“A comprehensive and fascinating deep dive into the evolution of libraries… Bibliophiles should consider this a must-read.”—Publishers Weekly

Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age.

Join historian Abby Smith Rumsey for a book talk & conversation with Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, authors of The Library: A Fragile History.

REGISTER NOW

Many have decried the perilous state of the library in the 21^st century, a situation that was made only worse when public libraries across the world were forced to shut their doors in the face of a global pandemic. But across centuries of existence, libraries have faced ruin from war, fire, neglect, and dispersal—only to be reborn again.

In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen trace the extraordinary history of the institution, from the famed collections of the ancient world to the modern public resource of today. Along the way, they encounter the librarians, historians, readers, supporters and antagonists that have shaped the library and its offerings over centuries. Do libraries last? Register for our book talk to find out from the authors.

July Book Talk: The Library: A Fragile History
Historian Abby Smith Rumsey in conversation with authors Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen.
July 20 @ 9am PT
Register now for this virtual event

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Abby Smith Rumsey is a writer and historian focusing on the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in all media. She writes and lectures widely on analog and digital preservation, online scholarship, the nature of evidence, the changing roles of libraries and archives, and the impact of new information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity. She is the author of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016).

Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at St Andrews University, where he directs the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a database of information about all books published before 1650. A leading expert on the history of book and media transformations, Pettegree is the award-winning author of several books on the subject. He lives in Scotland. 

Arthur der Weduwen is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at St. Andrews, where he serves as an associate editor of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. This is his fifth book. He lives in Scotland.

The post July Book Talk: The Library: A Fragile History appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

As many of our readers will know, Section 512 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the 1998 law that established the notice-and-takedown system that protects online platforms of all kinds—including, libraries, archives, and other nonprofits—from liability for the copyright infringement of others. While the law is not perfect, the safe harbor provided by the DMCA has been important in allowing libraries, nonprofits, and other smaller participants to harness the power of the internet and play a meaningful role in the online information ecosystem. More broadly, as our friends at the Wikimedia Foundation have noted, “Section 512 is crucial to the functioning of many of the most popular and important segments of the Internet, and the creative expression that happens there.”

Unfortunately, Section 512 has been under attack for some time. In addition to various legislative proposals, the United States Copyright Office has repeatedly been asked to conduct work on Section 512 that could threaten the safe harbor status of libraries and nonprofits and the communities of their patrons and users. In 2016, for instance, Internet Archive submitted comments to the Copyright Office’s first large Section 512 study, as outlined in a blog post entitled “Save our Safe Harbor“—there, we noted the special importance of the DMCA to “libraries and other nonprofit organizations” which rely in substantial part on volunteer communities and which “are unlikely to be able to bring to bear the sorts of resources [available to] larger commercial entities.” Then again in 2020, as the Copyright Office kept working towards Section 512 reform, the Internet Archive (in collaboration with the New York University Technology Law & Policy Clinic) urged the Copyright Office to consider how changes to the DMCA could have “disproportionately negative impacts on public service non–profits such as the Internet Archive and our patrons.”

This year, the Copyright Office is continuing with ever more work streams on DMCA reform. And while the conversation remains dominated by the commercial interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, Internet Archive has again submitted comments seeking to correct this imbalance. Most recently, in a May 27, 2022 comment on the Copyright Office’s study of Section 512(i) Standard Technical Measures, we emphasized that—notwithstanding industry attempts to use Section 512(i) to impose burdensome technical mandates which could threaten all but the largest commercial intermediaries—nothing in the law “admits of a standard technical measure which would impose substantial burdens and costs on libraries [and] non-profits.”

The DMCA Safe Harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the ability of libraries, nonprofits, and others to develop public-interest-minded spaces online. And while much has changed since the DMCA’s enactment, it is as important as ever that our legal and regulatory systems allow library and other public interest spaces to flourish online.

The post Save our Safe Harbor, continued: Internet Archive Supports Libraries and Nonprofits in Submission to the Copyright Office appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

“Wilson-Lee’s pioneering study makes Hernando’s life every bit as compelling as his father’s. But that is not all: as we accompany Hernando on his various European journeys of compulsive acquisition, we are not only led through a richly evoked early modern world, but also prompted to reflect on our own data-saturated age.” —The Times Literary Supplement

The Internet Archive invites you to join us on June 28 at 10am Pacific for a book talk with Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library, followed by a conversation with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

REGISTER NOW

In The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the compelling story of Hernando Colón, who sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues, the first database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe.

Hernando held the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection.

Book Talk: The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books
Author Edward Wilson-Lee in conversation with Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle.
June 28 @ 10am PT
Register now for this virtual event

Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and a specialist in the literature and the history of the book in the early modern period. He is the author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, Shakespeare in Swahililand and Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe.

The post June Book Talk: The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

CALLING ALL COMMUNITY MEMBERS:

In just a few months, the lawsuit Hachette v. Internet Archive will be heard in court. In 2020, four of the world’s largest publishers sued our non-profit library to stop us from digitizing books and lending them for free to the public. The publishers and the corporations who own them, including News Corp and Bertelsmann, are demanding $20 million in damages and that we destroy 1.4 million digitized books. What’s really at stake? The right of all libraries to own, digitize and lend books of any kind. (Here’s what Harvard’s copyright advisor has to say about the consequences of our case.) Starting today, make a small donation through Gitcoin and have an enormous impact for the defense of Internet Archive, through Gitcoin’s quadratic funding.

Today, Gitcoin Grant Round 14 opens, supporting advocacy groups around the world. When you donate even $1 worth of crypto to the Internet Archive, it can result in $3-400+ from the matching pool. Quadratic funding rewards the number of community members who give, along with the amount. So many small donations can really have an enormous impact.

