In an effort to help more people understand how Controlled Digital Lending works, the Internet Archive is helping coordinate two sessions in July. Both sessions are free, virtual, and open to the public.
Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending – July 13
The Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program empowers libraries to lend digital books to patrons using Controlled Digital Lending. Attendees will learn how CDL works, the benefits of the Open Libraries program, and the impact that the program is having for partner libraries and the communities they serve.
Implementation & Integration: CDL for All Libraries – July 14
For the second event in a summer series about the innovative library practice of Controlled Digital Lending, we’ll hear from libraries, consortia, and librarians who are exploring CDL implementations at their institutions and communities with hands on learning around potential and existing solutions. Learn about building institutional CDL policies, user experience for patrons and staff, technological platforms, and how you can get involved with the CDL community. Bring your questions, ideas, and be prepared to dig in!
Co-hosted by Library Futures, Internet Archive, Project Reshare, Open Library Foundation, and CDL Implementers
Much of the art gallery, artist, and arts organization materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web. These groups, like many in the cultural sector, have also been hit especially hard by the global pandemic, making their web presences particularly at-risk of being lost if they are not proactively collected and preserved.The creation of reference and research resources that promote streamlined access and enable new types of scholarly use will ensure that the art historical record of the 21st century, and especially of our current global pandemic, is readily accessible far into the future.
For this reason, the Internet Archive, along with the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), are pleased to announce our project Consortial Action to Preserve Born-Digital, Web-Based Art History & Culture. The project recently received a two-year, $305,343 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities. This award will support the formation of a cooperative group of 30+ art and museum libraries from across the United States to collaborate on the preservation of, and access to vital arts content from the web.
The Internet Archive has a long history of building and supporting collaborative communities and providing non-profit web, preservation, and access services to cultural heritage organizations. The multi-institutional initiative between Internet Archive, NYARC, and other arts and museum organizations will build on similar community-based archiving and professional cultivation projects in the Community Programs group, especially our Community Webs program, currently expanding nationally and internationally. Community Webs has received funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and IMLS to provide public libraries and cultural heritage organizations with services, training, and professional development opportunities to document their diverse local history.
NYARC are pioneers in collaborative web archiving and shared services, among art and museum libraries. NYARC’s robust web archive collections encompass art resources, artists’ websites, auction catalogs, catalogues raisonnes, and hundreds of New York City gallery websites. The Internet Archive and NYARC have partnered on work to build born-digital collecting capacity among arts organizations in the past, most recently in the IMLS-funded Advancing Art Libraries and Curated Web Archives National forum and related events. Through discussions, workshops and roadmapping sessions with leaders in art and museum libraries, a strategy and plan towards an inclusive, sustainable, cooperative approach to collecting and stewarding born-digital, locally-focused art history collection was developed, forming the basis of this broader cooperative effort.
Members in the project’s preliminary group of art and museum libraries will select topics and specific web content that is relevant to their expertise, will provide metadata to facilitate access to archived content, and will participate in planning and evaluation meetings, all while curating a valuable reference resource that will enhance their traditional collecting areas. The Internet Archive will coordinate communications, facilitate governance and collective curatorial activities, provide technical digital library and archive services, and help enable members to build and maintain discovery and access platforms, as well as facilitate researcher use of the collections resulting from the group’s work.
If your art or museum library is interested in joining this collaborative effort, please fill out this participation form by July 31 to join us!
The Library of Congress announced that Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, has been named to the Copyright Public Modernization Committee (CPMC), with a mission to help modernize the technology-related aspects of the U.S. Copyright Office. More specifically the CPMC will support “the development of the new Enterprise Copyright System (ECS), which includes the Office’s registration, recordation, public records, and licensing IT applications, and will be encouraged to help spread awareness of the Library’s development efforts more broadly.”
The thirteen member panel is composed of leaders from the library and university worlds along with representatives from trade organizations representing the recording and publishing industries, and corporate giants Amazon and Warner Media. Kahle, who holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brings decades of experience in digital library issues, and is an inaugural member of the Internet Hall of Fame. “I am excited to collaborate to help modernize the U.S. Copyright Office. Let’s see how far we can get,” says Kahle.
