Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s

Seeing it all?

Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s By Ars Technica, October 21, 2022

The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years.

A new website allows users to sift through 91.7 million computer files from CD-ROM releases and floppy discs dating back to the 1980s.  Hosted by tech archivist Jason Scott, the Discmaster site is the work of a group of anonymous programmers and features images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and more from the Internet Archive.

Discmaster allows users to search by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and other criteria.

Said Scott, "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database." Much of the file format conversion is performed on the back end, to make the vintage files more accessible.

From Ars Technica

View Full Article    

Publishers vs Internet Archive

Came across this pre pandemic when I received a letter from my local library about them decreasing the number of digital 'copies' of books available.    Had previously been connected to the Google Books program, that sought to digitize many books.   Still under way, but now far reduced.   There the publishers fought the digitization, even when the books involved were orphaned,  and had no remaining copyright owners.   Had not heard of the case with the Internet Archive,  which we used to track the emergence of web sites.   What does it mean to own a book?  And what does it mean in these times?    The Internet is a great resource, but shouldn't it have access to all publications?
 
Publishers Are Taking the Internet to Court
In a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, the largest corporations in publishing want to change what it means to own a book.    By Maria Bustillos   in TheNation.

When Covid-19 struck, hundreds of millions of students were suddenly stranded at home without access to teachers or libraries. UNESCO reported that in April, 90 percent of the world’s enrolled students had been adversely affected by the pandemic. In response, the Internet Archive’s Open Library announced the National Emergency Library, a temporary program suspending limits on the number of patrons who could borrow its digital books simultaneously. The Open Library lends at no charge about 4 million digital books, 2.5 million of which are in the public domain, and 1.4 million of which may be under copyright and subject to lending restrictions. (This is roughly equivalent to a medium-sized city library; the New York Public Library, by comparison, holds 21.9 million books and printed materials and 1.78 million e-books, according to 2016 figures from the American Library Association.) But the National Emergency Library wound up creating an emergency of its own—for the future of libraries. ... "     (Much more in the article) 

Internet Archive Threatened with Suit

We used the INternet Archive early on to track the use of web sites and trademarks.     But had not visited for a while.  Now saw this controversy which had been broiling.   A publishers threat to sue the archive in an emergency.

Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending  by Brewster Kahle in the Archive Blog

Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation during the closures. 

We have heard hundreds of stories from librarians, authors, parents, teachers, and students about how the NEL has filled an important gap during this crisis. 

Ben S., a librarian from New Jersey, for example, told us that he used the NEL “to find basic life support manuals needed by frontline medical workers in the academic medical center I work at. Our physical collection was closed due to COVID-19 and the NEL allowed me to still make available needed health informational materials to our hospital patrons.” We are proud to aid frontline workers.

Today we are announcing the National Emergency Library will close on June 16th, rather than June 30th, returning to traditional controlled digital lending. We have learned that the vast majority of people use digitized books on the Internet Archive for a very short time. Even with the closure of the NEL, we will be able to serve most patrons through controlled digital lending, in part because of the good work of the non-profit HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust’s new Emergency Temporary Access Service features a short-term access model that we plan to follow. 

We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic.  However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world. This lawsuit stands in contrast to some academic publishers who initially expressed concerns about the NEL, but ultimately decided to work with us to provide access to people cut off from their physical schools and libraries. We hope that similar cooperation is possible here, and the publishers call off their costly assault.  .. "

Wikipedia Adds Credibility with Digital Books

Fascinating additional link to readily accessible knowledge.     Of course, you can ask, how accurate is the book cited?  Still like the further effort, will look for examples now.   Also note the use of the Internet Archive, which we also used for research.

Wikipedia references now include book previews hosted by the Internet Archive    130,000 references have been digitized so far.

By Georgina Torbet, @georginatorbet  in Engadget

Wikipedia is an incredible resource, but the accuracy of claims published on its pages is sometimes called into question. To improve the site's credibility and usability, the Internet Archive is working to make references easier to follow by linking them to digital copies of books.

So far, 130,000 references have been linked to 50,000 digitized books that are hosted by the Archive. To see an example of the new digital referencing in action, you can head to the Wikipedia page for Martin Luther King, Jr. If you look at the reference for Adam Fairclough's book To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King Jr at the bottom of the page, you'll see it's a clickable link. Clicking takes you to the Internet Archive's digital version of the book, open to the page from which the reference was taken.

When you open a digital book hosted by the Archive, you can see a few pages of preview to check the reference information. If you want to read more, you can borrow a digital copy of the book through the Controlled Digital Lending program.  ... " 

Internet Archive Seeks to Save Google+

In early projects we used the Internet Archive to document marketing efforts.  We used the archive as a source of data and metadata of historical marketing.  Now the archive has volunteered  to save other parts of the Internet that are being lost,  Google+ posts,  parts that were not normally part of the Internet Archive's original scope.   Details of the effort and how you can help, or use the results,  at the link:

Data Migration in Reddit:
The archiving of public Google+ content to the Internet Archive by the ArchiveTeam has has begun.

