Thank you.
All right.
Thank you. We're fun.
We're going to play one more for you or two more.
Five more minutes. Five more minutes.
Yeah. Yeah. All right.
Let's do a Leskovachko or something. Some kind of chill.
Something groovy. Feel free to get up and dance if you feel like it.
Dance like no one's really looking at you, but that it will be on the
Internet forever until the end of time.
All right.
Why don't you gentlemen go and stand up and stage over there?
Yeah, over there? Is this better?
That was the plan.
Oh, okay. Cool. We'll do it.
We can do Min [...] Shavia though.
Let's do it.
Suvina El Shavia.
Go over here because then you won't have the light in your face.
Right now.
[...]
All right.
Suvina El Shavia.
One, two, three, and...
All right.
Let's do it.
Let's go, Leskovachko.
I'm kind of happy, funky and happy.
Hope it's setting the mood right for the bash.
Come on.
Yeah.
All right.
You see no one dancing, what's going on?
I don't want to lose their seats, you know.
Yeah, they want to lose their seats.
You can get up in your seat and dance in your seat.
We'll give you a prize.
If you're not going to dance, turn to page 25, Psalm 12.
One, two, three, four.
How do you do?
Excuse the position, just practicing my yoga.
Well, now that you're here, we may as well get to know each other.
My name is Peabody.
I suppose you know yours.
I guess you're wondering about this contraption.
It belongs to Sherman.
He's my boy.
Here, Sherman. Here, boy.
Shake hands. Say hello.
Hello.
Smart as a whip, isn't he?
So I built this for Sherman's birthday.
Happy birthday, Sherman.
Gee, thanks, Mr. Peabody.
Well, what is it?
Well, actually, it's a time machine.
I call it a way back.
We just set it, turn it on, open the door, and there we are.
Or were, really.
But all in all, it's just the thing for a boy in an apartment.
Hey, Sherman?
Well, I thought it was.
Of course, he's only a boy and...
Mr. Peabody, that's the nicest present anybody ever had.
Yes, yes, of course, Sherman.
No doubt about it.
Every dog should have a boy.
Ha-ha!
Hello, hello, hello!
Hello, everybody!
Oh, look at this wonderful audience.
I was told to remind people that if more people come up, please try to scrunch
into your seats, because otherwise we'll have people
sit on the floor and fire marshal.
So, hey, everyone.
Thank you for coming to our wonderful October celebration
here at the Internet Archive.
Let's see what kind of energy...
I know you're all just sitting there on top of a full of tacos and God knows what
else, but let's get that energy right back up again.
My name's Jason Scott, and...
I'm Tracy Jakewith, your co-MC.
Always like to ask this every year, how many people here, this is your first time
in the great room?
Ha-ha!
Well, welcome home, because many of you have been here in one way or another.
Behind you are machines that are part of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
When people are connecting to us every time you see something blink, that's
somebody out there finding out about somebody else's embarrassing Geocities page.
It is...
And of course, it is truly a great room, a renovated place that has the servers,
and we try to have wonderful events here.
This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive.
And if you've had the question that everyone has about what is up with the creepy
little statues, if you work here for three years, we make a little statue of you.
We don't have stock options.
So, anyway, so this is the 20th century celebration, where we are going to be
having some absolutely wonderful presenters tonight.
Tracy, what kind of people do we have coming in tonight?
We've got people from old-time 20th century books, software, film.
We've got archivists of all types, because we've archived the 20th century, and
we're going to bring it to you tonight with our 20th century time machine.
Just so you know, we don't normally have one of these.
This is a very special time.
We're so glad we have this.
It's a fully functioning time machine that is capable of bringing amazing figures
from the past to tell you about things that are going on.
And, of course, if you've been at the Internet Archive, you know we have this
beautiful panoply of materials on there.
We've got websites, we've got movies, we've got music, books, and software, and
we are constantly growing at the rate of terabytes a day, just pulling
things in to provide them out there.
So we're going to have some exciting announcements.
We're going to have some amazing things happen,
but I think it's time to get going.
So let's go wire this sucker up.
All right.
So what do you think, Jason?
Should we go back in time?
Should we try this time machine?
I think so.
Let's press some buttons.
All right. Let's do this.
Let's go back to, I don't know, 1912. 1912. That's a good time.
Right, good year. Things were going well.
Hope you don't get any diseases.
But other than that, the music was beautiful.
And let's summon Alexis Rossi, our director of access and
media, to come in and talk about it.
Oh, my God.
Time machines are quite a ride, you guys.
Just I'm going to tell you.
Good evening.
I would like you to close your eyes and listen to something.
I've got an old mule and her name is Sal.
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal.
She's a good old worker and a good old pal.
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal.
That's the sound of America in the early 20th century.
That was actually published in 1912, the year I just came from.
About three million recordings were produced on 78 RPM disks, just like the one
you heard, from about 1898 till the 1950s.
That's when the long-playing records came in,
LPs, the things you're familiar with now.
A lot of that music never made it forward into a format that you can actually
listen to now. 78 RPM disks are incredibly brittle, and I can tell you that
from experience for making this hat.
They break apart in your hands when you just picked them up.
That's all that happened.
No one has anything to play them on anymore.
And all of those millions of recordings that were made in the early 20th century
cannot be heard anymore.
That's why we started the Great 78 Project.
The goal of this project is to digitize as many of those three million
sides as we can get our hands on.
So the way that starts is someone donates disks to us.
And usually these are collectors who have spent 10, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years
putting these collections together.
And like I said, they're very fragile, so the first thing we do is we take
really good care of them.