HOW TO DONATE:

1. First you’ll need to create or log in your Github account. 
2. Use that account to authorize in to Gitcoin.  
3. Choose one or both of our gitcoin grants here:

• Internet Archive
• DWeb Camp Fellowships

4. You’ll need a crypto wallet like Metamask or Rainbow Wallet with some Ethereum or other tokens.
5. Select how much you want to donate. (For example: .003 ETH = about $5.00 US)
6. Do you want to also add some money to the matching pool? Be sure to set an amount in that field as well.
7. Hit the “I’m Ready to Checkout” button.
8. In the drop down menu, pick Standard Checkout, Polygon, or zkSync.
9. Connect and log in to your crypto wallet to pay.
10. BONUS: You can verify your identity by creating a Gitcoin Passport via Ceramic to maximize the matching funds (up to 150%).
11. The more people who give, the greater the percentage of the matching pool we receive.

Thank you for taking these steps to unleash huge support for the Internet Archive, helping us pay the millions of dollars in legal fees we have already incurred. Your support helps ensure the Wayback Machine, Open Library, and all our games, concerts, books and films will be available to you for free for a very long time.

The post GITCOIN Grants: Donate a Few Tokens, Defend a Public Treasure appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Guest post by: Amanda Hill, Archivist of the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County, a member of the Community Webs program and a contributor to the Internet Archive.

One of the things archivists get excited about is the importance of ‘original order’. This is the idea that the arrangement of records by their creator has significance to our understanding of the records themselves. Wherever possible, archivists will try to determine the original order of materials in their care.

An item received at the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County in 2015 presented something of a puzzle in this respect. It was a scrapbook from the First World War, of newspaper clippings and other memorabilia which had been pasted into a printed book. The binding of the book had partially come apart and the early pages of the scrapbook had been jumbled into no particular order, with clippings dated 1917 mixed in with those from 1916.

Examination of the scrapbook revealed that its owner was Alice Deacon, born in Belleville, Ontario, on September 27th, 1899. She was the child of Daniel Deacon and his wife, Catherine Dugan. During the First World War, the Deacons were living at 107 Station Street, Belleville. They were Roman Catholics and Alice was probably a student at St. Michael’s Academy on Church Street.

Alice had three older brothers: James, Frederick and Francis (Frank). Frank joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force on March 23rd, 1916 in Belleville and it may have been this event which triggered Alice’s interest in the war. Frank’s service record is available from Library and Archives Canada.

The scrapbook mainly comprises cuttings from The Daily Intelligencer newspaper during the war, where Alice carefully recorded references to Belleville boys overseas, sometimes annotating the clippings with her own observations about whether a man had returned from the front, or which school he had attended.

Alongside the newspaper extracts are other more personal items, such as postcards, theatre programs, calling cards, invitations and ticket stubs. This page illustrates some of the variety:

Here we find an invitation, two pressed flowers “from ruins of a French village, May 1917” and a picture “off a box of chocolates Jim gave me for my birthday, 1916.”

Alice did not begin with blank pages: she used a copy of Richardson’s New Method for the Piano-Forte, originally published in 1859 by Nathan Richardson. In between Alice’s pastings, we can see parts of the text of the underlying book. Some of the pages still had visible page numbers, although most did not, but the majority had at least some legible words and phrases. This was the key to re-creating Alice’s original order.

We discovered that the Richardson book had been digitized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was available online through the Internet Archive.

This digital copy proved essential in discovering the original order of the scrapbook. Using the Internet Archive’s searching facility, we were able to locate the identifiable words and match them to the page numbers of the original book. Once all the pages were identified, it was a simple matter to put them back into the order they would have been in when the book was intact.

Alice’s brother Frank came home safely from the war and was demobilized on May 23rd, 1919. Alice worked as a stenographer and bookkeeper in Belleville until 1929, when she married Leo Houlihan in St. Michael’s Church. She then left Belleville to live with Leo in Lindsay, Ontario. She died in 1955 and was buried in the Our Lady of Mercy Roman Catholic cemetery in Sarnia, Ontario.

Her scrapbook arrived back in Belleville by mail, sixty years after Alice’s death. Thanks are due to the anonymous donor for sharing this glimpse into a young woman’s wartime life, and also to our colleagues at the University of North Carolina and the Internet Archive for making it possible to reconstruct the scrapbook as it was when Alice first created it.

We have mainly been sharing our newspaper collection at the Internet Archive, but once it was digitized, we felt compelled to share Alice’s scrapbook there, too! 

The post We Can Rebuild It: Using the Internet Archive to Discover Original Order appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

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 sliver of that archive is accessible to journalists and scholars due to the inaccessibility of video at this scale: fast forwarding through that much television news is simply beyond the ability of any human to make sense of. The small fraction of programs that contain closed captioning, speech recognition transcripts or OCR’d onscreen text can be keyword searched through the TV Explorer and TV AI Explorer, but for the majority of this global multi-decade archive, there has until now been no way for researchers to assess and understand the narratives of television news at scale, especially the visual landscape that distinguishes television from other forms of media and which is so central to understanding many of the world’s biggest stories from war to pandemics to the economy.

As the TV News Archive enters its third decade, it is increasingly exploring the ways in which it can preserve the domestic and international response to global events as it did with 9/11 two decades ago. As a first step towards this vision, over the last few months the Archive has preserved more than 46,000 broadcasts from domestic Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian television news channels, including (in the order they were added to the Archive) Russia Today (part of the Archive since July 2010 but included in this collection starting January 1), Russian channels 1TV, NTV and Russia 1 (from March 26) and Russia 24 (from April 25), Ukrainian channel Espreso (from April 25) and Belarusian channel Belarus 24 (from May 16).

