Still, the Internet Archive staff and
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 6:53 am
community partners remain focused on digital preservation and providing access to needed materials that serve the public interest.
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Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.
Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a phone number list community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.
“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”
The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.
The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.
WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING
“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”
Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.
“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”
The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.
WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING
Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.
Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a phone number list community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.
“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”
The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.
The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.
WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING
“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”
Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.
“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”
The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.