We put them in new sleeves, we put the bubble wrap around them, and then they get
shipped to our partners, George Blood, LP, and Philadelphia,
who do the digitization process.
The first thing that happens is they get cleaned.
These disks are 100 years old in some cases.
They have dirt in the grooves.
They get cleaned, they get vacuum dried, and then the next thing that happens is
we take a photograph of the labels.
We preserve that photograph of the label in the digital
item so that you can reference it.
We also use it to pull metadata about the side that you're looking at.
And then of course we digitize it.
If you saw this outside, it was on the side yard here.
There's actually four tone arms on this turntable, and each one of them has a
different sized stylus, size or shape of stylus. 78s were not standardized.
LPs are, but 78s were not.
So we actually record four versions of it all at the same time so that you
can choose which one you prefer.
But the thing is, even though we've done about 35,000 sides at this point, and
we're adding...
Brewster loves the big numbers.
And we're adding about 5,000 sides a month.
This really isn't about big numbers, and it isn't about the cool turntable
or any of the other hardware.
It's really about preserving people's memories.
I would like you to think about Argentina in 1935.
The world was recovering from the Great Depression, which affected the
entire world, not just the United States.
Buenos Aires was celebrating the 400th anniversary of its founding as a city, and
the tango was experiencing a resurgence of popularity.
It was moving from working class neighborhoods and bars into giant ballrooms with
orchestras. 1935, Argentina.
A woman named Tina Arguimedo.
She was a 20-year-old newlywed.
She and her husband loved to dance.
And she started collecting 78s of the music that she loved.
She did this for 20 years.
When her husband died, she moved to the United States to live with her daughter.
This is Tina over on the left, her daughter and her granddaughter.
Tina had to sell pretty much everything she owned
when she came to the United States.
But she kept that music, because music is our memories.
Those things were important. 16 years
ago, she died.
And Lucretia, her daughter there on the right, didn't know what to
do with those records.
She didn't have space for them anymore.
So they went to a family friend, Deborah Simkovich, who kept them together.
She's also from Argentina. She's a composer of music.
And she decided she would take those records, and she would keep them
together and keep them for posterity.
Many years later, Deanna, that's Tina's granddaughter in the middle of the photo,
heard about the Great 78 Project.
She had never actually gotten to see her grandmother dance.
Because by the time Deanna remembers, her grandmother
had already suffered from a fall.
She had a spinal injury. She suffered from pain. She couldn't dance anymore.
But she did remember those 78s sitting in the living room.
And she remembered how her grandmother passed her love of music
down to her entire family.
So Deanna went to Deborah, and she said, I would like to take those discs and
donate them to the archive so that everyone can have access to that music.
Deborah agreed, thank goodness.
And today we've just started the Tina Argymetto and Lucretia Hug collection.
That's Tina and her daughter.
This is just the beginning. It's actually about 650 discs.
So we'll end up with about 1200 or 1300 sides from that in this collection.
And it's tangos, it's boleros, it's mambos.
It's all of this music that Tina loved to dance to and
that we all now get to benefit from.
It turns out we actually have Tina's granddaughter Deanna in the
audience here today.
I'm not sure where she is. And there she is.
We also have Deborah Simkovic with us, I believe, and she's here.
Thanks to them, we've actually been able to start digitizing these records and
making their families cultural available to everyone.
So of course our goal here is actually to do 3 million of these.
And this is a wonderful start.
We've also had about 20 other collectors donate discs to us, large collections of
things that we're going through right now.
We have about 200,000 discs already.
But this project is about to get a huge boost.
And I would like to bring out someone next to talk to you.
This is David Leonard, the president of Boston Public Library.
And I am going to change the date here to 1927.
So he can come and talk to you about all of the wonders.
Please welcome David Leonard.
Good evening everybody.
I am thrilled to be here in person at the true heart of the
internet here in the Bay Area.
The Boston Public Library was established by charter in 1848, a little before the
date that we're looking at right now.
But our mission was to make our information and resources available to
everybody, free to all.
The Public Library was a bold, groundbreaking, and outside the box idea to
improve education, cultural life, and society as a whole.
To propose something similar today would be absurd, laughable.
Why on earth would someone want to make society's knowledge store
available to just everyone?
This is like something from science fiction, some fictitious Jedi archive.
Who in their right mind would propose this open library, an idea based in civic
equity, instead of simply hoarding knowledge behind paywalls and access barriers
restricted to the wealthy and elite?
By these standards, thankfully, some of us are not of right mind at all.
Almost 170 years later, now in the 21st century, with a society and social fabric
that is as much global as it is local, the exact same challenges of equity, equal
access to information, and the pursuit of knowledge persist.
Perhaps even now are more pressing.
I'm sure you have your own particular examples of our society under threat.
Not only do we need a level playing field for everybody in our society, but the
true democratization of information and knowledge available to all is also at the
heart of opportunity for innovation and leadership in a knowledge
and service-based economy.
This library and principle of open access is both a public good and
a competitive differentiator.
It can be humanity's competitive differentiator.
The BPL is happy to celebrate its partnership with the Internet Archive that
now goes back over 10 years.
We count one of the Internet Archive's first scanning centers as a partner-in
-residence at the Central Library in Boston.
Brewster Kael and the Archive's leadership in technology, engineering, and indeed
in the area of copyright and first-use doctrine, which is the legal basis for
library lending itself, has in turn helped BPL itself become a leader in the area
of digital services, bringing its mission of free to all, forward in time to the
20th and 21st centuries.