Why preserve television news coverage in a time of war? For journalists today it makes it possible to digest and report on how the war is being framed and narrated, with an eye towards how these narratives influence and shape popular support for the conflict and its potential future trajectory. For future generations of scholars, it makes it possible to look back at the contemporary information environment and prevailing public information, perspectives, and narratives.

While there are myriad options for the general public to watch these channels today in realtime, there is no research-oriented archival interface designed for journalists and scholars to understand their coverage at the scale of days to months, to scan for key visuals and events and to comment, discuss and illustrate how nations are portraying major stories.

To address this critical need, today we are tremendously excited to unveil the Television News Visual Explorer, a collaboration of the GDELT Project, the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive and the Media-Data Research Consortium to explore new approaches to enabling rapid exploration and understanding of the visual landscape of television news.

The Visual Explorer converts each broadcast into a grid of thumbnails, one every 4 seconds, displayed in a grid six frames wide and scrolling horizontally through the entire program, making it possible to skim an hour-long broadcast in a matter of seconds. Clicking on any thumbnail plays a brief 30 second clip of the broadcast at that point, making it trivial to rapidly triage a broadcast for key moments. The underlying thumbnails can even be downloaded as a ZIP file to enable non-consumptive computational analysis, from OCR to augmented search.

Machines today can catalog the basic objects and activities they see in video and generate transcripts of their spoken and written words, but the ability to contextualize and understand the meaning of all that coverage remains a uniquely human capability. No person could watch the entirety of the Archive’s 6.6 million hours of broadcasts, yet even just the 46,000 broadcasts in this new collection would be difficult for a single researcher to watch or even fast forward through in their entirety. Television’s linear format means coverage has historically been consumed a single moment at a time like a flashlight in a darkened warehouse. In contrast, this new interface makes it possible to see an entire broadcast all at once in a single display, making television news “skimmable” for the first time.

The Visual Explorer and this new research collection of Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian television news coverage represent early glimpses into a new initiative reimagining how memory institutions like the Archive can make their vast television news archives more accessible to scholars, journalists and informed citizens. Beneath the simple and intuitive interface lies an immensely complex and highly experimental set of workflows prototyping both an entirely new scholarly and journalistic interface to television news and entirely new approaches to rapidly archiving international television coverage of global events.

Over the coming weeks, additional channels from the TV News Archive will become available through the new Visual Explorer, as well as a variety of experiments with the new lenses that tools like automatic transcription and translation can offer in helping journalists and scholars make sense of such vast realtime archives.

Get Started With The Television News Visual Explorer!

About Kalev Leetaru

For more than 25 years, GDELT’s creator, Dr. Kalev H. Leetaru, has been studying the web and building systems to interact with and understand the way it is reshaping our global society. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, his work has been featured in the presses of over 100 nations and fundamentally changed how we think about information at scale and how the “big data” revolution is changing our ability to understand our global collective consciousness.

The post A New Approach To Understanding War Through Television News: Introducing The TV News Visual Explorer & The Belarusian, Russian & Ukrainian TV News Archive appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

• Bandwagon: The Journal of the Circus Historical Society
• Console Living Room: Atari Lynx
• U.S. Senate – A collection of hearing videos across all committees from the United States Senate. 
• CDi Collection – A collection of CDi (Interactive CD-ROM) CD-ROMs from the 1990s and 2000s.

Books – 52,300 New items in May

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 89,325 New Items in May

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 92 New Items in May

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 112 New Items in May

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 807 New Items in May

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Netlabels – 223 New Items in May

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 110 New Items in May

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

The post New additions to the Internet Archive for May 2022 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Saturday, June 4, 2:00 PM ET
The New York Society Library, 53 East 79th Street, Manhattan
or by livestream

Register now for the in-person session or the livestream.

Join Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive for a special two-part presentation and
discussion on using this massive resource and on the societal and policy
issues affecting access to knowledge.

This is a great time to be an archivist and librarian—digital memory is ever more important and more difficult to manage.

Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public webpage ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By using mostly existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this, as well as compensate authors, within the current worldwide library budget. Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.
 
Will we allow ourselves to re-invent our concept of libraries and archives to expand and to use the new technologies?  This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our governments’ spending priorities, and in law.

This event takes place in two interrelated hours:
2:00-3:00 PM – The Internet Archive: What It Is and How to Use It
3:00-4:00 PM – Universal Access to All Knowledge: Technologies, Societies, Legalities

Register now for the in-person session or the livestream.

The post Special Event: Universal Access to All Knowledge @ The New York Society Library appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

For librarians who specialize in caring for music collections, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest technology and resources in the profession. The Music Library Association recently helped address this problem by making many of its publications openly available online.

The MLA donated 21 of its monographs to the Internet Archive for digitization and worked with authors to make the material free to the public under Creative Commons licenses. 

The new collection of backlist titles includes information on careers in music librarianship and history of the field. It also covers planning and building music library collections, which can be complicated and involve individual creators and small publishers, said Kathleen DeLaurenti, who helped lead the partnership with the Internet Archive in her role as MLA’s first open access editor. There are also valuable materials on music library approaches to technical services—everything from how to preserve music materials to how to bind and catalog them.

“Increasingly in librarianship, we have people who are being tasked to do this work who don’t have a specialized background, especially in smaller organizations, rural places, and public libraries,” DeLaurenti said. “We’re really excited to be able to make this content available to folks who may not have access to professional development in those spaces, and who may be looking for some materials to bolster their training and their own work.”

The MLA has been publishing new research of interest to music librarians since the 1970s and wanted to find a platform to make the information easier to discover, said DeLaurenti, director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Internet Archive provided the open infrastructure to share and leverage the work of the MLA, which is a small organization with about 1,000 members.

