutional host. Recently, as part of a microfilm digitizing effort, the Archive scanned images, photos and text from all 59 issues of Jump Cut and made them available in a collection.

“Our goal was always to reach as many people as possible,” says Lesage, who says she was “totally ecstatic” to learn the entire collection was preserved by the Archive. “Now people will be able to see the images that we ran with those early articles.”

In addition to the journals, Kleinhans and Lesage have had syllabi and lecture notes from a variety of film and media courses they taught digitized and added to the Internet Archive collection. “I’ve tried to encourage scholars to archive their own papers and research materials,” says Lesage, who hopes the collection will be used by students, teachers and researchers. “It’s a treasure that scholars should take advantage of and not leave it to their heirs to try and decide what to do with all these boxes of papers.”

Butler, who is  a regular user of the Wayback Machine, movies and audio files through the Archive for his own research and enjoyment, said preserving the course materials and the complete Jump Cut collection is exciting for scholars and the public at large.

“It provides access to voices that people would not normally hear,” Butler said of broader new availability of the media studies journal. “There’s so much that’s invisible in our culture, so much that’s hidden behind structural and class divides. Jump Cut has prided itself on providing a voice to the unspoken…It might open up a whole new world to readers that they never even knew existed.”

The post “Jump Cut” is a Model Open Journal: Digitized from Microfilm & Hosted on Archive.org appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

By Coraline Ada Ehmke

This is the first in a series of guest blog posts exploring the real-world implications of the Decentralized Web Principles.

Coraline Ada Ehmke is the creator of the Contributor Covenant and the author of the Hippocratic License, an open source license designed to promote and protect human rights. In 2021, Coraline founded the Organization for Ethical Source and currently serves as its Executive Director.

In his 1976 paper “Communication and Cultural Domination,” sociologist and media critic Herbert Schiller warned of a future in which the cultural lives of individuals around the globe would be shaped and dictated by a small number of private media interests. The domination of US tech corporations in the online world today is the grim fulfillment of that prophecy. 

Access to the vast store of collective human knowledge is increasingly predicated on the surrender of our rights of privacy, free association, and digital autonomy to gatekeepers like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, whose entire business models depend on the normalization of surveillance capitalism. And digital colonization — the violent and repressive imposition of Western values and taxonomies — is a fundamental component of their success.

“The internet is implicated in contemporary power structures, its promise tarnished by unaccountable digital corporations, data extractivism, the marketisation of democracy and network capitalism’s connivance with surveillance states.”

(Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, “Towards a political practice of empowerment in digital times: a feminist commentary from the global South”)

Realizing the potential of the web to democratize the advance of human knowledge while preserving cultural autonomy and promoting universal human rights requires more than a begrudging (and often patronizing) nod to “global perspectives” interpreted through the lens of the Silicon Valley ethos. Achieving just outcomes requires actively prioritizing both equal access and equitable participation across social and cultural boundaries.

And this begins with centering the foundational principles of mutual respect, trust, and equity.

Mutual Respect

Achieving mutual respect is essential for effective communication and collaboration, and plays an especially critical role in conflict resolution. 

It is important to distinguish between respect and tolerance. Tolerance is the privilege of the powerful: it is the granting of permission to deviate from the norms of the majority. And it comes with the unspoken threat that this permission can be revoked at any time. Asking the powerless to accept mere “tolerance” is asking them to endure their oppression for the comfort or convenience of their oppressors.

“That is the problem with toleration: others determine if they tolerate you, which rules and norms you need to meet in order to be allowed to participate.”

(Petra De Sutter and Bruno De Lille, “Wij willen niet getolereerd worden, wij willen respect”)

Honoring and respecting personal, social, and cultural differences in our digital communities starts with defining clear and consensual social contracts that establish the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of participation. 

Codes of conduct are important in creating and sustaining an environment of mutual respect, but in order to be effective they must be enforced consistently and fairly. This requires the additional layer of clear and transparent governance. Fostering a culture of mutual respect starts with making social contracts explicit, continually reassessing their impact, and evolving their conditions to address changes both within a community and in the world at large.

Sustaining a culture that respects our differences, rather than simply tolerating them, creates opportunities to leverage the richness and diversity of our communities for the greater good.

Trust

Building trust begins with an expectation of positive intent, and develops over time through mutual accountability. Trust is earned and sustained by accepting responsibility for our actions and their outcomes.

“Without trust, conflict is politics. With trust, conflict is the pursuit of truth.”

(Patrick Lencioni, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”)

Social scientists recognize two main forms of trust: cognitive trust and affective trust.

Cognitive trust is valued predominantly in Western cultures and is based on confidence in someone else’s skills and reliability. It is fostered by a continual display of competence and reliability, and is essentially transactional.

