Posts Tagged ‘Internet Archive’
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”*…
Long-time readers of (R)D will know of your correspondent’s affection for– and commitment to– archives and archiving: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, or here. As the new administration is sytematically scrubbing government websites of public data and threatening the National Archive, it’s a painfully-timely concern.
Digital pioneer Mark Pesce weighs in with a reminder that our archiving efforts should be broad– and that we shouldn’t neglect the personal…
When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life’s work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I’ve been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years’ worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I’d always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he’d also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I’d known Tony for two decades, but he’d never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It’s an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we’re no longer around to spruik them?
The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony’s other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won’t disappear completely.
Half an hour after I’d learned of Tony’s passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we’d call the “New Age” movement. Although the society’s star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
As Errol Morris has said, “People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.” The best defense is wide distribution (per the full Aaron Swartz quote, below).
Where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? “Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise,” from @mpesce.arvr.social.ap.brid.gy in @theregister.com.
See also: “Century-Scale Storage” from Maxwell Neely-Cohen and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School
Oh, and now is a good time to visit– and support– the Internet Archive.
* “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” — Aaron Swartz
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As we prioritize protection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1497 that Dominican friar and populist agitator Girolamo Savonarola, having convinced the citizenry of Florence to expel the Medici and recruited the city-state’s youth in a puritanical campaign, presided over “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the public burning of art works, books, cosmetics, and other items deemed to be vessels of personal aggrandizement. Many art historians, relying on Vasari‘s account, believe that Botticelli, a partisan of Savonarola, consigned several of his paintings to the flames (and then “fell into very great distress”). Others are not so certain. In any case, it seems sure that the fire consumed works by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other painters, along with books by Boccaccio, manuscripts of secular songs, a number of statues, and other antiquities.
“I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation”*…
Last Wednesday was a big day. Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain explain…
On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 [entered] the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They [are] free for all to copy, share, and build upon. 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025. To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.
The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life. “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”…
… When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1929 was a long time ago and the vast majority of works from that year are not commercially available. You couldn’t buy them, or even find them, if you wanted. When they enter the public domain in 2025, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.
The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. You could think of it as the yin to copyright’s yang. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But the United States Constitution requires that those rights last only for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! It is part of copyright’s ecosystem. The point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so.
How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just two examples from 2024. You may have enjoyed the film Wicked in 2024. Like many of its predecessors, it is based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books, and it offers origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. From the literary realm, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever—if he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation…
More about the works that have entered the domain and about the underlying copyright regime: “Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924!”
Pair with the analogically related “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia” from @molly.wiki.
And a gentle prod: now (indeed, any time) is a good time to support the Internet Archive.
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As we acclaim access, we might note that today is a special day for Baker Street Irregulars the world over, Sherlock Holmes Day. Sherlockian Carl Thiel (and here):
Morley, incidentally, believed the year of Holmes’s birth was 1853. Subsequent tradition has settled on 1854, largely due to the fact that in the story ‘His Last Bow’ (which takes place in August 1914) Holmes is described as a ‘man of sixty.’
Although Holmes’s date of birth is nowhere mentioned in the Canon (ie, all 60 stories written by Doyle), the 6th of January was first suggested by Christopher Morley (1890-1957) in his ‘Bowling Green’ column in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1933. Through the efforts of the Baker Street Irregulars, and largely the influence of William S Baring-Gould’s 1962 biography of Holmes (Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective), January 6th has become the traditional birthday of the great detective.
Morley wrote: ‘I have not looked up the data, but if, as an astrologer has suggested, Sherlock Holmes was most likely born in January, some observance is due. Therefore, if the matter has never been settled, I nominate January 6th (the date of this issue of the Saturday Review) as his birthday.
The Sherlock Holmes stories have, of course, flourished in the public domain for years…
In the 60 original stories, Holmes was depicted in illustrations as wearing a deerstalker cap in only four. Nowhere does Doyle mention that type of headgear.
image source
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”*…
From Chris Freeland the Internet Archive, an important new report…
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
• The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
• Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future…
“Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record,” from @chrisfreeland and @internetarchive. Do read the full report.
* Marcus Garvey
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As we husband our heritage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1665 that the oldest continuously-published newspaper in English, the Oxford Gazette, was first published. The following year, its name was changed to (it’s current title) the London Gazette, currently shortened to just “the Gazette.”
No longer a conventional newspaper (covering general news), the Gazette is one of the official journals of record or government gazettes of the Government of the United Kingdom, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. It has become a crucial British archive.