And so we are thrilled to announce today our participation in Internet Archive's
new Great 78 Project and have authorized the transfer of 200,000 individual
78s and LPs.
These come from our Sound Archives collection, a collection that without this
initiative would simply remain in storage, uncatalogued and
unavailable to anyone.
This great project will deliver digitized, multi-format access to the musical,
vinyl legacy of the 20th century before it disappears forever.
It is the continuation of new initiatives such as this that allows the BPL and
its partners to scale the now shared mission of free to all.
Archives and libraries are the necessary public vehicles for the transmission of
information and knowledge from one generation to the next.
And so to all at BPL and our partners who have worked and continue to work
tirelessly on digitization and broader access projects across all formats,
paradigms, apps, mashups, visualizations, and to Brewster and to Wendy and all
at the Internet Archive, thank you for all you do and for inviting us to be part
of this celebration and this next project.
Please join me in a round of applause for all who give to
make this vision a reality.
Brewster Cowell.
I want to say thank you very much to David Leonard and the Boston
Public Library. Let's give it up for them.
They're completely great.
And for recognition of all of the work that they've done over the years, we'd
like to present the 2017 Internet Archive Hero Award to the Boston Public Library
to David Leonard.
Brewster, thank you so much. This is a great honor for all of us.
Well, I'd like to say a little bit about the Boston Public Library. If you go
there, please do. It's Copley Square in Boston.
And I am inspired every time I walk through the doors because carved above the
door is free to all, which is a pretty darn great motto to live by.
And thank you to the Boston Public Library for bringing that very much to life.
Nope, nope, nope. You get to stay up here. No way.
The Boston Public Library is the first library to go and digitize a full
presidential library and make it publicly available with no restrictions at all.
It's the John Quincy Adams Library and made it available on the net.
They were the first library to go and digitize and lend modern books, to go and
take in-copyright books, digitize them, and lend them to their patrons
and make that available.
And that was six years ago and really leading the way.
And also, they're now the first public library to go and build a full audio
collection and put that as online as we're allowed to do.
And this is why I'd say it's a really good day to have the Internet Herald Art go
to the Boston Public Library.
And I'd like to say a little bit about what exactly this is.
So this is a sculpture that's made by Jeremiah Jenkins, who has been
an archive Internet artist in residence over the last year.
And he's been wrestling with the whole idea of permanence in the digital age.
How do you go and write on a medium like the World Wide Web, which has an average
life of 100 days before a web page is either changed or deleted, and how do you
make it last a long time?
And he thought about mediums that did last a long time. For
instance, cuneiform tablets.
We have them from the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, from thousands
of years ago, and they're still living.
So what he did is he took important web pages and he put them in clay.
This is the Boston Public Library's homepage cast into clay
to be able to make it so that when we are the ancients that the people
will be able to see what it is.
And he's gone the extra mile of not just having it in
an ice plaque that'll be above ground.
He's gone and dug a hole and buried it in the desert.
And he's assured me that he's done it above the future sea level.
So I think this is an appropriate casting in stone of some of the accomplishments
of the Boston Public Library. Thank you very much.
Well, if we're going to build a time machine for the 21st century people to
understand and be able to run around in the 20th century, we're going to have to
bring all sorts of things online.
We've got music coming online from the first half of the 20th century, but what
about books? How are we going to get books online?
Well, we've got a couple approaches towards bringing the 20th century online and
I'd like to go over one of them.
And to do this, we're going to have to change the time machine one more time.
We're now in 1942 and the idea is to bring books to
the time machine so that people can experience it as it was.
How do we go and make it so we have books available to all?
Well, one of the things that's holding us back in the library world of going and
making it so that anybody can go and transport themselves back in time
into the 20th century is copyright.
The copyright, which is meant to be a balance and to go and protect and encourage
authorship and publishing, has actually gone and been used to make it so that we
can't make access to certain things that long should have
been accessible by anybody.
But let's go and sort of look at a little bit why we're here.
Well, in the Constitution, there's a carve out that says, yes, publishers,
authors can go and make works available and it's protected for a limited amount
of time to be able to go and have this privilege of government protection
to go and make their works publicly available.
Limited time and what limited time meant to Ben Franklin and the founders
when they cast it into law was 14 years renewable once.
So you'd have 14 years to go in and exploit your works and then it goes into the
public domain unless you wanted another 14 years and then you get that.
So if we were to roll that forward till now, we would have copyright such that
almost everything in the 20th century would be public domain. Public domain would
mean that you could build on it. You could reuse it.
You could make plays out of novels.
You could translate it into other languages. You could read it for free. You
could be living in that way.
But that isn't what happened over the course of the last couple centuries. There
have been powerful forces by powerful people, including this man, Jack Flinty, to
go and make it so that the copyright term is longer and longer.
Therefore, the point of copyright has been receding. And so the
law was changed in 1976 that basically dialed back copyright such
that it went back to 1923.
So from 1923 and back, it's out of copyright and public domain. Therefore, we can
have it available to anybody in the 21st century. But beyond that, there are
restrictions and there are issues and there's ways that we have to work around to
try to get things out there.
And that wouldn't be so bad if copyright would stay a limited term and we could
year by year be getting more works into the public domain. But it's been like
Groundhog Day where there isn't new public domain works coming into
the public domain.
And the reason why that is, is there has been some forces afoot. Sonny Bono was a
pop star in the 1960s and he got elected into the House of Representatives in the
1970s. And he had a point of view that his wife stated was
he wanted copyright to last forever.