Affective trust is more prevalent in the Global South and Asia. This form of trust develops from a sense of emotional closeness, demonstrations of empathy, or even feelings of friendship. It is relational rather than transactional.

As with respect, trust must be considered within the context of power dynamics. Distrust toward those with power often has little or no real consequence to them, but withholding trust from the disadvantaged or disenfranchised only magnifies the impact of systemic inequalities. This is why it’s essential that those with power earn and sustain trust through what they do, while, in turn, extending trust to others by accepting and recognizing them for who they are.

Trust in a global context requires acknowledging, valuing, and developing both kinds of trust in our communities.

Equity

Equity is difficult to define, because there are so few examples of true equity in our world to draw from. One way of thinking about equity is a lack of disparity in agency across racial, ethnic, gendered, and other dimensions. The meaningful pursuit of equity requires interrupting the societal, institutional, and interpersonal injustices that sustain these disparities.

“New manifestations of racism and other forms of oppression continue to emerge and outpace our mechanisms and capacities to solve them… To be achieved and sustained, equity needs to be thought of as a structural and systemic concept.”

(Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide, Annie E. Casey Foundation)

Equity is not synonymous with equality. Equality assumes that everyone has the same needs and can succeed given the same opportunities. Meritocracy, widely heralded in the online world as a force for equality, is founded on the idea that our differences are irrelevant to success, rather than a contributor to success. This dangerously flawed premise, combined with an unwillingness to acknowledge intrinsic power imbalances, has only served to compound the impact of deeply-rooted disparities in the digital world.

Inequity is not a problem that can be solved from first principles. Those with power cannot define what is or is not equitable. Deciding what’s best for the marginalized, rather than meaningfully empowering them to make these determinations for themselves, is itself a manifestation of inequity.  Racism and other forms of oppression are self-perpetuating and constantly evolve in response to efforts to mitigate them, so strategies for addressing these issues must also evolve and adapt. Focusing exclusively on “quick fixes,” for example, outreach without corresponding investments in cultural and structural change, often do more harm than good.

Injustice cannot be cured by mere consultation, engagement, or representation. To effect meaningful change, those whose authority and privilege are sustained by inequity must yield power and distribute agency to those who are most impacted by systemic disparities.

Closing the Circle

The values of respect, trust, and equity are interconnected and inseparable. Putting them into practice means continually reassessing and re-imagining what a just world might look like. It means acknowledging that the same technologies we create and use with the intent of realizing these ideals, can (and will) be abused to instead sustain and magnify systemic injustice — at an otherwise unimaginable scale.

Values that are expressed but that do not guide our actions are merely performative. Real progress can only come about when we go beyond our good intentions, and take responsibility for impact and outcomes. Ultimately, we are accountable not only to our collaborators and our users, but also to our broader global society.

You can read the DWeb Principles in full, and add your name as a supporter.

The post The Sacred Geometry of Respect, Trust, and Equity appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

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 18^th and 19^th centuries needed in her research and teaching are often tucked away in rare book collections. For about five years, Cohen has been turning to the Internet Archive for help. And that access was even more critical during the pandemic when physical libraries were closed.

“It’s really enriched the arguments I can make about cultural history,” Cohen said. “The availability of documents and the very intensive work of tracking these down has become so much easier. The Internet Archive is a very user-friendly tool.”

The Biodiversity Heritage Library has been a resource to Cohen in teaching her English class, Imagining the Ocean. She has discovered manuals from Philip Henry Gosse, who created the first public aquarium, envisioning them as beautiful ocean gardens.  Cohen also shares her screen with students to discuss drawings of the sails, seashore and sea-anemones from the Victorian Age that she accesses through the Archive.

“Access to the history of science is useful to me. I’m a literature professor, but the imagination spans across different areas,” said Cohen, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Director, Center for the Study of the Novel.

In her own research of oceanic studies, Cohen explores the importance of diversity and reality in marine environments. She tapped into the Internet Archive to fact-check information for A Cultural History of the Sea, (Bloomsbury, April 2021), a six-volume series that she edited chronicling the vital role oceans have played over time.

In researching her upcoming book, The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy to be published by Princeton University Press, Cohen said the Wayback Machine was critical in confirming sources on websites that were no longer live.

The Sci-Fi/Horror collection of the Internet Archive has been useful to Cohen in teaching a course on Gothic film—especially since YouTube recently took down many of its films in that genre, she said.

Much of the material Cohen is looking for is in the public domain (such as Punch, a satirical British magazine that dates back to the mid-1800s ) but the documents are fragile because of their age. She has also  appreciated being able to borrow classic books of literary criticism, such as the collection on novel studies that supports her graduate course, Genres of the Novel. 

