internet_archive

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internet_archive34 karma

I curated this Collection of books written in the 20s and 30s by Leo Edwards: r/https://archive.org/details/leoedwards  I had read many of them in my youth and wanted to make them available to young people today.  So I purchased them on ebay, digitized them, and now they are available forever for free.  

- Mark

internet_archive31 karma

"Neighbors" by Normal McLaren is a pretty amazing Oscar and Canadian Film Award-winning stop-motion film from 1952. Picasso called it the greatest film ever made.

https://archive.org/details/neighbours_20170314

-- Jason Scott

internet_archive30 karma

If you do a search for "Internet Archive" and "Wayback" on most news search engines, you will find many news organizations have used us for comparing deleted or changed web pages for the purposes of reporting. There are cases where the Wayback has been used without credit/using our name so there are lots of additional examples as well.

I've had numerous e-mails from teachers and educators who have used the Archive's software emulation and digitized magazines as class assignments to allow students to do research for homework and reports.

​

One particularly touching e-mail came from a musician whose previous band had a partner who died, and whose family did not approve of the band, and had destroyed all the music in his possession. Our mirror had all the music that was lost, and so this musician could re-live the better times with his friend and collaborator. This sort of story is repeated a lot.

-- Jason Scott

internet_archive28 karma

My job description is a little floaty, so I try to go where needed, but my current (October 2018) duties include:

  • Tech support around the Emularity, the Internet Archive emulation system that does all those neat software-in-browser things like arcade games, console games, home computers, handhelds. User contributions and ingestion of new sets of materials take a little bit of hand-holding to get right. (Right now, I'm screenshotting 35,000 Commodore 64 floppies, that's taking a bit of my attention)

  • Sorting and cleanup of collections on the archive, either re-filing items that are in too-general buckets or contacting people who have uploaded 500 of something to see if they'd be fine with being given a collection of their own. Sometimes people are uploading dozens of computer manuals, for example, and that gets put over into a computer manuals section.

  • Handling a lot of mass contributions via "take it from my directory" or providing a drop-off so people who have one big contribution (or sets of big contributions) don't need to learn every in and out. (For example, some people frequently hand me scanned/imaged CD-ROMs and I can help with that).

  • Answer a lot of mail asking about operation, projects, and possible multi-faceted projects with the archive.

  • Scan the social media to "help" when someone asks about the Archive in various ways.

-- Jason Scott

internet_archive27 karma

In the home movies collection, there is a rare recording of a Japanese Internment camp from 1944.

At an Internet Archive event, one of the residents of this camp came and told his story of being a young boy at this camp and what his experience was. The debate in the comments below the film highlight how the US has not yet
come to terms with what these were.

-- Jason Scott