While the MLA began with 21 of the monographs, it is working to obtain rights clearance for an additional 20 titles and DeLaurenti hopes the online collection will grow. So far, authors have been excited that the association is making their work available as it increases access for scholars with the potential for more citations of their research.

The audience for the online collection will likely be “accidental music librarians”—people tasked with music library responsibilities who aren’t musicians but are looking for professional development resources in the area, DeLaurenti said, as well as individuals considering music librarianship as a career.

“As libraries are looking at what kinds of open infrastructure is out there and available, I think the work that the Internet Archive has done through COVID has really changed our perception and how they can work as a potential collaborator in that space,” DeLaurenti said. “We hope to continue different kinds of collaborations with [the Archive] in the future.”

LEARN MORE

• To browse the Music Library Association publications now online at Internet Archive, please visit https://archive.org/details/musiclibraryassociationpublications. 
• To learn more about the Music Library Association, please visit https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/.

The post Music Library Association Opens Publications at Internet Archive appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Last week, Knowledge Rights 21 released a strong call to action to ensure that libraries can continue serving their centuries old role in society of providing access to knowledge to the public. Knowledge Rights 21 is an Arcadia funded project advocating for copyright and open access reform across Europe.

In their Position Statement on eBooks and eLending, Knowledge Rights 21 explains that government action is urgently needed because the market for eBooks now operates outside of the current copyright law that permits libraries to acquire, lend and preserve physical books. Monopolistic behavior by commercial publishers including refusals to sell, embargoes, high prices, and restrictive licensing terms have frustrated libraries’ ability to undertake collection development, hurting those who rely on libraries for education, research, and cultural participation.

The Position Statement demands that “governments must wake up and act now before the rights of citizens to access information and learning through libraries are eroded any further.” The Statement proposes the following clarifications in EU law:

1.The right for libraries to acquire, preserve and make a digital reproduction of
an analogue and / or an electronic book / audiobook that has been made
available in the market under sale or licence;
2. No more copies than have been acquired under 1 above, shall be loaned to
members of the public at any one time. Libraries should have the right to lend
directly to users, as well as via other libraries as part of interlibrary loan;
3. Neither contracts nor technical protection measures shall be enforceable to
prevent this;
4. Any loans made under this shall require the payment of [Public Lending Right] monies by public libraries in line with existing practice with paper and or audiobooks.

The Internet Archive agrees that action on this issue is important and necessary. We are defending these principles in US court, in the lawsuit brought by four of the world’s largest publishers over our controlled digital lending program. We look forward to working with Knowledge Rights 21 and the library community “to help libraries not only to survive, but also to flourish” as the EU Court of Justice said in its landmark case supporting eBook lending by libraries.

The post Knowledge Rights 21 Calls for Action on Library Rights appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

The short answer to this question from a report recently published by IFLA appears to be: not very well at all. The report documents a worldwide survey of 114 libraries, 83% of which said they had copyright-related challenges providing materials during pandemic-related facility closures. The report also provides direct quotes from a series of interviews of library professionals, discussing the challenges they faced and often how difficult digital access to necessary materials such as textbooks has been throughout the last two years. As one librarian from the United States explains:

“Times were tough. We were scrambling and worried about so many things – including the health and safety of our students, faculty and colleagues – and trying to spin up as much as possible in the way of service. There are certainly some vendors that we personally like the interactions with, but it felt to me like the publishers saw this as an opportunity just to make more money and not really an opportunity to build stronger connections with us and our library. They offered free things for a very limited period of time.“

The report is well worth reading in its 22-page entirety. You can find it here.

The post Recent Report from IFLA: How well did copyright laws serve libraries during COVID-19? appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Albert Wan ran Bleak House Books, an independent bookstore in Hong Kong, for nearly five years, before closing it in late 2021. The changing political climate and crackdown on dissent within Hong Kong made life too uncertain for Wan, his wife and two children. 

As they were preparing to move, Wan packed a box of books at risk of being purged by the government. He brought them on a plane back to the United States in January and donated them to the Internet Archive for preservation. 

The collection includes books about the pro-democracy protests of 2019—some photography books; another was a limited edition book of essays by young journalists who covered the event. There was a book about the Tiananmen Square massacre and volumes about Hong Kong politics, culture and history—most written in Chinese. 

“In Hong Kong, because the government is restricting and policing speech in a way that is even causing libraries to remove books from shelves, I thought that it would be good to digitize books about Hong Kong that might be in danger of disappearing entirely,” Wan said.

Hearing that Bleak House Books would be shutting its doors, the Internet Archive reached out and offered to digitize its remaining books. As it happens, Wan said his inventory was dwindling quickly. So, he gathered contributions from others, and along with some from his own collection, donated about thirty books and some periodicals to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization. Wan said he was amazed at how flexible and open the Archive was in the process, assisting with shipping and scanning the materials at no cost to him. (See Hong Kong Community Collection.)

Now, Wan wants others to do the same.

“There are still titles out there that have never been digitized and might be on the radar for being purged or sort of hidden from public view,” Wan said. “The hope is that more people would contribute and donate those kinds of books to the Archive and have them digitized so that people still have access to them.”

Do you have books you’d like to donate to the Internet Archive? Learn more.

Wan said he likes how the Internet Archive operates using controlled digital lending (CDL) where the items can be borrowed one at time, not infringing on the rights of the authors, while providing broad public access.

Before his family moved to Hong Kong for his wife’s university teaching job, Wan was a civil rights and criminal defense attorney in private practice. Now, they are all getting settled in Rochester, New York, where Wan plans to open another bookshop.

The post Preserving Pro-Democracy Books From Shuttered Hong Kong Bookstore appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Calling all SF Cineastes and Archivists!

LOST LANDSCAPES is BACK!! With BBQ and live music too!