 “People’s time is limited and having access to this material facilitates scholarship,” Cohen said of the benefits of digitized documents. “I understand why publishers need to make money and I publish myself, but free access to information, particularly for nonprofit use, is a gift.”

The post Access to Rare Historical Materials Makes an Ocean of Difference for Stanford Professor appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Internet Archive is able to survive, thrive, and grow thanks to the generosity of our donors. That’s why we’re happy to announce the launch of a new way to donate easily from anywhere: SMS giving! 

Simply text ARCHIVE to 44321 and you’ll receive a secure link that you can use to make a gift. You can select a preset amount or enter your own, and choose whether to set up a monthly donation or make a one-time contribution. Payments can be sent via credit card, Google Pay/Apple Pay, or by connecting your bank account directly.

Of course, you can also still donate by visiting archive.org/donate, using cryptocurrency, making a legacy bequest, and more—here’s a list of all the ways you can give. There are also plenty of other ways you can help out if a financial contribution isn’t possible right now.

Our work is only possible because of the support of our community—and we’re deeply grateful for the generosity of our patrons. Thank you for helping us advance Universal Access to All Knowledge!

The post Now Accepting SMS Donations appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Although Casey Patterson spent much of the COVID-19 lockdown in a dank San Francisco basement apartment, he says he felt lucky in many ways.

The graduate student in English from Stanford University stayed healthy and—despite not having physical access to a library—was able to research his dissertation, teach classes, and prepare for job interviews. This was possible because of online access to materials through the Internet Archive.

Patterson, who is entering the sixth year of his doctoral program, offered to teach an online African American literature class to undergraduates as soon as COVID-19 shut down the campus and the university shifted to virtual instruction.

“I just felt a degree of duty to sign up for a lot of teaching. I wanted to be able to support students and knew the transition to online education was going to be rocky,” said Patterson, who also taught an Intro to Black Studies course during the pandemic. “It was chaotic. Obviously, we had a really tough time trying to figure out how to keep students engaged and make education a humane process.”

Instead of expecting students to buy several books, and without the ability for them to check out books in a library, Patterson turned to the Internet Archive. Patterson found works of Black critics such as Toni Morrison and C.L.R. James and their writings about 19^th century authors Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville to use in class. He downloaded classics including Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn to the Canvas learning management system and made them immediately available to students.

“It’s super helpful when you’re asking students to read 10 short passages from three different novels,” Patterson said of using the Internet Archive. “It would be cruel to ask them to buy all of the books or track them down to the library. This way you put them right at the students’ fingertips.”

Patterson also relied on text from the Internet Archive for his own research. For his dissertation, he is examining the role of educational history as a way of understanding African American literary studies and the institutionalization of Black studies as a discipline.

This spring, he interviewed for an academic job in which he was asked to prepare a lesson plan syllabus for a teaching demonstration. Having access to The Book of American Negro Poetry, works of African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and essays by Alice Walker enabled Patterson to put together materials from the convenience of his apartment on a tight deadline.

“Using the Internet Archive, I could lay hands on basically everything I needed,” Patterson said. “It was an absolutely indispensable resource at the time,” he says.

In the summer of 2019, Patterson had used the Internet Archive in his Fandom research, another area of interest. He’d run across a citation to a website that was no longer available online and was able to track it down through the Wayback Machine. But since the pandemic, Patterson says he’s come to value the Internet Archive for its collection of primary sources.

“Knowledge is for everybody. The more we can do to break down the barriers that make it inaccessible, the better off everyone is,” said Patterson. “The Internet Archive is one great example of how we can do that almost with a click of a button.”

The post Graduate Student: Internet Archive an “absolutely indispensable resource” appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Motivating students to stay engaged with online instruction can take some creativity.

Working at a special education learning center in Los Angeles, Luca Messarra found the promise of choosing a book to read for fun after a lesson kept his 9- to 11-year-old kids going. Although access to physical books was limited during the pandemic, he found digital versions in the Internet Archive that made all the difference.

Messarra’s individual work with students moved online in March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. He continued to help them learn to read and write by doing drills remotely, using online instruction materials provided by the learning center. It did not have access to digital works of fiction, but Messarra says those were the books that most excited the students.

“That was the most fun because it was an opportunity for them to see the fruits of their labor. They could read a book, finally,” says the 25-year-old who lives in Palo Alto. “It’s far more entertaining to read a book than to do drills over and over again. That was the highlight for a lot of students—to finally be able to read a book of their own choosing.”

Since wrapping up his job at the learning center, Messarra has been enrolled in a graduate English program at Stanford University where he is specializing in digital humanities and postcolonialism.

Looking back on his teaching experience during the pandemic, Messarra says he values the resources from the Internet Archive. “It was incredibly helpful and quite essential to boost the morale of students. They were bored and frustrated because of the pandemic,” he says. “For one of my students, it was his goal to read Harry Potter. Once he was able to read it, he was super excited and eventually bought the book because he was having such a good time.”