His Majesty’s Stationery Office took over the publication of the Gazette in 1889. Publication of the Gazette was transferred to the private sector in 2006, under government supervision, when HMSO was sold and renamed The Stationery Office. You can read the Gazette here.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library”*…
Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame? The redoubtable Robert Darnton reviews the equally-estimable Peter Baldwin‘s important new book, Athena Unbound- Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All…
In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization…
Darnton, who shares Baldwin’s goals of preservation and open access, unpacks the history of digital sharing/lending and of the forces massed to oppose it, and reviews the risks that attach, concluding in the end on a less optimistic (or at least, more complicated) note than Baldwin– a “dialogue” that’s enormously informative.
“The Dream of a Universal Library” (possible paywall; archived link here), from @RobertDarnton.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we accelerate access, we might send exquisitely-curated birthday greetings to Belle da Costa Greene; she was born on this date in 1879. A librarian, she managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Her life was a sad comment on access of another sort. Born to Black parents (her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first black student and first black graduate of Harvard [class of 1870], who ultimately served as dean of the Howard University School of Law), Greene passed for white. After she took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again and listed him as deceased on passport applications throughout the 1910s, despite his being alive until 1922.
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it”*…
In 1968, Stewart Brand and small group of colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, then followed it over the years with a series of updates, spin-offs, and sequels. An at-the-time unprecedented marriage of counterculture magazine and product catalog, it (and its successors) have been enormously influential. Now, as Long Now‘s Jacob Kupperman reports, the entire run of Whole Earth publications is freely available online…
When the Whole Earth Catalog arrived in the Fall of 01968, it came bearing a simple, epochal label: “Access to Tools.” As its editor and Long Now Co-founder Stewart Brand wrote in the introduction to that first edition, the goal was for the Catalog to serve as an “evaluation and access device” for tools that empowered its readers “to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”
The key word in all of that idealistic declaration of purpose was “access.” The Whole Earth Catalog did not intend to directly grant its readers this knowledge, wisdom, and mastery, but to provide a kaleidoscopic array of gateways from which they could attempt to find it themselves.
Yet for years, access to the Whole Earth Catalog itself has been difficult. 55 years on from the first publication of the Catalog, it mostly lives on in the interstices — as a symbol of a vibrant countercultural history and an inspiration for writers, designers, and technologists, but less so as an actual set of catalogs that you can read. The Catalog is not lost media per se — copies can be found in libraries, archives, and personal collections across the world — but accessing its trove of information is no longer as easy as it was in its heyday.
That is, until now.
on the 55th anniversary of the publication of the original Whole Earth Catalog, Gray Area and the Internet Archive have made the Catalog freely available online via the Whole Earth Index, a website bringing together more than 130 Whole Earth Catalog-related publications, ranging from some of the earliest Catalogs published in the late 01960s and early 01970s to 02002 issues of Whole Earth Magazine.
Within the site’s grid of publications rests a cornucopia of writing and curation, from in-depth looks at space colonies to ecological analyses of the insurance industry to reporting on the state of the global teenager at the turn of the 01990s. The Whole Earth Index is a work of love, a noncommercial enterprise designed, as project lead and Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw told Long Now Ideas, to “allow us to reflect on how we got to where we are and regain some of that connection to the countercultural world” of the Bay Area of the 01960s and 01970s.
…
For the people who helped make the Whole Earth Catalog and its descendants, the Whole Earth Index is in many ways a dream come true. Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly, who wrote for, edited, and led the CoEvolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, and later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, told us that he found “the interface to this historic collection to be as good, maybe even better, as reading the original paper artifacts,” adding that he’d “been giddy with delight in how satisfying this archive is.” The project’s model of “instant access from your home, for free!”, Kelly noted, was something that the team behind the Whole Earth Catalog could only dream of when they began their work.
The open-ended design of the Whole Earth Index is intended as a sort of provocation towards future works — a message and invitation in the spirit of the original catalog’s epochal claim that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The tens of thousands of scanned pages will live on the servers of the Internet Archive — as good a place as any to try and stave off a Digital Dark Age — but the ideas of the Whole Earth Catalog and its heirs will always live among those of us who read it and access its tools. What will you do with them?
The Whole Earth Catalog and its descendants are newly available online through the Whole Earth Index: “The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog,” from @Jacobkupp and @longnow.
* Stewart Brand, in the “Statement of Purpose” in the first Whole Earth Catalog
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As we treasure tools, we might spare a thought for a man whose work kicked in about the same time as the Whole Earth Catalog– and intersected with it in myriad ways (e.g., The WELL), Jon Postel; he died on this date in 1998. A computer scientist, he played a pivotal role in creating and administering the Internet. As a graduate student in the late 1960s, he was instrumental in developing ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series from which internet standards emerged, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for founding and administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death.
During his lifetime he was referred to as the “god of the Internet” for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this “compliment” came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a “professional,” and responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness: “Of course, there isn’t any ‘God of the Internet.’ The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.”
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