The Internet Archive: The Music Modernization Act is Bad for the Preservation of Sound Recordings. “There’s a bill working its way through Congress called the Music Modernization Act (the current bill is a mix of several bills, the portion we are concerned with was formerly called the CLASSICS Act) that has us very concerned about the fate of historical sound recordings. As currently drafted, this bill would vastly expand the rights of performers of pre-1972 sound recordings, without any provision for a public domain for these works or meaningful fair use and library exceptions. After a visit to Washington DC meeting with various Congressional staffers working on this issue, we do not believe that the CLASSICS portion of the bill will be fixed. We therefore oppose the CLASSICS portion of the Music Modernization Act.”
Internet Archive
Internet Archive: Some Very Entertaining Plastic, Emulated at the Archive
Internet Archive: Some Very Entertaining Plastic, Emulated at the Archive. “It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team. For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org. Introducing the Handheld History Collection.”
Internet Archive: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation
Internet Archive: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to the Internet Archive for Long Tail Journal Preservation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a research and development grant to the Internet Archive to address the critical need to preserve the ‘long tail’ of open access scholarly communications. The project, Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature, builds on prototype work identifying at-risk content held in web archives by using data provided by identifier services and registries. Furthermore, the project expands on work acquiring missing open access articles via customized web harvesting, improving discovery and access to this materials from within extant web archives, and developing machine learning approaches, training sets, and cost models for advancing and scaling this project’s work.”
Internet Archive: 27 Public Libraries and the Internet Archive Launch “Community Webs” for Local History Web Archiving
Internet Archive: 27 Public Libraries and the Internet Archive Launch “Community Webs” for Local History Web Archiving. “With generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the Kahle/Austin Foundation and the Archive-It service, the Internet Archive and 27 public library partners representing 17 different states have launched a new program: Community Webs: Empowering Public Libraries to Create Community History Web Archives. The program will provide education, applied training, cohort network development, and web archiving services for a group of public librarians to develop expertise in web archiving for the purpose of local memory collecting…. The program will result in dozens of terabytes of public library administered local history web archives, a range of open educational resources in the form of online courses, videos, and guides, and a nationwide network of public librarians with expertise in local history web archiving and the advocacy tools to build and expand the network. “
Internet Archive: Mass downloading 78rpm record transfers
Internet Archive: Mass downloading 78rpm record transfers. “To preserve or discover interesting 78rpm records you can download them to your own machine (rather than using our collection pages). You can download lots on to a mac/linux machine by using a command line utility.”
Kansas State Collegian: K-State Libraries donate thousands of records to digital archive
Kansas State Collegian: K-State Libraries donate thousands of records to digital archive. “Faculty in K-State special collections department knew of The Great 78 Project before getting involved, [Keli] Rylance said. During the 2016-2017 academic year, faculty combed through their collections and decided two would be good candidates for the project. Rylance then contacted the project’s developer at the Archive of Contemporary Music in New York to arrange a partnership. Since then, students have joined faculty in preparing the nearly 8,000 sides of audio for shipment to George Blood, an audio and visual digitisation company in Philadelphia.”
Internet Archive: 78s Bring the Past to Life
Internet Archive: 78s Bring the Past to Life. “For many of us, music is an integral part of our memories. It evokes a period of time in our lives, or inspires specific recollections. Music can also conjure times long past, outside of our personal memories. When we watch this movie, we see and hear Argentina in the early 20th Century. The music in this clip came from a 78 collected in Buenos Aires by Tina Argumedo, part of her personal collection of hundreds of discs.”