The post Reading Online Books a “Highlight” for Students During Pandemic appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

On Thursday, September 9, the Internet Archive will host an online webinar, “Reflecting on 9/11: Twenty Years of Archived TV News” Learn from scholars, journalists, archivists, and data scientists about the importance of archived television for gaining insights into our evolving understanding of history and society.

Participants include the Internet Archive, The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and The Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Speakers will include Roger Macdonald (Founder, Internet Archive’s TV News Archive), Jim Duran (Director, Vanderbilt Television News Archives), Karen Cariani (David O. Ives Executive Director, GBH Archives and GBH Project Director, American Archive of Public Broadcasting), Kalev Leetaru (Founder, Global Database of Events, Language and Tone Project), and Philip Bump (Washington Post national correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics)

Please register in advance for the September 9 webinar (11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PDT)

Journalists and scholars: as you prepare 20^th anniversary 9/11 reporting and analysis, these unique resources are available:

• Internet Archive’s 9/11 Television News Archive – a browsable library of TV news from U.S. and international broadcasters from 19 networks, over seven days, from the morning of September 11 through September 17, 2001. Contact: Josh Baran 917-797-1799
• The Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA) – Founded in 1968, the Archive’s collection includes TV news of attacks on 9/11/2001 coverage during the following weeks broadcast by ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. Over 270 hours of footage is available for viewing and research. The VTNA records and preserves national television broadcasts of the evening news on ABC, CBS, and NBC with the addition of the primetime news program on CNN in 1995 and the Fox News Channel in 2004. In addition to these nightly recordings, the VTNA also monitors television news networks for breaking live events. Contact: Jim Duran – 615-936-4019  
• The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by releasing a new 9/11 Special Coverage Collection of 68 public television and radio programs from stations across the country covering the events of the attacks and the aftermath. Among the featured programs are coverage of 9/11 and its anniversaries by The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the PBS News Hour, and much more. The AAPB is a collaboration between Boston public media producer GBH and the Library of Congress to preserve and make accessible culturally significant public media programs from across the country. Contact: Emily Balk, GBH External Communications Manager – 617-300-5317

Background:

• 500+ archived 9/11-related websites curated by The National September 11 Memorial Museum using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service
• Internet Archive’s Open Library offers a list of 2,630 published works about the 9/11 attack
• A decade ago, on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies hosted a conference that featured work by scholars using television news materials to help us understand how TV news presented the events of 9/11 and the international response. “Learning from Recorded Memory”
• This fall, the Internet Archive celebrates its 25th anniversary.
• The Internet Archive’s TV News Archive repurposes closed captioning as a search index for nearly three million hours of U.S. local and national TV news (2,239,000+ individual shows) from mid-2009 to the present. The public interest library is dedicated to facilitating journalists, scholars, and the public to compare, contrast, cite, and borrow specific portions of the collection. Advanced quantitive analysis opportunities and data visualizations are available via the collaborating GDELT Project’s Television Explorer and AI Television Explorer.
• Roger Macdonald, founder of the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive, is available for background interviews and to help journalists access the archive.

Internet Archive 9/11 Event and Resources Media Contact:  pressinfo@archive.org

The post Reflecting on 9/11: Twenty Years of Archived TV News – Special Event and Resources appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Back in March 2020, teachers were asking themselves a nearly unthinkable question: “How are we going to get books in students’ hands with our schools & libraries closed?” We’ve heard from hundreds of teachers about the challenges they faced in connecting remote learners with books during COVID. Here is their story:

And here we are in August of 2021, with another school year about to start, and educators are still asking this same question. As a nonprofit dedicated to Universal Access to All Knowledge, the Internet Archive provides a number of free resources for parents, students, teachers, and librarians around the world. Check out these tools for remote learning:

Curated Collections

• Our site is packed with free, kid-friendly learning resources. 
• Looking for ways to bring diverse representation into your classroom reading? Find books that support the LGBT+ community in Open Library.
• In 2015, ten-year-old Marley Dias set out to increase representation of books in which black girls are the main character with her #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign. Inspired by Marley, we want to support schools to make learning more inclusive. Find more than 300 of the curated titles in our library. 

Lesson Plans

• Looking for lesson plans? Browse our collection to find detailed notes on hundreds of books and themes this summer, including Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote.
• Do your students struggle with math? Online tutor The Math Sorcerer has put together a list of math books and resources for self-studying, covering a range of topics and abilities. Borrow the books and help your students gain confidence with math.

Tips for Using Our Library

How long can I borrow a book? How many books can I check out at once? Find all the information you need to know about borrowing books from the lending library in our online tutorials and get reading!