The first meeting of the CPMC is on July 22, 2021 from 1-4 PM eastern time and is open to the public, by registration only. Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter and Library of Congress chief information officer Bud Barton will provide opening remarks, and Library subject-matter experts will provide an update on the development of ECS and other modernization efforts. Attendees will have an opportunity to hear directly from CPMC members and participate in a live Q&A. The meeting will be recorded and made available for viewing after the event.
Centennial Hall Denver campus photo shoot April 2016.
photo: Mike Cohea
Johnson & Wales University started as a business school in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1914, expanding over the years to offer 80 majors on multiple campuses.
In June 2021, declining enrollment led JWU to consolidate, closing its North Miami and Denver locations. This left the future of the university’s library collection at those sites in limbo. To save the collection, JWU Denver donated 33,000 books—primarily from its culinary and hospitality programs—to the Internet Archive to be preserved, digitized and many will be lent digitally.
Merrie Valliant, director of library services at JWU’s campus in Denver, curated the rich collection, encompassing titles dating back to the early 1900s. The hospitality section contains books on all aspects of the hotel and restaurant business including management, leadership, and accounting. There are books on menu planning, food science and nutrition. And the assortment of cookbooks covers global cuisines and novelties, including Balinese and Indonesian food, an Antarctic expedition cookbook from 1945 with recipes for penguins and walruses—and even books on just a single ingredient, such as strawberries.
“We had cookbooks from all countries, all states and every continent. If someone were to look for an interesting recipe of Jamaican jerk or a good creole recipe from Louisiana, they would be able to find it,” Valliant said.
“The Internet Archive is going to keep it alive…It’s truly the library of the future…”
Merrie Valliant, director of library services, JWU Denver
With JWU’s 12,000 students only attending classes now in Providence, Rhode Island, and Charlotte, North Carolina, the library needed to downsize, and donating was the best option, Valiant said. In addition to the hospitality books, the donation included books on sports and event management, as well as books on criminal justice, business, law, history and fashion design.
The collection is clearly a treasure, said Liz Rosenberg, manager of donations for the Internet Archive.
“Merrie had been the librarian caring for these books for the past 20 years and she shared her hope that more students might be able to continue being inspired by the collection,” Rosenberg said. “Her dedication to the library at the Johnson and Wales Denver campus and her students was what got the Internet Archive so excited about preserving this great collection. We are pleased it can live on digitally.”
Pallets of books from JWU Denver staged for transport.
In May, Valliant, student workers, and volunteers helped fill more than 900 boxes with books from the Denver library. The 45 pallets were transported to the Internet Archive where they will be preserved and queued for scanning. “I had cataloged and touched almost every book on the shelf,” Valliant said. “It really was difficult to watch it being driven away. It felt like a family saying goodbye to a distinct part of their life.”
Yet, the books will have a future audience for years to come.
“The Internet Archive is going to keep it alive,” Valliant said. “It’s truly the library of the future where you can access it 24/7/365 when you need it. I think it’s wonderful that we’ve been able to contribute to that collection of information.”
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If you have a collection that you would like to make available to all, the Internet Archive would be happy to preserve and digitize your materials:
Check out our help center article for more information about donating physical items to the Internet Archive.
Watch the recent webinar about our physical donations program.
Last week, the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) voiced its strong support for the longstanding and widespread library practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). In doing so, they join a host of libraries and library associations in asserting the right of libraries to own, digitize and lend materials online.
IFLA is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to be able to provide digital access to library collections and CDL provides an effective, lawful tool for doing so. IFLA writes that CDL helps “to fulfill the mission of libraries to support research, education and cultural participation within the limits of existing copyright laws.”
IFLA’s Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, which was approved by IFLA’s Governing Board in May 2021, builds on the U.S.-oriented Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, which has been endorsed by 55 institutions and 120 individual copyright experts and librarians, bringing the discussion into the international context. IFLA’s Statement makes a powerful economic and legal case for supporting CDL in all countries around the world.