Come join the fun this Memorial Day and hang out with us at the Internet Archive.

$1 hotdogs, live music by the Traveling Wilburys Revue then onto a screening of Prelinger Archives’ “Lost Landscapes: Earth, Fire, Air, Water: California Infrastructures“.

Date: Monday, May 30, 2022
When: 5:30 PM BBQ – 6:30 PM Live Music – 8:15 PM Film Screening
Where: 300 Funston Ave., San Francisco, CA
Cost: $15.00

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

The post Memorial Day BBQ, Live Music and Lost Landscapes at the Internet Archive – Monday May 30, 2022 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

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 Social Media?” about the opportunities and dangers ahead. The webinar is part of a series of six workshops, “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web.” 

Watch the session recording:

The session featured founders of some of the top decentralized social media networks including Jay Graber, chief executive officer of R&D project Bluesky, Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of Matrix, and Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse. Unlike Twitter, Facebook or Slack, Matrix and Manyverse have no central controlling entity. Instead the peer-to-peer networks shift power to the users and protect privacy. 

If Twitter is indeed bought and people are disappointed with the changes, the speakers expressed hope that the public will consider other social networks. “A crisis of this type means that people start installing Manyverse and other alternatives,” Staltz said. “The opportunity side is clear.” Still in the transition period if other platforms are not ready, there is some risk that users will feel stuck and not switch, he added.

Hodgson said there are reasons to be both optimistic and pessimistic about Musk purchasing Twitter. The hope is that he will use his powers for good, making it available to everybody and empowering people to block the content they don’t want to see. The risk is with no moderation, Hodgson said, people will be obnoxious to one another without sufficient controls to filter, and the system will melt down. “It’s certainly got potential to be an experiment. I’m cautiously optimistic on it,” he said.

People who work in decentralized tech recognize the risk that comes when one person can control a network and act for good or bad, Graber said. “This turn of events demonstrates that social networks that are centralized can change very quickly,” she said. “Those changes can potentially disrupt or drastically alter people’s identity, relationships, and the content that they put on there over the years. This highlights the necessity for transition to a protocol-based ecosystem.” 

When a platform is user-controlled, it is resilient to disruptive change, Graber said. Decentralization enables immutability so change is hard and is a slow process that requires a lot of people to agree, added Staltz.

The three leaders spoke about how decentralized networks provide a sustainable alternative and are gaining traction. Unlike major players that own user data and monetize personal information, decentralized networks are controlled by users and information lives in many different places.

“Society as a whole is facing a lot of crises,” Graber said. “We have the ability to, as a collective intelligence, to investigate a lot of directions at once. But we don’t actually have the free ability to fully do this in our current social architecture…if you decentralize, you get the ability to innovate and explore many more directions at once. And all the parts get more freedom and autonomy.”

Decentralized social media is structured to change the balance of power, added Hanamura: “In this moment, we want you to know that you have the power. You can take back the power, but you have to understand it and understand your responsibility.”

The webinar was co-sponsored by DWeb and Library Futures, and presented by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO).

The next event in the series, Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse and the “Next Big Thing,” will be held Thursday, May 26 at 4-5 p.m.EST, Register here

The post Goodbye Facebook. Hello Decentralized Social Media? appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Join us on Tuesday, May 31st at 6pm PT / 9pm ET for a fireside chat with Congressman Ro Khanna in conversation with Harvard Professor and author Lawrence Lessig to discuss Rep. Khanna’s book, Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.

In the Bay Area? You can join us at our San Francisco headquarters in person! Otherwise, tune in via Zoom. REGISTER NOW! Please note that our in-person seating is limited, so act fast to secure your spot.

You can reserve a copy of the book from our local bookseller, The Booksmith, by choosing the Add-On in the tickets section if you want to pick up your copy in person. Or if you want to order online and have the book shipped to your home, order here.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In the digital age, unequal access to technology and the revenue it creates is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States. There is an economic gulf between those who have struck gold in the tech industry and those left behind by the digital revolution; a geographic divide between those in the coastal tech industry and those in the heartland whose jobs have been automated; and existing inequalities in technological access—students without computers, rural workers with spotty WiFi, and plenty of workers without the luxury to work from home.

Dignity in a Digital Age tackles these challenges head-on and imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people all across the country without uprooting them. Congressman Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley offers a vision for democratizing digital innovation to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities. Instead of being subject to tech’s reshaping of our economy, Representative Khanna argues that we must channel those powerful forces toward creating a more healthy, equal, and democratic society.

ABOUT RO KHANNA:
Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress. He has taught economics at Stanford, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration, and represented tech companies and startups in private practice. He is the author of Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two children in Washington, DC, and Fremont, California.

ABOUT LAWRENCE LESSIG:
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, where he was the Berkman Professor of Law until 2000, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

The post Fireside Chat: Congressman Ro Khanna in conversation with Larry Lessig appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

• Chris Cromwell Rare Reel to Reel Tapes – Rare and recovered reel-to-reel tapes from a variety of sources and preserved by Chris Cromwell. 
• 1940s Classic TV – Television from the 1940s.
• Game Shows Archive – A collection of game shows throughout television history, involving chance, skill and luck, usually presided over by a host and providing in-show commercials.
• Dutch Television – Television programs and videos in the Dutch language, or from the Netherlands.

Books – 50,109 New items in April

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 150,224 New Items in April

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 99 New Items in April

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 6,745 New Items in April

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 909 New Items in April

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Netlabels – 111 New Items in April

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 55 New Items in April

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

The post New additions to the Internet Archive for April 2022 appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Register now for our Library as Laboratory Lightning Talks session, May 11 @ 11am PT.

In this final session of the Internet Archive’s digital humanities expo, Library as Laboratory, you’ll hear from scholars in a series of short presentations about their research and how they’re using collections and infrastructure from the Internet Archive for their work.