Learn More

Follow #LearnWithIA on Twitter throughout the month of August for additional tips & resources!

The post Back to School with the Internet Archive: Fall 2021 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

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 Canadian Association of Research Libraries, CIPPIC, and all throughout Canada in applauding this important decision.

The Access Copyright case was centered around the question whether educational institutions in Canada were required to pay certain tariffs to Access Copyright. Access Copyright had argued that its tariffs were mandatory for educational institutions, and recently attempted to raise them from $3.38 to $45 per student, per year, along with a variety of other changes. In response, York University argued that its use was fair dealing and, as a result, that it was not required to pay a tariff or any other fee for such use. After a lengthy court battle, the Supreme Court of Canada has now ruled in favor of York, holding that the tariffs are not mandatory and emphasizing the importance of “protect[ing] users from the potentially unfair exertion of . . . market power” by big copyright interests like Access Copyright.

While the Court did not address the specifics of York’s own fair dealing, it was sure to emphasize “the nature of fair dealing as a user’s right” in Canada. As the Court explained:

Copyright law has public interest goals. . . . [T]he public benefits of our system of copyright are much more than “a fortunate by-product of private entitlement” [citation omitted].  Instead, increasing public access to and dissemination of artistic and intellectual works, which enrich society and often provide users with the tools and inspiration to generate works of their own, is a primary goal of copyright. “Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole” (Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc., [2002] 2 S.C.R. 336, at para. 32, per Binnie J.).

York University v Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), 2021 SCC 32

Copyright can only serve its true purpose when due attention is given to user’s rights and the public interest. But all too often, in courts around the world, the public interest is not fairly addressed. The Access Copyright decision helps ensure that Canadian courts do not make this mistake; as Professor Michael Geist has noted, it “removes any doubt that the Supreme Court remains strongly supportive of user’s rights in copyright.”

The post Supreme Court of Canada Reaffirms Public Access as a “Primary Goal of Copyright” appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

During the pandemic, perhaps you have been cleaning out some bookshelves in your house. Or maybe you are a librarian, planning to be back in your building for the first time in more than a year and restarting collection management activities.

If you are wondering what to do with your excess materials, the Internet Archive can help. The nonprofit library accepts donation books, records (CDs, LPs, 45rpm, 78rpm, cylinders), films, and microforms that it does not already have in its collection. The Archive preserves one copy of everything it receives and tries to find good homes for duplicates. Then, as funding allows, the Archive digitizes the materials and helps them reach a wider audience online.

At a recent webinar, staff from the Archive explained the process for donating and  encouraged the public’s help as it works to provide universal access to everything ever published.

“No donation is too far away or small to be considered by the Internet Archive,” said Liz Rosenberg, donations manager. She has helped coordinate donations of entire libraries, including collections from Marygrove College in Detroit and Bay State College’s Boston Campus.

Donation Process

To find out more about what’s involved with physical donations, Rosenberg suggests going to the Help page for details about shipping instructions or dropping off donations smaller than about 20 boxes. All others are asked to complete a physical item donation form to provide all the information to make a larger donation happen, including where the items are located, an accurate count, and other special considerations for the offer.

Once submitted, staff begin the planning process to determine if the collection is in a format that can be accepted, if there are duplicates, and the project timeline. Arrangements then can be made for packing and shipping. In the case of larger collections, the Archive typically is able to provide assistance with transportation costs.

Sometimes donors pack their own items and then the Archive pays for the shipping. That was the case for a recent donation of 18,000 records from a music enthusiast in Washington D.C. The donor was looking for a “forever home” for his beloved vinyl and the Archive was happy to schedule a pickup and preserve the rare collection, Rosenberg said.

Why Donate?

For donations of 50 or more items, the Archive can create a collection to both honor the donor and make their donation accessible all in one place. “The ability to access all of their media in one place really reassures our donors that they will still have access to their items even once they’re no longer in their physical possession,” said Rosenberg. Some stories behind major contributions are covered by the Archive in its blog.

Better World Books, a socially responsible bookstore that has a longstanding relationship with the Internet Archive, regularly donates books for preservation and digitization. It receives many of its books from library partners around the world. The Archive accepts many materials that BWB will not.

“We love more than anything to get large collections—entire intellectual units, such as a reference collection that is curated,” said Chris Freeland, a librarian who works at the Archive. “It helps us round out our collection, and helps our patrons. If someone has a collection that no longer fits their collection development priorities, think of Better World Book or the Internet Archive for those materials.”

The Archive is open to over-sized items, such as maps, and books that do not have to have an ISBN number. What about loose periodicals? The Archive does not want a few scattered issues but does have interest in long runs of a magazine.