According to the Statement:
“Licensed eBooks have opened the door to a radical undermining of the traditional public interest functions and freedoms of libraries. These still exist for paper books, but with the advent of licensed eBooks, libraries are no longer free to decide when or what to purchase, with some publishers even refusing to sell to libraries. Controlled digital lending provides an alternative to a licensing approach, and so a means of redressing the balance.”
The Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program is powered by CDL and we welcome the continued and growing support of other libraries. As many libraries remain closed across the globe, millions of digitized books are still available for free to be borrowed by learn-at-home students and readers everywhere.
Internet Archive’s Community Webs program is delighted to announce a partnership with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to ingest metadata from the over 700 publicly available Community Webs web archive collections into DPLA. These collections include thousands of archived websites and millions of individual web-published resources that document local history and underrepresented groups. The Internet Archive has been a DPLA content provider since 2015, primarily contributing content from our many print digitizing partnerships. Community Webs will also join DPLA as a member and we are excited for this opportunity to add hyperlocal born-digital and web collections from public libraries nationwide into DPLA’s national portal to cultural heritage collections.
The Community Webs program was launched in 2017 to provide training, infrastructure, services, and professional community cultivation for public librarians across the country for the purpose of documenting local history and community archiving, especially documenting communities and populaces traditionally excluded from the historical record. The program is in the midst of nationwide expansion and currently includes more than 100 member public libraries who are collaborating with local organizations, movements, and groups to document the lives and accomplishments of their citizens. The program continues to add new public libraries and cultural heritage organizations to support and scale their community archiving and has an open call for applications in the US, Canada, and internationally for additional public libraries and local heritage organizations to join the program. Examples of Community Webs collections include:
Community Webs members have created more than 30 collections documenting local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including COVID-19 Coronavirus East Baton Rouge Parish from East Baton Rouge Parish Library and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s “Novel Coronavirus COVID-19” collection which focuses on “the African diasporan experiences of COVID-19 including racial disparities in health outcomes and access, the impact on Black-owned businesses, and cultural production.”
Community Webs members have created a number of collections documenting LGBTQ groups, events and other resources, including LGBTQIA/Hormel Resources from San Francisco Public Library and Birmingham Public Library’s “LGBTQ in Alabama” collection.
Members are also actively archiving materials on their local or regional culture, such as Kansas City Public Library’s Arts & Culture collection, which “documents Kansas City’s thriving arts community, including galleries, museums, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, criticism and art spaces.”
Many members have focused on documenting local social services or advocacy groups, such as Madison Public Library’s Racial Equity and Social Justice, Madison, WI collection of “organizations and non-profits that engage in public discourse on issues of racial equity and social justice.”
Working with a mission-aligned organization like DPLA and our shared values of collaboration, open access, and community empowerment made it an obvious fit for Community Webs member collections to also be available in DPLA. Some public libraries who are a part of the Community Webs program are also members of local or statewide DPLA content hubs, and already have digitized content available in DPLA.The partnership between DPLA and Community Webs will ensure that archived web and born-digital collections are accessible alongside similar digitized materials for seamless discovery and access for uses. Pairing Community Webs’ free archiving, infrastructure, education, and other services with DPLA’s aggregation tools, hubs networks, and its advocacy role will help expand national access and capacity for making primary sources, and a more diverse archival record, accessible to any online user,
“DPLA’s new partnership with the Community Webs program will help further our mission to provide free digital access to cultural heritage artifacts that inform a truly representative history of our nation, “ said Shaneé Yvette Murrain, director of community engagement for DPLA. “We are thrilled to be deepening our work with Internet Archive through a program so perfectly aligned with our organizations’ shared values.”
“Pairing the community web archives of 100+ public libraries and the cohort cultivation that are part of Community Webs with the national scope and professional networks native to DPLA is a perfect match. We are excited to expand access to these amazing grassroots digital collections,” said Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services at Internet Archive.
We are excited to be partnering with DPLA to increase access to these vital community history collections and look forward to building more integrations and furthering this collaboration in the years to come.
Our featured speaker at the June DWeb Meetup was Nathan Schneider, an author, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Director of the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is a leading scholar of cooperative enterprises and has analyzed how projects could put the second DWeb Principle of Distributed Benefits into practice.
