Is there hope for the #Internet?
Artists Thomas Georg Blank & Işık Kaya @ayakkisi came to the @internetarchive to explore that theme.
🎞️Their #NewWork debuts today: a clip from Chapter 1 "song of the petabox" 👇
"And the data is so happy there you can actually hear it sing..."
2/ Thomas Georg Blank & @ayakkisi's new work is titled "When looking at stones I get sucked into deep time, when looking at my hard drive I'm afraid that it will break"
3/ Blank & Kaya bring together text, video & audio fragments to show that, "in the right hands, the Internet does not have to become an instrument of surveillance and control, but, on the contrary, can be graceful and divine."
A clip from Chpt 2: "Time travelers made of stone"
4/ A clip from the #NewWork by Thomas Georg Blank & @ayakkisi, Chpt 4 "collapsing time into myself into time"
At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize #78 rpm records.
Our partner @georgeblood_lp has perfected this technique, digitizing with 4 different styli at once.
We put as much effort into capturing the #metadata as we do digitizing the music.
2/ There's a half-century of 78 rpm recordings (1898-1950s) at risk of being lost, never heard again in the digital era.
Our goal is to save them all. 🎶
You can listen to 255,000 of these 78 rpm recordings in the George Blood Collection: archive.org/details/george… @great78project
3/ Another benefit of digitization? Discovering little-known corners of #music history.
1/ 2021 - Cape Town Library: Today's tragic fire at the @UCTLibrary has destroyed its Special Collections in African Studies, including some of the oldest & rarest materials about Africa.
2/ 2018 - Nat'l Museum of Brazil in #Rio: fire destroyed much of this 200-year-old institution's collections, including its scientific library. theguardian.com/world/2018/sep…
3/ 1992 - National Library of Bosnia & Herzegovina was completely destroyed by bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_…
So, just how does a small-ish nonprofit like the @InternetArchive manage to serve & preserve 70 petabytes of data, 24/7 to 1+ million patrons each day?
2/ Every week, our @InternetArchive staff gathers for "Friday Lunch" & a presentation by a staff member. @jonahedwards leads our core infrastructure team. Here, he's walking us through the numbers.
3/ Our motto inside the Archive is "Bits in (store stuff forever) & Bits Out (serve stuff to you all over the world.)" If we can do that, we're succeeding.
Doing that ourselves by maintaining servers, racks, cable...well it's part of the mission. #UniversalAccesstoAllKnowledge
2/ That illustration says it all.
It's what digital library shelves will look like in a few years. Empty except the current bestsellers. Why? Because publishers refuse to sell ebooks to libraries, only license them thru subscriptions. (Think Netflix for library books.)
3/ And now Amazon is refusing to sell or license its ebooks and audiobooks to libraries at all. @GeoffreyFowler: "Amazon treating digital collections differently than print is a 'particularly pernicious new form of the digital divide,' the @ALALibrary told Congress."
Back in 2015, @internetarchive was honored to have him over for a "Radical Theater Dinner" w/ Bread & Puppet Theater founder, Peter Schumann & leaders of the SF Mime Troupe.
2/ That evening, #Ferlinghetti generously autographed his books of poetry, reminisced with old friends, and recited one of his works by heart.