Well, it couldn't do that because it's a limited term. But they did make a
copyright term extension that his wife named after him, the Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act, which basically made it so that for another 20 years, there
wouldn't be new books being put into the public domain each year.
So you'd basically go around, another year would go by, and we'd still be living
the same public domain books. It wouldn't move forward. It would be Groundhog
Day. This struck some people as not the right thing. For instance, Harvard
Professor Larry Lessig, who thought this was unnecessary
to encourage new people to do this and ridiculous.
And so he took it to court lawsuit to go and say that this was unconstitutional.
And it went up the chain until it got to the Supreme Court. We even at the
Internet Archive made a bookmobile where we went and drove across the country
making public domain books from digitized books and
handing them out and giving them out to free.
And we made books in front of the Supreme Court as they were arguing this case.
But alas, we lost. And the law stood. And so there haven't been a new book
put in the public domain since I was an adult. It's been going on and on where
it's just basically stalled.
But that's not the end of our story. There's a wonderful woman named Professor
Elizabeth Townsend-Guard at Tulane University. And she is probably the world's
expert in how long copyright lasts in all sorts of places.
And she noticed that in the Sunny Bono Copyright Act is an Easter egg. And this
Easter egg is a gift to libraries. It's a bone for libraries that if it's in the
last 20 years of copyright, it's kind of complicated. If it's in that period and
it's not for sale, then we can digitize it and make it available for
free. It's pretty cool.
So we started working with a couple of her students to be
able to take this period to try to figure out what in our collection could be
done. So Tommy and Stan are interns here at the Internet Archive. And they were
working with our systems to try to figure out how during that period of time can
we go and find books that are available.
And tonight I'd like to say that one of those books is this book. This book is
called Your Life, A Popular Guide to Desirable Living, published in 1938 and
written by my grandfather, Douglas Lertin.
I have one copy of this book and I have two sons. And according to the law, I
can't make a copy and give it to the other son. This doesn't seem to make any
sense at all about a book that's been out of print for 60, 70
years. This doesn't make any sense.
But now we can digitize this and we have. And it's now available not only to my
sons, but anybody that wants to know a popular guide to desirable life. And it
turns out that there are lots of other books as well that are in this category.
It looks like there are hundreds of thousands of books that are in this category
in our libraries to be able to do this. And as a way of saying thank you for
leaving an Easter egg in this law, we're now made the Sonny
Bono Memorial Collection.
As you may know, his pop best song was I Got You Babe.
And to sort of give an idea of what we're trying to do to this sort of Groundhog
Day kind of moment of the public domain doesn't move. I thought I'd play a short
clip from the famous movie Groundhog Day when Bill Murray is
struggling with some of the books that [... ] working on.
[...] think that's one of the same issues.
Okay, that was great. Next we're going to welcome to the stage, Rick
Praylinger. Rick is an internet.
Rick is an internet archive board member. He's a librarian. He's professor at UC
Santa Cruz. He's a writer, a filmmaker, and he's also a founder of the
Praylinger archives.
And we're going to welcome Rick from 1942, 44, excuse me.
And let's welcome him from the Time Machine.
Good evening, everybody. Thanks so much for coming and for supporting the archive
with your presence and your many kindnesses. As you
know, I'm a moving image archivist.
And over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so, I've become increasingly
interested in home movies. Forget about the rest. Home movies are cinema to me.
Home movies are the movies that most of us.
Well, I wish more people did, but most of us don't save them. You know, their
family encounters, their the home, their travel, their ceremonies.
We have perhaps a thousand Christmases and 500 birthdays. But the thing about
home movies is that they tend to be records of everyday life in an extremely
detailed and granular way.
They're records of the kind of everyday experience that we wish we could remember
better. So at the archive, we're scanning them quite aggressively and there's
already a thousand more online and many more to come.
But home movie makers also did something that we don't often think of. They were
witnesses to great historical events. And tonight, I'd like to show a film that
turned up in a completely unexpected manner on eBay.
Several years ago, I was trolling eBay late at night and I found a film that
nobody else was interested in and bid on it and won.
And when it came back, we put it on the projector and we found that this was
actually a rare and disturbing historical record of a very
dark time in our history.
This film was shot in Jerome, Arkansas in 1944 at the so-called
Jerome War Relocation Center, which was a concentration camp where Japanese
Americans were sent mostly from the Central Valley and where they were
incarcerated for three years.
As I play the film, I'd like to invite a very special guest to come up to the
stage and help talk us through it. Seb, would you come and join us?
I'd like to introduce Saab Masada, who's come all the way from Fresno to be with
us tonight. Thank you, Saab, for
coming. Should we roll the film?
Wendy called me and that Rick had discovered this film. I was so excited because
I'd never seen a film of our camp. This is the camp. It was built
in a swamp lands of southeast Arkansas and it was the last one to be built
because they had to clean out the swamp and the forests.
This is a picture of some of the agricultural crops that those of us in the camp
had to raise to feed ourselves.
The guard tower, which was pretty much abandoned as soon as we got
in because the government learned that we were not dangerous. This
is a graduation scene.
This was a 1944 camp film because the government was
closing it in order to make room for a secure prison for German POW.
These are pictures of trucks that our family had to ride to Rohwer,
which was the camp that we were sent to.
Here, these people are being brought to the train to be shipped to
the Arizona camp and to Colorado and perhaps some of the other concentration
camps to make room for the POWs.
I was watching this film and was really excited because I didn't know that there
was such a film that was taken of our camp.
This film apparently has not been seen publicly in 77 years.
This film will tell America that these concentration camps that we were in
was not a myth. They were real. So it's a historical record of the proof of what
had happened to 120,000 Americans and legal residents.
