Take Action: Defend the Internet Archive

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A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture. But this lawsuit goes far beyond old records. It’s an attack on the Internet Archive itself.

This lawsuit is an existential threat to the Internet image masking service Archive and everything we preserve—including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet.

At a time when digital information is disappearing, being rewritten, or erased entirely, the tools to preserve history must be defended—not dismantled.

This isn’t just about music. It’s about whether future generations will have access to knowledge, history, and culture.

Sign our open letter and tell the record labels to drop their lawsuit.

Posted in 78rpm, Audio Archive, News, Wayback Machine - Web Archive | Tagged 78s, lawsuit | 55 Replies
Community Webs Digitization Grant Reveals Stories of San Francisco’s Immigrant Communities
Posted on April 17, 2025 by Anna Trammell
The following guest post from Christina Moretta, Photo Curator and Acting San Francisco History Center Manager at San Francisco Public Library, is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories.

San Francisco History Center (SFHC) of the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) is the official archive for the City and County of San Francisco. SFHC serves all library users and levels of interest, from the merely curious to those engaging in scholarly research. Because of the Center’s archival function, it also administers the archival collections of the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center.

Internet Archive has supported our work to preserve and provide access to San Francisco’s history in many ways. Since 2007, Internet Archive has hosted SFPL digitized content, including local documents and city directories. In 2017, SFPL became one of the first members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. This program has provided us with the tools we need to preserve local web-based content that will be important for future researchers investigating San Francisco’s history.

In 2023, the Community Webs program was awarded a grant from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission for the “Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections” project. This grant supported the digitization of local history collections from libraries across the country, including SFPL. With this support, 23 bound volumes of a Chinese/English language newspaper East/West and 4 cartons of oral histories from the Paul Radin Papers were digitized by Internet Archive.