Internet Archive

The Internet Archive held its second annual Books in Browser Conference in San Francisco last week. This was a small invite only event with around 250 attendees, and it was held at IA’s headquarters (an old church).

If you weren’t lucky enough to attend the conference, you can still get some value from the event. O’Reilly has uploaded videos of most of the sessions to Youtube, and most of the slides used by the presenters have been made available on the IA’s website (here, here).

The videos are definitely worth seeing; a couple the presenters showed off their newest project for the first time at BiB 2011.

image by blmurch

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The Internet Archive has just added a new gadget to its workroom: a digital film scanner from Müller Framescanner. (While I’m sure the IA has had film scanners before, this is the first that I can find mention of.)

This is a versatile and quite large scanner, and it supports all common formats, including Regular 8, Super 8, Pathé 9.5, 16 mm, Super 16m. It’s not available for you to scan your old home movies, unfortunately, but it will be used to save old and decaying films.

Film isn’t a durable format, sadly. According to Wikipedia, 50% the silent films made made for American cinema have been lost.

The Internet Archive has recently launched a new project. It’s no longer saving just a digital copy of books and websites; now it’s archiving paper books as well.

The Internet Archive has opened its first physical archive and it’s located outside in Richmond, California. At the archive, books are processed, catalogued, boxes, and packed into climate controlled 40′ long shipping containers. The IA launched this effort because it was watching some libraries throw away paper books after they’d been digitized. The whole purpose of the IA is to preserve content for future generations, so archiving paper books was a natural step.

Also, as it digitized more content, the IA realized that storing the content on a a hard disk still involved a physical preservation,which required maintenance and archiving the HD itself at the end of its lifespan. Microfilm was also just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed the IA that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.

via The Internet Archive