Announce-general News from the Internet Archive # 14

News from the Internet Archive

No. 14, 11 October 2013

(You’ll find information about subscribing and unsubscribing at the end of this edition.)

Celebrate at the Internet Archive—1024—Thursday October 24th

Internet Archive invites you to a fun evening in San Francisco on October 24th for our once-a-year celebration and announcements of new services. (And it just so happens to fall on 1024, which our fellow geeks will recognize as 2^10.)

http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/02/invitation-oct-24th/

We will drink and be merry with our friends, then gather together to tell you about the new steps we’re taking to guarantee permanent, free access to the world’s knowledge. Some of the things we’ll share include:

No more broken links. Help wipe out dead links on the Internet with new tools and APIs to replace dead links with archived versions. Down with 404s!

Quotable Television News. A new interface for the TV News Research Service will facilitate journalists, bloggers, and your news-addicted relatives to search, quote short clips, and borrow from a massive, searchable archive of U.S. television news programs.

Reader Privacy for All. We are helping to protect the reading habits of our users from prying eyes by increasing encryption and keeping less user data.

Bringing Old Software Back to Life. First steps to bring the software for Apple II, Commodore 64, et cetera back from cassette and to the web.

October 24, 2013
Free Admission, Donations Welcome
6pm-7pm : Cocktails and Reception
7pm-8pm : Announcements

300 Funston Ave., San Francisco CA 94118
415-561-6767

Petabytes, Gigabits, and More. Come see for yourself!

Please RSVP:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RvZ13sUvhfoY6CFmPKY19rTnvlPh464flNjLhrt6DXI/viewform

Archive-It and the international perspective

Archive-It, the Internet Archive’s web archiving service to harvest and preserve digital collections, now partners with 32 organizations outside of the United States as well as 249 domestic partners. As the organization has grown, so has the need for engaging in face-to-face dialogue with web archivists around the world to learn about their specific needs and challenges outside of the American perspective.

To that end, Archive-It, along with its partners at the University of Innsbruck, hosted the first ever Archive-It meeting outside of the United States on 20 September. Professionals from Austria, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, joined in a lively discussion that included:

—attention to challenges around copyright of web content and permission to crawl

—appraisal and selection of web content to be archived

—capture and display of increasingly complicated social media sites

—the scholarly and scientific use of web archives by researchers

—access and integration of archive.org web captures in Archive-It.org

—“making the case” for web archiving to an organization’s leadership

—planning for a follow-up 2014 meeting

Read more:

http://blog.archive-it.org/2013/10/01/our-first-international-web-archiving-meeting/

LibriVox celebrates eight years

In 2005, Hugh McGuire asked, “Can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?”

The answer is yes. Thanks to the help of many, LibriVox, the nonprofit organization he leads, has made tremendous progress in producing and distributing free audiobooks of public domain work. With over 7,000 audio books, LibriVox is one of the largest publishers of audiobooks in the world, and certainly the largest publisher of free public domain audiobooks.

http://librivox.org/

The LibriVox site has recently undergone a major facelift, making it far easier to browse and find great public domain audiobooks. In addition, the underlying software that helps thousands of volunteers contribute to LibriVox has been completely rebuilt. This rebuild project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and donations from the public. The Internet Archive continues to host LibriVox’s audio and web infrastructure.

http://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio

Thanks to the thousands of volunteer readers who bring over 100 new books a month by reading and recording public domain books in Project Gutenberg and other sources, including the Internet Archive.

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Read more:

http://blog.archive.org/2013/09/26/over-7000-free-audio-books-librivox-and-its-new-look/

Internet Archive in the news

Preserving the Web: National library to archive almost all Israeli websites

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.550894

How to get census data during the government shutdown

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/08/how-to-get-census-data-during-the-government-shutdown/

Please remove the article from the Internet… Not any more!

http://balticbusinessnews.com/blog/2013/10/8/please-remove-the-article-from-the-internet-not-any-more

Solving the Supreme Court’s link rot problem

http://gcn.com/articles/2013/10/04/supreme-court-links.aspx

Private Group Helps Fill Gap During Slowdown

http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/19190

Highlights from the Archive’s collections

The story of Mary MacLane (1902)

One of the earliest of US riot-grrl feminists, Mary MacLane was awesome.

She’s just beginning to get rediscovered. The story of Mary MacLane is her classic 1902 memoir written as a nineteen-year-old in Butte, Montana: drugs, death, bisexuality, the Devil and more.

http://archive.org/details/storyofmarymacla00macliala

More of her work:

http://archive.org/search.php?query=mary%20maclane

—recommended by Michael R. Brown

The Whistler

The Whistler radio series broadcast from 1942-1955. It’s old time radio drama at its best—each episode has a twist at the end.

Single episodes are available to download or stream:

http://archive.org/details/OTRR_Whistler_Singles

I very much appreciate the time spent uploading these episodes, and while there are some glitches (a few that loop back to the beginning at random points), it’s overall a very satisfying backdrop to working days and sleepless nights.

—recommended by Julia M. Brinckloe

Computer Magic: A Journey Into the World of Computer Imagery (1990)

Well, this is a tad self-centered, but my favorite link is the first Laserdisc ever stored on Archive: Computer Magic. It’s an hour-long television special on the world of special effects and animation that aired on PBS, The Discovery Channel and networks around the world. It might have just disappeared with my eventual passing since I have the master tapes. How many other works would be lost forever without Archive?! My appreciation level is through the roof!

http://archive.org/details/ComputerMagic

—recommended by Colyer Dupont

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