Library Technology Guides

The Internet Archive takes over foreign dissertations from Leiden University Libraries. The Leiden University Libraries announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection from UBL and will take care of its future preservation and access. [Full Announcement].

Partnership on AI strengthens cross-sectoral community with four new partner organizations. As AI development and adoption accelerates, the need for coordinated collective action to develop AI responsibly is more important than ever. In our continued effort to meet this challenge, Partnership on AI strengthens its cross-sectoral community with the addition of four new Partners: Credo AI, Institute for the Future of Work, Internet Archive, and Interpublic Group. The new Partner organizations contribute to the diversity of perspectives within the PAI community, adding valuable points of view from the startup community, civil society, and the advertising and marketing industry. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive responds to recording industry lawsuit targeting obsolete media. Late Friday, August 11, 2023, some of the world's largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. As a non-profit library, the the Internet Archive takes this matter seriously and are currently reviewing the lawsuit with its legal counsel. [Full Announcement].

UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive co-directing project to help text data mining researchers navigate cross-border legal and ethical issues. The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded nearly $50,000 to UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining. The funding was made possible through NEH's Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program. [Full Announcement].

Colgate University Libraries donates to expanding government document microfiche collection. From 1970 to 2004, Colgate University amassed as many as 1.5 million microfiche cards with documents from the U.S. federal government. In July, the Internet Archive arranged for the twelve cabinets of microfiche, each in excess of 600 pounds, to be loaded onto pallets and shipped to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization. Materials include Census data, documents from the Department of Education, Congressional testimony, CIA documents, and foreign news translated into English. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive seeks summary judgment in federal lawsuit filed By publishing companies. The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in its favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. The Internet Archive, headquartered in San Francisco, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Durie Tangri LLP, explains that the Archive's Controlled Digital Lending program is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world. The brief explains how the Internet Archive is advancing the purposes of copyright law by furthering public access to knowledge and facilitating the creation of new creative and scholarly works. The Internet Archive's digital lending hasn't cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive's digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books. [Full Announcement].

News conference on major development in big publishers' legal attack on libraries and digital lending. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library which preserves and provides access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will host a video news conference this Friday, July 8 to discuss a significant new development in a federal lawsuit filed against the library in 2020 by four major publishers. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive releases Refcat, the IA Scholar Index of over 1.3 billion scholarly citations. As part of our ongoing efforts to archive and provide perpetual access to at-risk, open-access scholarship, we have released Refcat (“reference” + “catalog”), the citation index culled from the catalog that underpins our IA Scholar service for discovering the scholarly literature and research outputs within Internet Archive. This first release of the Refcat dataset contains over 1.3 billion citations extracted from over 60 million metadata records and over 120 million scholarly artifacts (articles, books, datasets, proceedings, code, etc) that IA Scholar has archived through web harvesting, digitization, integrations with other open knowledge services, and through partnerships and joint initiatives. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive Joins IDS Project for Interlibrary Loan. The Internet Archive announced it has joined the The Information Delivery Services Project, a mutually supportive resource-sharing cooperative whose 120 members include public and private academic libraries from across the country. As a member of the IDS Project, the Internet Archive expands its ability to support libraries and library patrons by providing access to two million monographs and three thousand periodicals in its physical collections available for non-returnable interlibrary loan fulfillment. [Full Announcement].

Community Webs joins the Digital Public Library of America. Internet Archive's Community Webs program is announced a partnership with the Digital Public Library of America 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. [Full Announcement].

Detroit college library reopens online with help from Internet Archive. The collection of Detroit-based Marygrove College Library, comprising more than 70,000 books and journals, starts a new life online with the support of Internet Archive. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive Joins Project ReShare. The Internet Archive is the newest library to join Project ReShare, a group of organizations coming together to develop an open source resource sharing platform for libraries. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive responds to publishers lawsuit. Lawyers for the Internet Archive filed a brief in the US Southern District of New York responding to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House in June of this year. The Internet Archive denies all charges of willful infringement. [Full Announcement].

Announcing a National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public. To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. [Full Announcement].

Better World Books and the Internet Archive unite to Preserve Millions of Books. Better World Books, the world's leading socially conscious online bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner, the Internet Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to come. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive collaborates with the MIT Press and Arcadia to digitize and provide access to hundreds of MIT Press backlist titles. The MIT Press and the Internet Archive announced a partnership, with support from Arcadia, to scan, preserve, and enable libraries to lend hundreds of MIT Press books that are currently not available digitally. This partnership represents an important advance in bringing acclaimed titles across the MIT Press’ publications in science, technology, art, and architecture to a global online audience. [Full Announcement].

Digital Library Initiative reaches semifinals in MaCarthur Foundation competition for $100 million grant. The digital library, Internet Archive, is one of eight groups named semi-finalists today in 100&Change, a global competition for a single $100 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The competition seeks bold solutions to critical problems of our time. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive to bring TV news footage to the public. The Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, will expand its research library to make readily available hundreds of thousands of U.S. television news programs, with $1 million in support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. [Full Announcement].

Launch of TV News Search and Borrow with 350,000 Broadcasts. The Internet Archive launched TV News Search & Borrow. This service is designed to help engaged citizens better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs. [Full Announcement].

Internet Archive launches wayback machine: free service enables users to access archived versions of Web sites dating from 1996. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, a free service allowing people to access and use archived versions of past web pages. For the first time, all members of the public will be able to search and view the Internet Archive''s enormous collection of web sites, dating back to 1996 and comprising over 10 billion web pages. [Full Announcement].