Once digitized, patrons with print disabilities can access the materials and some are selected to be accessible via Controlled Digital Lending and for machine learning research. Together, we can achieve long term preservation and access to our collective cultural legacy.

The post Internet Archive Can Provide a New Home for your Beloved Books & Media: Details on Making a Physical Donation appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

The Internet Archive is pleased to announce it has joined the The Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project, a mutually supportive resource-sharing cooperative whose 120 members include public and private academic libraries from across the country.  As a member of the IDS Project, the Internet Archive expands its ability to support libraries and library patrons by providing access to two million monographs and three thousand periodicals in its physical collections available for non-returnable interlibrary loan (ILL) fulfillment. 

“The Internet Archive is a wonderful addition to the IDS Project’s team of libraries.  It is a great honor to be able to help IA reach more libraries and more patrons through the integration with IDS Logic,” said Mark Sullivan, Executive Director of the IDS Project.

If you want to learn more about the IDS Project and the Internet Archive, I will be speaking at the 17th Annual IDS Summer Conference on July 29th.

In addition to the IDS Project, the Internet Archive is also piloting a program with libraries through RapidILL. If there are other resource sharing efforts that we should investigate as we expand our ILL service, please reach out to me at brewster@archive.org.

The post Internet Archive Joins IDS Project for Interlibrary Loan appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Libraries have historically been trusted hubs to equalize access to credible information, a crucial role that they should continue to fill in the digital age. However, as more information is born-digital, digitized, or digital-first, libraries must build new policy, legal and public understandings about how advances in technology impact our preservation, community, and collection development practices.

This panel will bring together legal scholars Ariel Katz (University of Toronto) and Argyri Panezi (IE University Madrid/Stanford University) to discuss their work on library digital exhaustion and public service roles for digital libraries. They will be joined by Lisa Radha Weaver, Director of Collections and Program Development at Hamilton Public Library, who will discuss how library services have been transformed by digital delivery and innovation and Kyle Courtney of Library Futures/Harvard University, a lawyer/librarian who wrote the influential Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, signed by over 50 institutions. The panel will be moderated by Lila Bailey of Internet Archive.

August 3 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_b4R4ayfzSj2-GIvbpabumA

Background reading

• Hansen, D. R., & Courtney, K. K. (2018, September 24). A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books. https://doi.org/10.31228/osf.io/7fdyr
• IFLA Statement on Controlled Digital Lending (2021). https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/93954
• Katz, Ariel, Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledge (August 22, 2016). 13(1) I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 81 (2016). https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/89456/1/Katz%20Copyright%2C%20Exhaustion.pdf 
• Panezi, Argyri, A Public Service Role For Digital Libraries: The Unequal Battle Against (Online) Misinformation Through Copyright Law Reform And The Emergency Electronic Access To Library Material (March 26, 2021). Forthcoming, 31 CORNELL J.L. & PUB. POL’Y _ _ (2021), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3813320  

The post Why CDL Now? Digital Libraries Past, Present & Future appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Guest post by author Fran Moreland Johns.

Whenever I’ve had a book published I have celebrated every sale. But the biggest cause for celebration – the sale that always made me most proud – was when a library acquired a copy or two. Individuals may purchase a book, shelve it or pass it along to a friend, and thereafter it disappears. Libraries are forever.

This is the belief that underscores my enthusiasm for the Internet Archive. While the Atlanta Public Library may one day cull my book to make room for someone else’s, those words I labored over and so treasure, whether anyone else ever treasures them or not, are safe with the Internet Archive. And may it thrive and prosper.

This is all a very long way from my literary beginnings on a Royal portable typewriter. I wrote for newspapers and magazines – the Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA Today, National Real Estate Investor to cite just a few of the wildly different multiple dozens – from the early 1950s into the technologically bewildering 2020s. Eventually I added an MFA in short fiction to my BA in Art and veered into short stories, with a few tiny publication successes, including Dying unafraid (1999) and Perilous Times: An inside look at abortion before – and after – Roe v Wade (2013). When the internet came along, I tiptoed in via a blog for news aggregate site True/Slant.com which eventually morphed into today’s franjohns.net. With a little luck my short story collection, Marshallville Stories, will be published in 2022; the Internet Archive will get one of the first copies.

I’ve been following the conflict between U.S. publishers and the Internet Archive with some degree of horror and dismay. Publishers, I realize, are in business to make money and thereby stay in business. Do they not want people, as many people as possible, to read the books they publish? After the first flurry of sales (perhaps excluding the blockbuster books that will make big bucks for authors and publishers alike, may they also thrive and prosper) does it not follow that publishers would want their books to enjoy long and successful lives? That, at least, is the hope I believe most authors harbor. I can’t claim to speak for other authors, but this I know is personally true: I write for the joy of writing, and in the hope of being read. I’d be surprised if there were many writers out there who don’t feel the same.