Register now!

Speakers include:

WARC Collection Summarization

Sawood Alam (Internet Archive)

Items in the Internet Archive’s Petabox collections of various media types like image, video, audio, book, etc. have rich metadata, representative thumbnails, and interactive hero elements. However, web collections, primarily containing WARC files and their corresponding CDX files, often look opaque. We created an open-source CLI tool called “CDX Summary” [1] to process sorted CDX files and generate reports. These summary reports give insights on various dimensions of CDX records/captures, such as, total number of mementos, number of unique original resources, distribution of various media types and their HTTP status codes, path and query segment counts, temporal spread, and capture frequencies of top TLDs, hosts, and URIs. We also implemented a uniform sampling algorithm to select a given number of random memento URIs (i.e., URI-Ms) with 200 OK HTML responses that can be utilized for quality assurance purposes or as a representative sample for the collection of WARC files. Our tool can generate both comprehensive and brief reports in JSON format as well as human readable textual representation. We ran our tool on a selected set of public web collections in Petabox, stored resulting JSON files in their corresponding collections, and made them accessible publicly (with the hope that they might be useful for researchers). Furthermore, we implemented a custom Web Component that can load CDX Summary report JSON files and render them in interactive HTML representations. Finally, we integrated this Web Component into the collection/item views of the main site of the Internet Archive, so that patrons can access rich and interactive information when they visit a web collection/item in Petabox. We also found our tool useful for crawl operators as it helped us identify numerous issues in some of our crawls that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
[1] https://github.com/internetarchive/cdx-summary/ 

More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies

Michelle Alexopoulos (University of Toronto)

 Economic policies enacted by the government and its agencies have large impacts on the welfare of businesses and individuals—especially those related to fiscal and monetary policy. Communicating the details of the policies to the public is an important and complex undertaking. Policymakers tasked with the communication not only need to present complicated information in simple and relatable terms, but they also need to be credible and convincing—all the while being at the center of the media’s spotlight. In this briefing, I will discuss recent research on the applications of AI to monetary policy communications, and lessons learned to date. In particular, I will report on my recent ongoing project with researchers at the Bank of Canada that analyzes the effects of emotional cues by the Chairs of the U.S. Federal Reserve on financial markets during congressional testimonies.  

While most previous work has mainly focused on the effects of a central bank’s highly scripted messages about its rate decisions delivered by its leader, we use resources from the Internet Archive, CSPAN and copies of testimony transcripts and apply a variety of tools and techniques to study the both the messages and the messengers’ delivery of them. I will review how we apply recent advances in machine learning and big data to construct measures of Federal Reserve Chair’s emotions, expressed via his or her words, voice, and face, as well as discuss challenges encountered and our findings to date. In all, our initial results highlight the salience of the Fed Chair’s emotional cues for shaping market responses to Fed communications. Understanding the effects of non-verbal communication and responses to verbal cues may help policy makers improve upon their communication strategies going forward.  

Digging into the (Internet) Archive: Examining the NSFW Model Responsible for the 2018 Tumblr Purge

Renata Barreto (University of California Berkeley)

In December 2018, Tumblr took down massive amounts of LGBTQ content from its platform. Motivated in part by increasing pressures from financial institutions and a newly passed law — SESTA / FOSTA, which made companies liable for sex trafficking online — Tumblr implemented a strict “not safe for work” or NSFW model, whose false positives included images of fully clothed women, handmade and digital art, and other innocuous objects, such as vases. The Archive Team, in conjunction with the Internet Archive, jumped into high gear and began to scrape self-tagged NSFW blogs in the 2 weeks between Tumblr’s announcement of its new policy and its algorithmic operationalization. At the time, Tumblr was considered a safe haven for the LGBTQ community and in 2013 Yahoo! bought Tumblr for 1.1 billion. In the aftermath of the so-called “Tumblr purge,” Tumblr lost its main user base and, as of 2019, was valued at 3 million. This paper digs into a slice of the 90 TB of data saved by the Archive Team. This is a unique opportunity to peek under the hood of Yahoo’s open_nsfw model, which experts believe was used in the Tumblr purge, and examine the distribution of false positives on the Archive Team dataset. Specifically, we run the open_nsfw model on our dataset and use the t-SNE algorithm to project the similarities across images on 3D space.

Japan As They Saw It (video)

Tom Gally (University of Tokyo)

“Japan As They Saw It” is a collection of descriptions of Japan by American and British visitors in the 1850s and later. Japan had been closed to outsiders for more than two centuries, and there was much curiosity in the West about this newly accessible country. The excerpts are grouped by category—Land, People, Culture, etc.—and each excerpt is linked to the book where it first appeared at the Internet Archive. “Japan As They Saw It” can be read online, or it can be downloaded as a free ebook.

Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century (video)

Tom Gally (University of Tokyo)

Novels were the binge-watched television, the hit podcasts of the 19th century—immersive, addictive, commercial—and they were produced and consumed in huge numbers. But many novels of that era have slipped through the cracks of literary memory. “Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century” is a list of fifty of those neglected novels, all waiting to be discovered and read for free at the Internet Archive.

Forgotten Histories of the Mid-Century Coding Bootcamp

Kate Miltner (University of Edinburgh)

Over the past 10 years, Americans have been exhorted to “learn to code” in order to solve a series of entrenched social issues: the tech “skills gap”, the looming threat of AI and automation, social mobility, and the underrepresentation of women and people of color in the tech industry. In response to this widespread discourse, an entire industry of short-term intensive training courses– otherwise known as coding bootcamps– have sprung up across the US, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year and training tens of thousands of people. Coding bootcamps have been framed as a novel kind of institution that is equipped to solve contemporary problems. However, materials from the Internet Archive show us that, in fact, a similar discourse about computer programming and similar organizations called EDP schools existed over 70 years ago. This talk will showcase materials from the Ted Nelson Archive and the Computerworld archive to showcase how lessons from the past can inform the present.