A trial was held in 1983, which proved
that the government had lied and that we were put into this prison for up to four
years, actually, based on a lie by our government and by General DeWitt.
A student yesterday at the high school in Fresno told me she couldn't believe
that this had happened on a based on a lie.
So how old were you when you were brought to camp?
I was 12 years old. And when I got out of the freshman in high school.
What was the lie?
Well, our culture taught us to not focus on any negative attitudes. And so
they kept us busy with all kinds of activities, schools, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts.
And so that helped us to survive. But the bad part of it was that all
these traumatic experiences were buried. And so most of my generation
did not want to talk about it.
And today, those who are still alive can hardly remember because
it's been buried so deeply.
And so we go to schools to talk about it so that this history will not be
forgotten. As George Santagliana said, those who forget the past are condemned to
repeat it. And we don't want it to be repeated again.
But the 2016 election, I heard echoes of what I heard in 1942,
where the politicians were using the terror of the fear of terrorism to
target the Muslims and people from from the south of our border.
Those are the trains that were used.
And those who were the last to leave, probably those who were being shipped to
rather by truck to rower were saying goodbye to their friends. There were over 8
,000 of us in prison in this camp in Jerome.
So we're going to this film will be available in full. You've seen five minutes
of a 15 or 16 minute film that will be available on the archive tomorrow. And
it'll be, I hope, a great tool for teaching and for consciousness.
I know you speak about the incarceration quite often, and I hope that this
is useful to you as well.
It will be. Thank you.
We were I'll never forget, May 16, 1942, because that's when the army truck came
into the front yards of a farm in Fresno and all nine of us, our family piled in
and we were taken to the Fersall Fairgrounds was suddenly turned into a prison
for over 5000 Americans and legal residents only of Japanese ancestry.
We were there for six months and we were shipped to Jerome, Arkansas.
It turned extremely cold and beginning of November. In fact, we had some snow
and the campus was still being completed and so our our barrack had no heat.
And my father caught pneumonia and 21 days after we arrived, he died in a
makeshift barrack hospital. The thing that I regret about that is we didn't have
a time to grieve as we were in our camps, our relatives were in other camps.
And we had no kitchen to invite people over. And so I just went on and played as
if nothing had happened because none of my friends knew my that my father had
died. And I really regret that that experience.
Yes. Yes.
Well, thank you.
So thank you so much for taking the trouble to come and join us tonight. Very
much. Appreciate it. Of course.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
I'm now going to turn the way back, turn the time machine ahead a few years to
1972 and introduce our wonderful director of partnerships, Wendy Hanamura.
Thank you, so for coming all the way from Fresno. He's 87 years old and he drove
himself from Fresno with his beautiful wife, Marion.
And thank you, Rick, for preserving this incredible piece of Japanese American
history. See, before I was an Internet archivist, I was the daughter and the
granddaughter of American citizens who were locked up behind barbed wire in the
same kind of camps that sob and Marion were locked up in World War Two.
So I know that we need these time machines because we can fast forward 50 years
when there won't be people like sob to tell their story and we will need to
remember these stories without the people to tell them
first person like you heard tonight.
And even though I'm a filmmaker and film is so important to me, the thing that
changed my life was not a piece of film. It was actually a book.
It was this book, Executive Order 9066. I found it in the
Glenview Public Library in Oakland, California, when I was in the sixth grade.
This book changed my life because flipping through its pages, seeing these
photographs was the first time I felt in my gut what had happened to my family
when I understood that that camp that they always talked about going to was
actually a concentration camp in the deserts of Utah.
This book changed my life. But here's the thing. This book was published in 1972.
It's out of print and very hard to find.
And now I have two beautiful sons. One of them is in college. His name is Kenny.
And last semester he was taking a class on race and ancestry. And he called me
and said, Mom, Mom, I need some information about what happened to Grandma and
Grandpa in World War Two.
So Executive Order 9066 would have been a great book for Kenny. But like so many
of his generation, he does almost all of his research online.
So for him and many others, if a book isn't digital, it's as
if it doesn't even exist.
Now, Kenny could have found just a snippet of this book in Google Books. And it
turns out that the only place he could actually check out this book and flip
through its pages is on our own site, Open Library.
But here's the thing. This is one of millions of books that are missing from our
digital shelves. Life changing books. Books that could mean so much to students,
to educators, to journalists.
Books that represent many, many voices not heard in this country.
That is a problem that the Internet Archive believes we can solve. We believe we
can fill the digital shelves with a missing century of books.
Now, how do we know that they're missing? Well, take a look at this graph. It
shows you all of our e-books, all of our digital books, by decade of publication.
We're doing okay up until 1923. You know why that is, because those books are out
of copyright. And then we're doing okay again starting about
1990 in the digital realm.
But in between those dates, there is a huge gap of knowledge. Why is that? Well,
copyright restrictions, e-book restrictions, lack of
resources to digitize these books.
And you know what, folks? It's not just the Internet Archive. Take a look at
this. These are the books in the Amazon warehouses. That same chasm exists
between 1923 and the digital age.
So where are these important books, these out-of-print books, these orphan works?
They sit in our libraries.
Here's what we're proposing to the world. We believe that we can digitize and
make available to everyone four million books, the equivalent of a great
major public library online.
We're calling this project Open Libraries because we and our partners believe
that we could create a network of digital libraries across this land offering
these books free of charge to people who really need them.
Now, this is a big project and it will take a lot of resources. And we thought we
had it because this year, the MacArthur Foundation offered $100
million to one organization that could solve one of the world's big problems.