So let’s hear it for libraries. And for the one that’s unique among all others, the Internet Archive.

***

Fran Moreland Johns has been writing (for newspapers, magazines, online sites) since the 1950s, and blogging since she was introduced to the idea via a paid blog for news aggregate site True/Slant in 2009. Her roots are in small town Virginia and her heart is in hometown San Francisco. She currently blogs on Medium.com and www.franjohns.net. You can read Dying unafraid (1999) online through the Internet Archive’s lending library.

The post One Writer on Libraries appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

A Library of Everything

As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg’s invention hundreds of years before. 

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–smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the Library not just searchable, but organizable; make it so that you could navigate your way through millions, and maybe eventually billions of web pages.

The first step was to make computers that worked for large collections of rich media. The next was to create a network that could tap into computers all over the world: the Arpanet that became the Internet. Next came augmented intelligence, which came to be called search engines. I then helped build WAIS–Wide Area Information Servers–that helped publishers get online to anchor this new and open system, which came to be enveloped by the World Wide Web.  

By 1996, it was time to start building the library.

This library would have all the published works of humankind. This library would be available not only to those who could pay the $1 per minute that LexusNexus charged, or only at the most elite universities. This would be a library available to anybody, anywhere in the world. Could we take the role of a library a step further, so that everyone’s writings could be included–not only those with a New York book contract? Could we build a multimedia archive that contains not only writings, but also songs, recipes, games, and videos? Could we make it possible for anyone to learn about their grandmother in a hundred years’ time?

Not about an Exit or an IPO

From the beginning, the Internet Archive had to be a nonprofit because it contains everybody else’s things. Its motives had to be transparent. It had to last a long time.

In Silicon Valley, the goal is to find a profitable exit, either through acquisition or IPO, and go off to do your next thing. That was never my goal. The goal of the Internet Archive is to create a permanent memory for the Web that can be leveraged to make a new Global Mind. To find patterns in the data over time that would provide us with new insights, well beyond what you could do with a search engine.  To be not only a historical reference but a living part of the pulse of the Internet.

Looking Way Back

My favorite things from the early era of the Web were the dreamers. 

In the early Web, we saw people trying to make a more democratic system work. People tried to make publishing more inclusive.

We also saw the other parts of humanity: the pornographers, the scammers, the spammers, and the trolls. They, too, saw the opportunity to realize their dreams in this new world. At the end of the day, the Internet and the World Wide Web–it’s just us. It’s just a history of humankind. And it has been an experiment in sharing and openness.

The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world. 

Looking Way Forward

Over the next 25 years, we have a very different challenge. It’s solving some of the big problems with the Internet that we’re seeing now. Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource? 

So many of us trust the Web to find recipes, how to repair your lawnmower, where to buy new shoes, who to date. Trust is perhaps the most valuable asset we have, and squandering that trust will be a global disaster. 

We may not have achieved Universal Access to All Knowledge yet, but we still can.

In another 25 years, we can have writings from not a hundred million people, but from a billion people, preserved forever. We can have compensation systems that aren’t driven by advertising models that enrich only a few. 

We can have a world with many winners, with people participating, finding communities of like-minded people they can learn from all over the world.  We can create an Internet where we feel in control. 

I believe we can build this future together. You have already helped the Internet Archive build this future. Over the last 25 years, we’ve amassed billions of pages, 70 petabytes of data to offer to the next generation. Let’s offer it to them in new and exciting ways. Let’s be the builders and dreamers of the next twenty-five years.

The post Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Session recordings are now available from our recent webinars on Controlled Digital Lending:

Watch “Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending“

Watch “Implementation & Integration: CDL for All Libraries“

The post Recordings Now Available From Recent Controlled Digital Lending Webinars appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

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.” Anna Karenina waits for her husband “in front of the fireplace with her English novel.” And in Jane Eyre, Georgiana falls “asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel.”

What novels were they reading? While Eleanor might have been reading Jane Eyre and Anna might have been perusing Barchester Towers, it’s more likely that they were reading some of the thousands of other novels published in that century. Novels were the binge-watched television, the hit podcasts of the era—immersive, addictive, commercial—and they were produced and consumed in huge numbers.

Some of those novels are, of course, still read today. But for every Pride and Prejudice or A Tale of Two Cities, dozens more have been forgotten. In the 20th century, the novel came to be regarded as serious literature, something to be taught and studied, and attention narrowed to a limited number of authors and works. And as the books themselves aged, their paper turning yellow and brittle, libraries removed them from their shelves. With readers having access only to the reprinted “classics” that still made money for publishers, the vast majority of 19th-century novels were forgotten and unread.