Automatic scanning with an Internet Archive TT scanner (video)

Art Rhyno (University of Windsor)

The University of Windsor has set up a mechanism for automatic scanning with an Internet Archive TT scanner, used for the library’s Major Papers collection.

Automated Hashtag Hierarchy Generation Using Community Detection and the Shannon Diversity Index

Spencer Torene (Thomson Reuters Special Services, LLC)

Developing  semantic  hierarchies  from  user-created  hashtags  in  social  media  can  provide  useful  organizational  structure  to  large  volumes  of  data.  However,  construction of  these  hierarchies  is  difficult  using  established  ontologies  (e.g.  WordNet)  due  to the differences in the semantic and pragmatic use of words vs. hashtags in social media. While alternative construction methods based on hashtag frequency are relatively straightforward, these methods can be susceptible to the dynamic nature of social media,  such  as  hashtags  associated  with  surges  in  popularity.  We  drew  inspiration  from the ecologically-based Shannon Diversity Index (SDI) to create a more representative and  resilient  method  of  semantic  hierarchy  construction  that  relies  upon  graph-based community detection and a novel, entropy-based ensemble diversity index (EDI) score. The EDI quantifies the contextual diversity of each hashtag, resulting in thousands of semantically-related groups of hashtags organized along a general-to-specific spectrum. Through an application of EDI to social media data (Twitter) and a comparison of our results to prior approaches, we demonstrate our method’s ability to create semantically consistent hierarchies that can be flexibly applied and adapted to a range of use cases.

Web and cities: (early internet) geographies through the lenses of the Internet Archive

Emmanouil Tranos (University of Bristol)

While geographers first turned their focus on the internet 25 years ago, the wealth of data that the Internet Archive preserves and offers remains at large unexplored, especially for large projects in terms of scope and geographical scale. However, there is hardly any other data source that depicts the evolution of our interaction with the digital and, importantly, the spatial footprint of this interaction better than the Internet Archive. Therefore, the last few years we have been using extensively data from the Internet Archive in order to understand the geography and the evolution of the creation of online content and their interrelation with cities and spatial structure. Specifically, we have worked with The British Library and utilised the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2013)¹ for a number of projects in order to (i) explore whether the availability of online content of local interest can attract individuals online, (ii) assess how the early engagement with web tools can affect future productivity, (iii) map the evolution of economic clusters, and (iv) predict interregional trade flows. The Internet Archive helps us not only to map the evolution and the geography of the engagement with the internet especially at its early stages and, therefore, draw important lessons regarding new future technologies, but also to understand economic activities that take place within and between cities.
¹http://data.webarchive.org.uk/opendata/ukwa.ds.2/

The post New Speakers Announced for Next Week’s Lightning Talks appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

Guest Post by: Tricia Dean, Tech Services Manager at Wilmington Public Library District (IL)

This post is part of a series written by members of the Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity for community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices. For more information, visit communitywebs.archive-it.org/

I was excited when I saw the call for participants in Community Webs. While Wilmington, Illinois is a small, rural town (5,664 people), the thought was that we still had something to contribute. Most Archive-It partners are universities, museums and large libraries, and being in their company was a little daunting to me initially. Other institutions have someone who opens the project, and then it develops into a larger team project. Wilmington Public Library District (WPLD) has a much smaller staff; the project has been wholly mine, which has been both thrilling and terrifying. 

Wilmington is a small rural town, falling on the lower end of the economic scale.  Because we are isolated,the library plays a vital part in the community.  We offer the usual storytimes and adult programs, but also loan out hotspots and ChromeBooks. We have 45 hotspots and these are almost always checked out; some people are using them for vacations, but by usage it is apparent that others are using them as their primary means of connecting to the Internet. Internet access has been more and more important, but after the Covid-19 broke out, more governmental services went strictly online, making access even more critical – and to many who had not been regular patrons. WPLD is a hub for the community, offering computers, information, tax forms, and a place to come in and chat – even more important when we are trying to stay close and limit outside contact.

I am a Chicago native who went to Champaign-Urbana for grad school. I was a scanner for the Internet Archive for several years where I was privileged to handle some incunabula (pre-1500 items). I am the Technical Services Supervisor at Wilmington; primarily I catalog our materials, but I also tend toward Projects, from adding series labels to re-orienting all the calls in the juvenile non-fiction section.  I am currently going through our attic to help determine what we have (it’s a Mystery!). I’m making lists, and hoping to have items to scan which would be available online, in multiple places. I applied for the Community Webs program (with my director’s blessing) because I felt that it’s important for small towns to be represented in the collection of history. Only 20% of the population still lives outside major metro areas, but it is every bit as important to capture that life as it is to retain the history of large cities.

Wilmington Library joined Community Webs in the summer of 2021. After some technical clarifications with the Archive-It staff WLPD was set up. In considering what made Wilmington unique, the first link was to our library and social media pages. Social media has grown in importance in the last twenty years, but it became a vital link during Covid when services were otherwise unavailable. Wilmington Library YouTube videos, how-tos, crafts and storytime, stand to remind us of how we responded and as a continuing reference for parents who can’t get to the library. But since social media, specifically, is known for ‘right now,’ it lacks the kind of reflection over time that we can create through the Community Webs project.