Featured speaker, Nathan Schneider
A truly distributed Web will require different kinds of companies. Today, tech startups rely on types of financing that demand an “exit” in one of two forms: an acquisition by a bigger company or an IPO on Wall Street. Both options help drive us toward radical centralization of power, no matter how decentralized our technology may seem. In his powerful essay “Distribute Commons, Not Commodities,” Schneider suggests a new way forward. Instead of creating another top-1% who hold increasingly concentrated power, what if start-ups committed to distributing value to the community contributing to it?
At the June Meetup, Schneider described the idea of “Exit to Community,” and presented real-world scenarios where distributed benefits are working.
Watch Nathan’s talk here:
Lightning Talk Speakers
Guo Liu
Guo Liu, Co-Founder and CTO of Matters.Matters is a social network of content creators, mostly consisting of journalists, novelists, and critics. It’s a decentralized content publishing and discussion platform for creators to publish, manage, license, and monetize their work. Guo shared the lessons they’ve learned while designing and migrating the network to decentralized architecture.
Watch Guo’s talk here:
Ana Jamborcic
Ana Jamborcic, Product Strategist at Social Roots. Ana guides product direction with a steady eye on the intersection of business value and approaches to complex social problems that are innovative, applied, useful, usable, collaborative, sensible, and more.
Christina Bowen, Knowledge Ecologist at Social Roots. Christina integrates tech and human processes with living systems principles to support healthy teamwork and information flows that lead towards more sensible futures.
Watch Ana and Christina’s talk here:
Christina BowenSantiago Bazerque
Santiago Bazerque is the creator of Hyper Hyper Space, an open-source, not-for-profit effort to create distributed applications using web browsers as full peers. He discussed how the design concepts that inspired TCP/IP, the original internetworking protocols, can be applied to the design of dapps. He also shared his experience using the browser as a platform for experimenting with new dweb protocols.
Watch Santiago’s talk here:
Mix Irving
Mix Irving is the Senior Developer at Āhau, an indigenous knowledge management system, built in New Zealand, designed for offline, data sovereignty first. Mix dipped into the platform’s theory of change and gave us a small peek at the tech stack built on scuttlebutt, hypercore, and graphql. First generation kiwi, with roots in England / Scotland, Mix lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington with two small kids, a partner, and a cat.
Watch Mix’s talk here:
Vera Winters
Vera Winters is a member of Flancia, a collective formed to carry out social experiments based on input from its members. They use a platform they developed called the agora to determine the desires of the collective. Vera has worked in open source for over a decade and is passionate about decentralized systems and organizations.
The COMMUNIA Association is an international network of activists, researchers, and practitioners from around the world. Founded a decade ago, Communia advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to culture and knowledge. Now, in celebration of its ten-year anniversary, Internet Archive is pleased to announce that it has officially joined Communia.
At its founding, Communia issued 14 policy recommendations. Broadly speaking, these recommendations stand for a balanced approach to copyright that would help expand access to knowledge. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Communia held a series of events, and launched a new webpage, to reflect on these recommendations in view of the past ten years of copyright policy and to consider what the future may hold.
Meanwhile, Communia has continued to engage in the day-to-day work of advocating for a more balanced copyright. For instance, over the past several years, Communia has been a key voice regarding the European Union’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Like many others, we spoke out against many aspects of this new law. But the work did not stop there—as an EU Directive, this new law has to be transposed by each EU member state: implemented through passage of their own national laws. And because member states have discretion in how exactly to implement the directive, there has remained the important—but challenging—work of trying to guide its implementation in the best possible way. Communia took on this extraordinarily difficult task.
To do so (as they recently explained), Communia built a network of local advocates in each of the 27 member states. They then worked with these local advocates to try to guide the national implementations of the DSM directive so as to maximize access to knowledge and culture and the protection of users’ rights. More recently, they launched the Eurovision DSM contest, tracking the status of each member states’ implementation of the directive and scoring them along important metrics including transparency and safeguards for user rights. This is challenging and resource intensive work; as a result, the public interest often does not have a seat at the table. Communia ensures that it does.