What does this mean, how does this affect you, and what can you do?
Most public Google+ content should live on at the Internet Archive thanks to a fanatical bunch of volunteers, and you can help.

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". Though often known for its Web archives, the "Wayback Machine", it also preserves texts, audio, video, software, and other formats. Think of the Wayback Machine as the Web's attic, or basement, or storage locker. .... " 

Google Plus is Going and Soon will be Gone

You will note that the G+ option for forwarding these posts is gone.  I did not do this, Google did,  and it is completely removing the system called Google Plus , and will soon remove all the posts that were ever done with it, many millions I am sure.  That starts in April.  I know people that used it heavily, but I never did.   I used and still do use Twitter for the same purposes.   Gives you pause about the permanence of all this.  For a while the US Library of Congress was archiving all tweets, but then gave up on that, becoming more selective.  You can archive your own G+ scribblings for a while.  And there is still the Internet Archive, which is still humming along.

Warning of a Digital Dark Age

Despite methods like the Internet Archive, in the BBC:

" ... Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete.

He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".. ... "

Archiving the Internet and Searching it with the Wayback Machine

Many people think that everything that is on the net stays there.  That is not entirely true, though it is a good idea to operate as though that is the case.  A system called the Internet Archive is an attempt to archive large parts of it, so they will always be available.  Though the choice of what to archive is still partly selective and partly random.   In the January 26 New Yorker, an excellent article: The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived?, about what is called the WayBack Machine, and the idea of internet persistence.  Have used that capability to support some things I have written on historical topics.  It has allowed me to do things that would have been impossible otherwise.    Once you have read the New Yorker article, you can visit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine here.  It has saved 452 billion web pages over time, to date.  Check out what your internet presence is now, and what it was then.

Lost Links

Received another query about links that no longer point to the information that they should.  This is a common thing on the Web.   Unless what you are pointing to is a entity that has the resources to maintain their content, it happens.   You can ask, but usually I don't have the time to search out the lost information. It is true that some of these things can be found somewhere on the 'Internet Archive',  but I will not generally be re-linking them.

Wikipedia's Data Trove for Trends

I have talked to several people who are using the Wikipedia as an ontology of knowledge. Surely there is much more data to be mined there. But what statistics exist about its operation? What trends there are that are indication of markets?  How does that differ from other social media?  The data is freely available.  More  In an article from Wired:

" ... There are websites, and then there’s Wikipedia. The internet behemoth boasts 30 million articles written in more than 285 languages, tweaked by 70,000 active editors and viewed by 530 million visitors worldwide each month. As mountains of information go, it’s Everest. Teasing out trends from the open source encyclopedia’s archives is a task few would even attempt. Yet Erik Zachte did just that.

Zachte used his statistical intuition to create “Wikistats,” an online statistics package that’s more than a trove of charts and graphs for data geeks. It’s the most direct measure yet of Wikipedia’s success in achieving its central objective: making the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone everywhere. ... " 

Link Rot and Permanent Hyperlinks

We juggled with link rot since the earliest days of the Internet.  As we were trying to build from existing Internet content.  You can point to anything, but that thing can go away without warning.   There is a significant part of the Internet that has disappeared.  MJ Perry on the market for permanent hyperlinks.  We examined approaches like the Internet Archive for making content accessible.  For example, here is the archive for this blog up to May 30 of this year.  He covers some new explorations in this direction to make content selectively more permanent, like Perma.cc, soon to be made generally available and free.

National Digital Public Library

Just launched.  A new open source library of US resources has launched in Beta.  The DPLA.  Some have been talking about how decrepit US copyright laws will influence this effort.  " ... Two years in the making, the DLPA will make available to the public 2.4 million records at its launch, including electronic images, video and audio from America's libraries, archives and museums. It also makes many scientific records available.... "  On twitter as @DPLA

Library of Congress Saves Tweets

As mentioned previously the US Library of Congress is starting to save tweets.  Now over 500 million a day are being archived.   Researchers are already asking for access.  Might they also be available to citizens in general?  Another source of democratized big data for the average person?

Loss of Web History

I did several projects to look at corporate history in the enterprise as it addressed computing technology, and found the Internet Archive a useful resource.  Now I am preparing for a talk at Xavier University. Yet as the article says, it contains a large number of artifacts, but not the primary detail that a historian needs.  Especially when dealing with social network communications.  Discussed in the BBC Technology Section: The Decaying Web.