1900 people applied, 800 proposals were judged, and they picked eight semi
-finalists, including the Internet Archive.
Now, we didn't end up winning the $100 million, but
we won something else. MacArthur challenged us to think big, and we did.
And we gathered with us like-minded people, the lawyers, the librarians, the
service providers, many of whom are here in this room tonight. They've flown in
for this week to be with us.
And why would they do that? It's because they know, just as we do, that for so
many communities, e-books can be a game changer.
If you're blind, if you're low vision, if you live too far from a library, if you
can't get there during working hours, if you can't afford to buy a book on
Amazon, having a library digitize their books and lend them free of charge
makes all the difference.
There's another thing. What about reader privacy? Librarians are staunch
defenders of your privacy.
Librarians won't sell your information to the highest bidder. Librarians won't
tell people what you've been reading. We have the chance to build a service
across this nation based on the morals and values of our profession.
And in this era of disinformation, this time of post-truth, I think we have never
meted trusted sources of information more.
So I want you to dream with me and think five years from now when we have
digitized and made available four million books. What will that mean for our
children and our children's children and for teachers who will
have these things at their fingertips?
Well, here's what I hope. I hope that my children will know what made me
tick. They'll understand the media that I was passionate about, and most of all,
they'll learn from the many, many mistakes that we have made. Thank you.
I'm going to try my hand at this time machine. Let's see if I can make this work
from 1972 to 1985. I'm going to summon up Jason Scott, our free
range archivist. Come on, Jason.
Hello again. Am I on? Got me on? Oh, that's fantastic. Hey, everybody. Hey there.
So, yeah. So I got a bunch of hats at the archive besides this one. So besides MC
and Loudmouth and just everybody's nightmare.
I am also the software curator at the Internet Archive. So what that means is,
you know, we have books, movies, music, texts, everything else, but we also have
software. And I think we're the largest software collection in the world. And if
we're not, show me it. I'll download it. Add it to ours will be the biggest.
So we have this software library, and to me it's not really enough to have images
of the floppy disks or the CD-ROMs or to have, you know, basically a bunch of EXE
programs. You got to access it. I mean, you go to the Internet Archive and you
look at a book. You read the book. You look at a movie. You, you know, see the
movie and so on. Well, at the archive, we have something called browser-based
emulation. So I'm very proud of. We've had it for a number of years now,
and it's been amazing to see.
Basically, at the archive, for many of our projects, tens of thousands of items,
you see something that's neat. An image comes up of what it looks like. You click
on it and you're playing it. We do that through a necromancy of JavaScript and
scripting that is just crazy. But it works. You click on it, boom, Apple II is up
there. Click on it. Boom, arcade game is up there. You know, we got arcade games.
We got consoles. We got all sorts of home computers, obscure and fantastic.
You're correct. So this year, you know, we've been working hard to add more and
more platforms. And as the platforms get more complicated, it involves more
people. So this year, we added this platform.
That's right, the Macintosh. One of the engineers behind the Macintosh is in the
room. I didn't ask him if I had permission to point him out, but I know you're
out there and I love you. So the Macintosh was a huge turning
point in computer graphics because people could now use a desktop metaphor in a
real mass way. We started having the mouse and menus be the way things were done.
I mean, it's the harbinger of the way we live now. Plus, it's the cutest little
thing, isn't it? It's like a little nine inch screen, black and white. Anyway, we
emulate it on the archive. And I want to quickly just thank all these different
people who have played a part. James Friend is in the audience to say hi, James.
And James is in the audience too. We've had people from all around the world
contributing to make this just happen. So if you go to the Internet Archive, you
can see these different classic programs. You know, you've got a Crystal Quest,
Shuffle Puck, Mac Right, you know, that hot game of Mac Right. And you can
utilize all of these wonderful programs. And we've done this before. And the way
we've done it before is what I call the shock and awe method. We just drop 1000
programs on you and hope it all works. This time, we've had somebody going
through personally. So thanks for Stephen Cole. He's been testing them and
working on them. Just a volunteer in London who's just been working to add them.
So if you click on them, they're pretty much going to work.
And for the people who are like, what, what my Mac? What? How's the airbook?
So just understand that this was what Macs used to be like. They were one bit
graphics on or off. But people could do amazing art with them. Right. So like
games like I see everyone's like Dark Castle, everything lights up, everyone's
playing Dark Castle, we'll still be there tomorrow, please don't worry. But Dark
Castle is one of those games. It was an arcade game. It was so beautifully done.
And that is all black and white graphics on a nine inch screen. And this fact
caught the attention of Adrian LaFrance at the Atlantic. And she wrote part of
her article in Mac Right on our site, so that she could talk about it. So it got
a lot of attention. In fact, it got the attention of the premiere of Canada,
Justin Trudeau, who tweeted.
So, so here's the thing, right? We all know we're living in the big dystopic
timeline, right? So the premiere of Canada tweets about this. And immediately,
there's all these people who are like, the head of state has said something, I'm
angry, which is fine. Like, don't waste your time playing games, save our
country, you know, just the kind of stuff people do, they whatever. But one of
the persons said, stop with the pandering. And I've been thinking ever since
then, to who? What members of the electorate are you trying to shift with
your love of Dark Castle? Strange
moment. So there's all sorts of programs in here, for instance, spelunks, which a
lot of people might not know, but it was done by the Miller brothers, random
Robin, who went on to create missed, which is the seminal program that many
people think basically cause CD ROMs to be accepted as a medium. So spelunks is
up on the archive, don't quite have missed a little bit. But it's still for sale.
