We just recently revived a 15 year old blog that has neglected and just shutdown but to day it is back and all that thanks to The Internet Archive. We have recovered some (still in process) of our old stories, the ones that mattered, the ones that people ended up linking or used as a citation for some photography discussion. What site needed the recovery? Why did we bother putting it back together? One of our main reasons is that we wanted to revive the nostalgia of getting back in photography, film and a little of digital.
How did we recover it? There is is one website that stores all things web.. a historical database of everything online and in digital format open access to anyone that wants to discover how things were back then. We got out old articles back, its not 100% there but traces of what was important are still available.
This is what photo.net.ph looked liked back in 2004 – https://web.archive.org/web/20040607141047/http://photo.net.ph/
What is the Internet Archive?
According to wikipedia: The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet.
The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world’s largest book digitization projects.
Internet Archive from Jonathan Minard on Vimeo.
Archive is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale.
Part one features Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and his colleagues Robert Miller, director of books, and Alexis Rossi, director of web collections. On a mission to create universal access to all knowledge, the Internet Archive’s staff have built the world’s largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts.
The video includes a tour of the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California.
Directed by Jonathan Minard
Cinematography by John Behrens, Alexander Porter, and Fearghal O’dea
Produced at the Internet Archive on October 22-26, during the Books in Browsers Conference and 10 Petabyte Celebration. Project supported by Eyebeam
Is the Internet Archive Legal?
Some people argue that it isn’t legal. The Internet Archive just launched a service called the National Emergency Library, from which anyone could borrow digital copies of 1.4 million books without a waiting list. But as authors of the books part of the library responded angrily on social media, the story rapidly went from good to bad in an instant.
more on story from The Vox: Why authors are so angry about the Internet Archive’s Emergency Library
The Internet Archive calls its practice Controlled Digital Lending. The Authors Guild says it’s illegal.
You can never make everyone happy. So there will always be controversy. Here is one recent video from the national writers union about the most recent topic.
We hope things will turn out well and hope they find a compromise online for the good of all.