We may be small, but we have a number of historical articles and sites which needed to be brought together. We want to reflect events that have been impactful to our community, from the explosion of the Joliet Armory in the 1940s to the continuing issues with the Wilmington Dam, which has proved dangerous, but has complicated ownership issues. I still have a long way to go; the projects (attic/local history/web archive) are all intertwined. Wilmington has the usual Community Resources and City Government collections in Archive-It. Going forward, we want to continue to develop our Wilmington History collection. We are working on local history and will establish a collection of materials from our attic and public donations. Our local paper has vertical files which could be a goldmine of information – again, on my to-do list.  We will be kicking off an Oral History Project, which will begin with a series of simple gatherings/coffee hours for our seniors, providing a place for them to gather, and a space to share their stories. I am hoping these will be in our Community Webs archive. Who better to speak to where we’ve been and where we are than some of our oldest residents?

Why is Community Webs important? Because it will help to remember when we cannot keep up with the information overload. Because there is so much happening that we miss a good deal of what is around us – or can’t bear to face it for long. Because so very very much of our lives are now online – and can be erased with a keystroke. Because we are seeing, painfully, that those who do not learn from the past will be/are condemned to re-live it. And, for Wilmington, I think it is important because so many of the voices and sites being captured are from museums, universities and large public libraries. It is important that we remember that we used to be far less urban than we are today. It is important to remember the smaller places, those who are too easily lost in the maelstrom of modern life, because to be forgotten is to be erased.

The post Preserving Wilmington History on the Web appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

At a recent webinar hosted by the Internet Archive, leaders from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) shared how its massive open access digital collection documenting life on the planet is an invaluable resource of use to scientists and ordinary citizens.

“The BHL is a global consortium of the  leading natural history museums, botanical gardens, and research institutions — big and small— from all over the world. Working together and in partnership with the Internet Archive, these libraries have digitized more than 60 million pages of scientific literature available to the public”, said Chris Freeland, director of Open Libraries and moderator of the event.

Watch session recording:

Established in 2006 with a commitment to inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge, BHL has 19 members and 22 affiliates, plus 100 worldwide partners contributing data. The BHL has content dating back nearly 600 years alongside current literature that, when liberated from the print page, holds immense promise for advancing science and solving today’s pressing problems of climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, noted in his presentation that Charles Darwin and colleagues famously said “the cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried on without reference to an extensive library.”

“Today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is creating this global, accessible open library of literature that will  help scientists, taxonomists, environmentalists—a host of people working with our planet—to actually have ready access to these collections,” Kalfatovic said. BHL’s mission is to improve research methodology by working with its partner libraries and the broader biodiversity and bioinformatics community. Each month, BHL draws about 142,000 visitors and 12 million users overall.

Most of the BHL’s materials are from collections in the global north, primarily in large, well-funded institutions. Digitizing these collections helps level the playing field, providing researchers in all parts of the world equal access to vital content.

The vast collection includes species descriptions, distribution records, climate records, history of scientific discovery, information on extinct species, and records of scientific distributions of where species live. To date, BHL has made over 176,000 titles and 281,000 volumes available. Through a partnership with the Global Names Architecture project, more than 243 million instances of taxonomic (Latin) names have been found in BHL content.

Kalfatovic underscored the value of BHL content in understanding the environment in the wake of recent troubling news from the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published by the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the impact of the earth’s warming. 

“The outlook for the planet is challenging,” he said. “By unlocking this historic data, we can find out where we’ve been over time to find out more about where we need to be in the future.”

JJ Dearborn, BHL data manager, discussed how digitization transforms physical books into digital objects that can be shared with “anyone, at any time, anywhere.” She describes the Wikimedia ecosystem as “fertile ground for open access experimentation,” crediting the organization with giving BHL the ability to reach new audiences and transform its data into 5-star linked open data. “Dark data” that is locked up in legacy formats, JP2s, and OCR text are sources of valuable checklist, species occurrence, and event sampling data that the larger biodiversity community can use to improve humanity’s collective ability to monitor biodiversity loss and the destructive impacts of climate change, at scale.  

The majority of the world’s data today is siloed, unstructured, and unused, Dearborn explained. This “dark data” “represents an untapped resource that could really transform human understanding if it could be truly utilized,” she said. “It might represent a gestalt leap for humanity.” 

The event was the fifth in a series of six sessions highlighting how researchers in the humanities use the Internet Archive. The final session of the Library as Laboratory series will be a series of lightning talks on May 11 at 11am PT / 2pm ET—register now!

The post Library as Laboratory Recap: Analyzing Biodiversity Literature at Scale appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.

The Internet Archive is proud to partner with Better World Books to support Ukrainian students and scholars. With a $1 donation at checkout during your purchase at betterworldbooks.com, you will help provide verifiable information to Ukrainian scholars all over the world through Wikipedia.

Since 2019, the Internet Archive has worked with the Wikipedia community to strengthen citations to published literature. Working in collaboration with Wikipedians and data scientists, Internet Archive has linked hundreds of thousands of citations in Wikipedia to books in our collection, offering Wikipedia editors and readers single-click access to the verifiable facts contained within libraries. 

Recently, our engineers analyzed the citations in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia, and were able to connect citations to more than 17,000 books that have already been digitized by the Internet Archive, such as the page for Геноміка (English translation: Genomics), which links to a science textbook published in 2002. Through this work, we discovered that there are more than 25,000 additional books that we don’t have in our collection—and that’s where you can help! 

Now through the end of June, when you make a $1 donation at checkout during your purchase at betterworldbooks.com, your donation will go to acquire and digitize books that are cited in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia. With your help, we can ensure that Ukrainian scholars and people studying Ukraine have access to authoritative, factual information about Ukrainian history and culture. 

Thank you for making a difference by buying books from Better World Books, and helping Ukrainian students and scholars with your donation.

The post Helping Ukrainian Scholars, One Book at a Time appeared first on Internet Archive Blogs.