It's really popular. But let's go a little farther than that. Okay. So
August 11th, 1987 was a very special time. Bill Atkinson created this
amazing program along with a bunch of other programmers and created something
called hypercard. Do we have any love for hypercard in the house? Any of
my stack bros and stock sisters in the house? Good, good, good, good.
All right. So here's the thing about hypercard. Hypercard was this incredible
thing that came out in 1987, where it was a combination art programming and
linking system which allowed just anybody to essentially, this is how we would
describe it now, make a web page before a web. You would have a thing where you
would be able to bring up a page, put text and graphics on it, click on it, and
be able to cause other things to happen. And it was really easy to use for web
streaming and [...] going on in the world, and people loved it. Academics loved
it. They could do teaching stacks. People loved it, they could do photo albums.
People could do weird jokes. It was amazing. Problem is, after a while, Apple
kind of turned away from it. And by the early 2000s, they just basically dropped
it as a product. And they had truly honestly dropped it as a product by the late
90s. So it was in danger, it's been in danger of disappearing. And as soon as I
put up the Mac emulation, people are like, oh, hooray. my
Mac, my HyperCard stack.
So I'm like, all right, let's bring it.
So people have all sorts of crazy HyperCard stacks, okay?
I will not apologize for the content of the HyperCard stacks.
This is true computer folk art.
This is, everybody got a shot to make whatever program they wanted to and make it
run, and they go in every direction of sadness, of
wonder, of happiness and danger.
It's everything they want.
If you're gonna get offended, don't stop by.
But if you're gonna be amazed, please do stop by.
So we actually have over 3,000 HyperCard stacks up now, and we're continuing
to add them constantly.
And in what I think is a beautiful piece of work, we had the 30th anniversary of
HyperCard in August, if you run the math.
Anyone who saw the other one, they knew that.
But Andrew Ferguson made a site for us, which is out there,
and it's called HyperCard Online.
That's what the site looks like.
All right?
If you are sitting around, and there are some of you out there who are sitting,
sorry if I'm gonna go geek here, with a . HQX or a .SIT of your old HyperCard
stack that you loved so much, drop it in here, and we'll put it up.
So we've had people putting up dozens of HyperCard stacks, and people are playing
them, and they're enjoying them, and they're living again.
Some of them are, like I said, all range of creation, but they are a part of us
from the 20th century that we are now making live in the 21st century.
It'll work sort of on your phone, will make it better as time goes on, but you
can certainly play it on your laptop or your desktop and be able to experience
the wonders of the Macintosh and the wonders of HyperCard again.
So that's the time machine that we're bringing to you from
the past to the future.
Thanks very much.
[...]
Whoa!
She's my boss, but I would have said it anyway.
Let's do it.
Let's bring out Mark Graham and Vinay Goel of the Wayback Machine.
Thank you so much, Jason.
It's really great to be here tonight.
You know, it doesn't get any better than this.
I'm in a room with friends.
I get to talk about one of my favorite subjects, the Wayback Machine.
And if it's, you know, any test of the people that I met out in front here, I
know that many of you two have a special place
in your heart for the Wayback Machine.
What is the Wayback Machine?
Basically, it is a time machine.
It's something that you can use to travel back and experience the
web of the 20th century.
You can find websites that no longer exist.
You can go to web pages that now are very different than what they
were when they were first published.
And we're really grateful for all of that.
You know, and yet here in Silicon Valley, we're pretty familiar
with the Wayback Machine.
But it wasn't until quite recently that it's become a bit of a household word.
And and that's well, because of one person, I think you might know who I mean.
OK, sorry, I know there he is.
And can I say, you know, that this new administration, they've they've erased so
many things from from the web.
And almost overnight, the Wayback Machine has become every journalist's
first go to tool.
And it's become a source of truth for for so many of us.
But listen, don't don't take my word for it.
Let's hear from something someone who actually
really knows a lot about the subject.
Six days before the election, November 2nd this year, a retired general named
Michael Flynn tweeted this quote, you decide NYPD blows whistle on new Hillary
emails, money laundering, sex crimes with children, et cetera.
Must read that must read tweet about Hillary Clinton and her
sex crimes with children.
That's now gone.
And now former general Michael Flynn, who believes stuff like that and spreads it
around, he's now slated to be national security adviser.
Michael Flynn this week tried to quietly disappear that tweet.
He tried to delete it, except thanks to the Wayback Machine.
God bless you, Internet Archive.
God bless you, Wayback Machine.
Thanks to them, nothing ever really disappears anymore.
So he didn't try to take it down, but he can't make it go away.
All right. Yeah.
God bless you, Rachel Maddow.
Yeah. And and we've been warned, right?
So in 1996, the Internet Archive started backing up the Web.
And at that time, the Web was two terabyte.
Two terabyte, all of it.
And how do we know that?
Well, because we brought it back for you here tonight.
That's right. The Web of the 20th century, Vinay.
All right. Very well done.
The so two point two terabytes.
This sculpture here is titled the World Wide Web.
Two point two terabytes in sixty three inches.
It was created by the artist Alan Raff, and it was commissioned and it's been
living in the Library of Congress for the last 15 years.
And we brought it back here to its home this week.
And you're now seeing it for the first time.
Wayback Machine today, however, is 20 petabyte.
OK, so how much is 20 petabyte?
It would take about 10,000 sculptures like this to equal 20 petabyte.
Well, gratefully, hard drives have gotten a lot more compact over the years.