So we congratulate Communia on its tenth anniversary, and are thrilled to support and join in its work. We look forward to working alongside Open Future, Creative Commons, and all the others who have made Communia such an important voice in the copyright community over the past decade and are sure to do the same in the years to come.
Image From Bühler, Friedrich Adolf, Filtern und Pressen (Leipzig O. Spamer 1912)
The Government of Canada continues to consider fundamental changes to its copyright laws. In its latest proposal, what’s old is new again, as Canada once more considers automatic content filtering online. Internet Archive Canada strongly opposes these proposals, and submitted a formal response to the Government explaining why.
Unfortunately, these are not new ideas. For over a decade, website blocking, automatic content filtering, internet bans, and other draconian copyright measures have been urged on governments around the world. With political leaders looking at large technology companies with a new eye, both the United States and the European Union have expressed a new openness to these previously rejected ideas. Now styled as attempts to reign in “big tech,” what is really at stake is the free and open internet, which offers so much to the individual user and makes websites like archive.org possible.
Fortunately, while the Government has outlined a variety of potentially troubling changes to Canada’s Copyright Act, it has also stated that “[s]ignificant changes” to Canada’s copyright law are “not presently being contemplated.” In the circumstances, Internet Archive Canada is simply asking the Government to recognize the tremendous significance of these kinds of proposals and refrain from enacting them at this time. Many others have done the same; indeed, our friends at Open Media asked all Canadians to voice their concerns .
Internet Archive Canada is proud of its history in Canada, and we have often lauded Canada’s bright and positive approach to copyright. We are hopeful that reason will once again prevail in the Canadian copyright debates, and that the Government of Canada will work to ensure good copyright policy and strong libraries in the 21st century and beyond.
The Internet Archive is seeking applicants for its next cohort of Community Webs! We are thrilled to announce that the program is now open to additional cultural heritage organizations in the US, as well as any public library or local memory organization in Canada and internationally.
Community Webs provides infrastructure and services, training and education, and professional community cultivation for public libraries and cultural heritage organizations to document local history and the lives of their communities. Launched in the US in 2017 with kickoff funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Community Webs began expanding nationally in 2020 with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Building on the program’s success and continued growth, Internet Archive is now supporting expansion of the program into Canada and to the international community, and is accepting applications for our next cohort kicking off in late-Summer 2021. The deadline for applications is August 2, 2021.
The program offers a unique opportunity for participating organizations to build capacity in digital collecting. Community Webs participants work alongside peer organizations and with their local communities to document the lives of their citizens, marginalized voices, and groups often absent from the historical record. All Community Webs participants receive:
A guaranteed multi-year free subscription to the Archive-It web archiving service, which includes perpetual storage and access provided by the Internet Archive.
Access to additional Internet Archive non-profit services, such as digitization and digital preservation, either for free (as funding allows) or at or below actual cost.
Training and educational resources related to digital collections, web archiving, digital preservation, and other topics, as well as access to a cohort community pursuing similar work and to networking spaces, events, and knowledge sharing platforms.
The option to leverage program partnerships and integrations to include community web archives in other aggregators or access platforms beyond Internet Archive.
The program currently includes over 100 public libraries from across the United States. These organizations have collectively archived over 70 terabytes of web-based community heritage materials. Some highlights include:
Archived web page: Reporte Hispano, April 6, 2021. New Brunswick Free Public Library. Spanish Newspapers collection.
Archived web page: KC Friends of Alvin Ailey, January 10, 2021. Kansas City Public Library, Arts & Culture collection.
The benefits of the program are wide-ranging and impactful for both participants and their communities. As Community Webs member Makiba J. Foster of the African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Broward County, Florida stated during a recent Community Webs event, Archiving the Black Diaspora, “Community Webs provided me with the training, they provided me with the cohort support, […] provided me with services, and particularly it helped to develop an expertise for me in terms of creating collections of historically significant web materials documenting our local communities.” The program “allowed me to start a project of recovery and documentation of digitally born content related to the Black experience.” More information about what Foster and other Community Webs members are up to can be found by viewing our recent program announcements.
Find out more about the program and keep up to date by visiting the Community Webs website. Apply online today and spread the word!