Now, however, thanks to preservation and scanning by libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and elsewhere, thousands of those forgotten novels are available at the Internet Archive. The list below has links to fifty of them—mostly British novels published between 1800 and 1899—as well as to Wikipedia articles for many of the authors.

I compiled this list after reading a fascinating recent study by Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak about books regarded as classics by users of the book-rating site Goodreads. They found that readers today seem to read mainly the well-known canonical works. Jane Eyre, for example, has more than 1,700,000 ratings at Goodreads and over 45,000 reviews.

For the following list, I chose only 19th-century novels that, as of May 2021, have not been reviewed or rated by anyone at Goodreads. There are many such forgotten novels in the Internet Archive’s collections, and it’s likely that some of them have not been read by anyone for over a century.

Would you like to be the first?

Tom Gally lives in Yokohama, Japan, and teaches at the University of Tokyo. In 2019, he wrote about travel books found at the Internet Archive.

• Francis Adams, John Webb’s End: Australian Bush Life [link] (1891)
• Fanny Aikin-Kortright, Anne Sherwood: Or, The Social Institutions of England [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1857)
• John Ainslie (ed.), Antipathy: Or, The Confessions of a Cat-hater [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1836)
• W.W. Aldred, A Lost Cause: A Story of the Last Rebellion in Poland [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1881)
• Elizabeth M. Alford, Netherton-on-Sea [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1869)
• Charlotte Anley, Earlswood: A Tale for the Times, and All Time [link] (1853)
• Anonymous, Uncle Tweazy and His Quizzical Neighbours: A Comi-satiric Novel [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1816)
• William Delafield Arnold, Oakfield: Or, Fellowship in the East [vol 1, vol 2] (1854)
• Blanche Atkinson, A Commonplace Girl [link] (1895)
• Isabella Banks, Glory: A Wiltshire Story [link] (1881)
• Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Metropolis [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1819)
• Walter Besant, All in a Garden Fair: The Simple Story of Three Boys and a Girl [link] (1892)
• Matilda Betham-Edwards, John and I [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1862)
• Clementina Black, The Pursuit of Camilla [link] (1899)
• Robert Black, Love or Lucre [link] (1879)
• Shirley Brooks, The Silver Cord [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1861)
• Rosa Nouchette Carey, The Mistress of Brae Farm [link] (1899)
• Henry Cockton, Stanley Thorn [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1841)
• Christabel Rose Coleridge, Kingsworth: Or, The Aim of a Life [link] (1882)
• Mortimer Collins, Marquis and Merchant [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1868)
• Christiana Jane Davies, The Browns and the Smiths [vol 1, vol 2] (1863)
• Pierce Egan, The Pilgrims of the Thames, in Search of the National! [link] (1838)
• Henry Erroll, The Academician [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1888)
• Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, The Middle-Aged Lover [vol 1, vol 2] (1873)
• Maria M. Grant, Lescar, the Universalist [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1874)
• Barbara Hofland, Says She to Her Neighbour, What? [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4] (1812)
• John Isabell, By the Cornish Sea [vol 1, vol 2] (1885)
• Kitty Lee [Katharine] Jenner, In London Town [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1884)
• Theo Kennedy, Farnorth [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1866)
• William Henry Giles Kingston, The Circassian Chief: A Romance of Russia [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1843)
• Susan Rowley Richmond Lee (pseudonym: Curtis Yorke), A Romance of Modern London [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1892)
• Alethea Lewis (pseudonym: Eugenia de Acton), The Microcosm [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4, vol 5] (1801)
• Charlotte Trimmer Moore, Country Houses [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1832)
• Samuel Phillips, Caleb Stukely [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1844)
• Sophia Reeve, The Mysterious Wanderer [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1807)
• Rita, “Corinna”: A Study [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1800)
• Joseph Moyle Sherer, The Story of a Life [vol 1, vol 2] (1825)
• Catherine Sinclair, Modern Flirtations: Or, A Month at Harrowgate [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1841)
• Eliza Tabor, Dimplethorpe [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1880)
• Floyd Tayleure, Professions [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1852)
• Katherine Thomson, Constance [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1833)
• Ursula, Mrs. Greville: The Story of a Woman’s Life [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1874)
• Harold Vallings, The Transgression of Terence Clancy [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1893)
• Susannah C. Venn, The Dailys of Sodden Fen [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1884)
• Lucy Bethia Walford, A Stiff-Necked Generation [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1889)
• Eliot Warburton, Reginald Hastings: Or, A Tale of the Troubles in 164– [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1850)
• Robert Plumer Ward, Tremaine: Or, The Man of Refinement [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1825)
• Joseph Blanco White, Vargas: A Tale of Spain [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1822)
• Edmund Yates, Castaway [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1872)
• Mary Julia Young, A Summer at Brighton: A Modern Novel [vol 1, vol 2, vol 3] (1807)

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