In fact, a big chunk of the Wayback Machine is right behind you in those six
towers back there with with the blinking lights.
I say a big chunk of the Wayback because we've actually got it in other places.
We subscribe to this site, this concept of lots of copies keep stuff safe.
And so we're trying to help to preserve the 20th century and
keep it safe for future generations.
So over the past 20 years, we've archived about 300 billion web pages.
In fact, in the time that Vinay and I are up here on stage, we will have archived
about a half a billion web pages. 500,000 web
pages just in the time that we're up here.
We do this 24, 365 working to preserve the
web for future generations.
You might ask yourself, yeah, it's a lot.
So a lot of numbers, a lot of web pages.
But she might ask yourself, like, well, OK, well, so what?
You know, I mean, like, why is this important?
And, you know, as well.
But we've seen this last year, especially having a memory, a collective memory of
our of our consciousness is super critical because there are people
out there who are trying to erase it.
EPA data, climate change data, NASA science, all of it.
All of it is really fair game.
In fact, just last week, FEMA deleted information on their web page about the
percentage of people in Puerto Rico who had access to electricity.
Yeah.
And a few people noticed that we noticed that we, of course, had archives of
those web pages with the information and it got spread around on social media.
And this Washington Post story tells a story about how about a day and a half
later, that information was restored back to the Web.
Now, I don't really know what happened, but I like to think there was an example
of the Wayback machine being used to speak truth to power.
So this last year, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, we've
rebuilt the Wayback machine from scratch.
Last year, we launched a very rudimentary search searching for websites.
You can now access the Wayback machine from iOS apps and Android apps.
We've got browser extensions for all of the major browsers.
And we've worked with Wikimedia Foundation and that we've corrected millions of
broken links out there on the public web that otherwise would have would have
resulted in the dreaded 404 page not found.
But now they'll point you to pages preserved in the Wayback machine.
But we wanted to like we have a special special thing we want to share with you
tonight, and that is basically this is where we're introducing now the most
innovative evolution in the history of the Wayback machine to help bring the 20th
century into the 21st century.
So I'm proud to introduce now Vinay Goel, the senior engineer for the Wayback
machine who created and invented this new Web Search 2.0.
Thank you, Mark, and good evening, everybody.
The Wayback machine was released to the general public in the year 2001.
For the next 15 years, our users browsed archived versions of web pages by typing
in a URL into this box that you see here and then browsing archived versions.
But how about you when our user didn't know quite didn't know exactly what you
were looking for? To that end, we took a big step last year.
We released a version of Wayback Search where you could type in keywords and
discover the home pages of hundreds of millions of websites.
So here's an example.
So today we're happy to preview for you the natural next step in the evolution of
Wayback Search. We present to you Wayback Search 2.0.
With this new version, yeah, whoo, with this new version, you will now be able to
type in keywords and discover not just the home pages of millions of websites,
but also billions of individual web pages.
Well, let's give it a shot.
It's the turn of the 20th century and I'm looking for web pages related to
climate change. So I would come in here, start typing climate change, and then
I'd filter it to years 1996 through 2000.
It's a live demo, so wish me luck.
There you go.
Third time's a charm.
Search and here it is.
It's showing you web pages from the Wayback machine that were first that first
appear on the Web in the 1990s.
Many of these web pages are no longer on the live Web today.
A Google search will not return these pages, but here they are
preserved in the Wayback machine.
But wait, there's more.
For the first time ever, you will also be able to search through
billions of images.
In this case, billions of images related to climate change from the late 1990s.
Why stop there?
Search through hundreds and millions of audio files like this one talking about
how the small organisms in the Great Lakes are threatened by climate change in 99
or 2000 there. Video files like these QuickTime movies on classes related to
climate change. Other media files like PDFs like in this case.
The original text of the Kyoto Protocol for climate change in the 1990s, all of
this data at your fingertips now.
So this is a lot of data.
It's a lot of data at your fingertips.
So you might come across cases when you want to limit the results to specific
websites. Now, here at the Internet Archive, we
love animated gifts from geocities.
So let's try to find them here.
So I'm going to filter my search to just geocities. So I type in site colon
geocities dot com, followed by say snow globe.
And there you have it.
Fun animated images of snow globes from our beloved geocities.
So from climate change to animated images of snow globes, whatever your personal
rabbit hole, we invite you to time travel the web with us in the Wayback Machine.
Thank you.
Right on. All right.
[...]
have other Jason's been here?
What did they tell you?
There's going to be this election.
So, oh, hey, hey, it's me.
OK.
So are you having fun?
Well, you've been sitting through our presentation, some of our amazing things
that we've been showing you functionality with the Wayback
Machine, with software, with books.
This is going to be a great year coming up.
I promise it's going to be a really fun time.
So what's next?
[...]
The three main things, right?
We have dessert downstairs.
That's right.
Dessert from three twins ice cream.
We've got dancing outside in the back of the archive with DJ Fast.
Ready, spinning 78s and all sorts of great music.
And we might have exaggerated about those little
cards with the stickers you have.
We told you if you got every sticker, you'd get a special prize.
Well, everybody gets that special prize.
So go downstairs and claim your Internet archive black
beanie with a logo right in the front.
Let us let everyone know as you walk down the street who your favorite website
is, it's a very 1990s idea, isn't it?
It is. Let's go there.
All right.
Well, I guess that's really just that's it.
Has it been a good time for you?
Thanks to everybody.
[...]
Thanks again.
Go on out. Have a good time.
Thanks to everyone who worked on it here.
God bless you, Santa Rosa.
Good night.
Thanks for coming.