mastodon 4.5.8Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive
http://archive.org http://openlibrary.org http://brewster.kahle.org @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org tfr
Please Donate to the Internet Archive. $25 helps.... a lot.
Useful to Journalists,
Useful to Students,
Useful to more than 2 million people a day.
Collections growing at 150TBytes/day
@internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/16/business/video/internet-archive-wayback-machine-church-digvid
geez. Senators want to lock up the law (again).
@carlmalamud@official.resource.org spent years making sure the law (and standards included in the law) were publicly accessible for free. Even getting the Supreme Court to declare it so.
yeah, but...
"Congress Wants To Put The Law Behind A Paywall. Again."
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/06/congress-wants-to-put-the-law-behind-a-paywall-again/
U.S. Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.),
John Cornyn (R-Texas),
Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and
Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)
boo.
Celebration of
1 Trillion Webpages! People are awesome.
over 1 billion people over the last 30 years have wanted to share what they know with the world. Knowledge worth saving.
@internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org show video with tabs to jump around:
"Getting rid of physical books because we now have databases is like getting rid of sunshine because of the existence of vitamin-D pills and cod liver oil." --love that.
a plea for keeping physical libraries available. (but it is key to remember that all living library collections include materials that come and also go)
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/death-of-the-physical-library/
Connie Chan Rocks. Thank you Nancy Pelosi-- good pick to endorse for your seat.
Connie Chan represents the Internet Archive district in San Francisco, and got unanimous support for: Digital Library Rights, and Internet Archive Day resolution in 2025, and got the Internet Archive Hero award in 2023!
Connie Chan understands our digital world and supports our digital learners.
Lovingly handwritten title on the spine! Meteorlogical Observations / Royal Observatory / Sydney / 1874-77
I love my job. (do you have random photos from work that make you happy?)
wow, china is leading on manufacturing renewables.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/20/china/china-energy-security-global-oil-crisis-iran-intl-hnk
Linking data with the help of AI.
There are old medical PhD theses coming online (yea!).
Found Wikipedia articles about the doctors, and then edit the wikipedia articles that would be improved by pointing to them. Also added a review to the Internet Archive items to point to the wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mantoux
/more on next
Stanford tuition to Be $335 Starting September 1958.
(Things I learned today from scanning)
"Do you need a liberal education? We say that it is unpatriotic not to read these books."
""The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
Robert M Hutchins (of Great Books fame)
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215549/page/n149/mode/1up?q=%22unpatriotic+%22
claude code is more fun than netflix. bravo.
As programming gets easier (and more fun) via claude code etc...
Will there be less programming or more? If there is latent demand for computer programs and ones that works, then the demand for programming, and therefore the number of programmers might increase not decrease.
When lighting got cheaper with electric lights, people lit more things. maybe this will happen with coding and coders?
What an interesting time to be alive.
"What to do when the ‘public good’ of information goes bad
The creation and dissemination of reliable news is at an economic disadvantage" (paywalled ft.com boo)
Opinion Misinformation Martin Wolf
suggests subsidizing info creation, then goes to BBC, skips libraries which pay billions a year.
why skip libraries? Could be because we are not as effective as in the past cuz digital licensing schemes of big publishers so are largely irrelevant to our info environment of most people.
lets fix!
The Daily Weather Report, 1938 International and Upper Air Sections by Air Ministry Meteorological Office, London W.C.2. Check out the first pages at link below.
Someone (or all AI's!) need to know!
I love my job.
pls post photos of why your job is awesome.
https://archive.org/details/daily-international-upper-air-sections_1938-10
fyi. First Tesla Semis (long haul 18 wheelers) come off of the new production line in dedicated factory.
at 500 mile range (astounding) I wonder if it could mean destination charging (with solar) rather than lots of charging stations.
https://electrek.co/2026/04/29/tesla-semi-first-truck-high-volume-production-line/
Claude Code is good at doing research!
In this case helping find the disposition of 126,000 digitized US Supreme Court dockets (cert denied or full opinion), and then reporting why in a archive.org review (using like a wikipedia discussion).
This took real hand-holding and QA to be sure, but it is super helpful. Looked at court listener, the supreme court site (and the old one via the wayback machine!), the Caselaw Access Project at harvard. So good.
Moment of Gratitude, this time for GitHub.com
I have been having fun with claude-code and have been using github in ways I did not know existed (like hosting docker images), and so easy! (and, I think, for free)
Thank you GitHub!
https://brewster.kahle.org/2026/02/01/generative-ai-is-a-new-drug-report-on-my-first-trip/
® (registered trademark) of an Article?
The Register is putting "®" at the end of the articles I looked at: e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/suse_runs_ms/.
What does that mean?
Building AI in Europe for the public good! Enabled by regulatory certainty there.
"Well-trained AI model turns speech into text"
"More than 50,000 hours of TV, parliamentary speeches and dialects. This is what the training data for KB's new AI model looks like. KB-Whisper has learned a wide variety of Swedish and can quickly transcribe speech to text – which can contribute to both subtitles on TV and better searchability in the library's collections."
Interview of the new librarian of the British Library :
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-rebecca-lawrence-weekend-interview/
Q&As on AI:
"Bringing Collections to Life" in our libraries the Stichting Internet Archive held a meeting in the beautiful WAAG in Amsterdam to find how to help.
Pls join the fun.
New foundational LLM model for a small language was demonstrated.
Look at the fabulous room!
( @stichtinginternetarchive@toot.community https://stichtinginternetarchive.nl/ )
