Information Stewardship Forum 2026: Creating Community and Purpose Around US Government Information 

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As soon as people started walking in the door, I breathed a sigh of relief. After months of careful (some might say obsessive) planning, we were kicking off the inaugural Information Stewardship Forum, 2026. Over three days in March, we opened the doors of the Internet Archive to 120 people who work tirelessly to preserve and give access to government information in the United States. They traveled to San Francisco representing different vital facets of this work: libraries, archives, journalism, research, policy, nonprofits, funding, and technology. Participants also reflected different parts of the government information ecosystem (which includes federal, state and local stakeholders).

The Forum was constructed as a space for participants to share tools, workflows, and lessons learned from digital and physical preservation efforts, and to support practical knowledge exchange across domains and disciplines to ensure that government data remains accessible, trustworthy, and resilient in a rapidly changing information landscape. The preservation of government information has long been carried out by libraries and archives but in the current moment, this work carries a sense of weight and importance. 

Internet Archive was a natural host for this event, having long supported preservation and access to government created information and publications: through web archiving efforts including Archive-It; by participating in the the End of Term Crawl; through digitizing government produced publications; and by serving as a depository library in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). In 2022, Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library was launched, built on a straightforward but urgent premise: governments have created an abundance of information and put it in the public domain, but the public can’t easily access it.

Of course the Internet Archive is but one of many stakeholders; scaffolding has been established by institutions including the U.S. Government Publishing Office (buttressed by more than 1,000 FDLP depository libraries), the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress, alongside countless state and local agencies, archives; and thousands of government information librarians and other specialized data stewards.

Held under Chatham House Rule, the forum created space for candid discussion across plenaries, lightning talks, Birds of a Feather sessions, and closing conversations. It also created ample room for people working on related problems to compare notes, test ideas, and begin seeing the field less as a set of isolated projects and more as a community of collaborators. One theme surfaced again and again: preservation is not a solo endeavor. Preserving public information is not only a technical challenge. It is also an organizational, legal, financial, and civic one. Some high level themes emerged across our three days spent in community. 

  • Not only is government information being lost, but the the stewardship ecosystem itself remains fragmented and under-described. Mapping this space – who is doing what, and identifying key information assets will be a critical part of this work going forward. 
  • Recognition that stewardship is more than storage. Saving material is only the beginning. Continuity, trust, and usability are also important components of preservation.
  • The emergency response or triage mode that has animated many recent efforts are not sustainable; this work has been indispensable, but fragile. Building on work done on an emergency basis without feeling confined by it is a challenge for moving this work forward. 
  • Public records laws and access frameworks exist, yet information is still removed, obscured, or made difficult to use over time. Data may remain technically public while being trapped in formats or interfaces that frustrate long-term use. Worse, government information may be inappropriately constricted behind paywalls.
  • A related concern was the growing use of web harvesting restrictions in response to concerns about use by AI companies. While understandable in many contexts, those restrictions can also impede public interest archiving and make preservation harder precisely when long term capture is most needed. 
  • Local government information was identified as especially vulnerable, as were climate data, health data, and disaggregated data that allows communities to see themselves in the record.
  • Advocacy matters; the more people who can be drawn in to understand what is at stake and can participate in stewardship, even in modest ways, the more resilient the system becomes. One attendee framed this practical challenge as “How can we have easy to use tools that will allow others to invest in this work?” Tools for participation!

An important concrete outcome from this convening is Preservation of Government Information: A Call to Action. Shared as a draft during the Forum, this text serves as a manifesto of sorts, and gives  broader language to themes that surfaced throughout the event: that public access to government information cannot be left to chance, that archive-ready publication should become a norm, and that preserving public information must be treated as a civic obligation. Individuals and organizations are urged to sign and express their support for the document. 

So why did I breathe that sigh of relief when we opened the doors at 300 Funston Avenue? I could see the positive body language – recognition, surprise, delight, handshakes, hugs and exclamations that come when people are in community with those they recognize as their people. Across the three days, this emerging community had the opportunity to coalesce, to learn together, and to recognize that they are part of a broader stewardship ecosystem, one that will need stronger coordination, communication, and community. There are still many challenges in this space, but there is a firm resolve to ensure that access to government information remains open and accessible to the public. 

The Information Stewardship Forum 2026 was designed to surface the shared problem space, and to facilitate connections, and it was rewarding to see it unfold into a gathering where people were actively identifying concrete collaborations, naming shared principles, discussing infrastructure and standards; fortunately attendees did not need to wonder about how to keep the energy alive after going home; they were able to join and engage in an online community space established by Internet Archive that ensures that the conversation and community can continue.

Graphic recording by Jasmin Pamukcu, Cusp Consulting.

Introducing Vanishing Culture: A New Book on the Loss of Our Digital Memory

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From disappearing news articles to lost films, music, and websites, a new book from the Internet Archive reveals how our shared digital record is eroding, and what it will take to preserve it.

What does it mean to live in an era where culture can simply… disappear?

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record—a new book from the Internet Archive—brings together essays, research, and case studies that document a growing crisis: the erosion of access to the knowledge, media, and history that shape our collective memory. From journalism and government information to music, film, and the web itself, the shift from ownership to access—and from physical to digital—has made culture more vulnerable than many realize.

This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about accountability, scholarship, and the public’s right to access information. When news articles are altered or removed, when public information is taken offline, or when creative works are locked behind shifting licenses, the historical record becomes incomplete. What disappears is not just content, but context.

DOWNLOAD & READ Vanishing Culture for free at the Internet Archive. PURCHASE A PRINT COPY from Better World Books, or your local bookstore.

Recent efforts by some publishers to block web archiving services like the Wayback Machine underscore how fragile access to digital history has become. When large portions of the web are intentionally excluded from preservation, gaps in our shared record are structural, not accidental.

At the same time, libraries, archivists, and preservationists are working to push back against this loss. The Internet Archive and its partners continue to build a digital library for the web: capturing, preserving, and providing access to materials that might otherwise vanish.

Vanishing Culture is both a warning and a call to action. It invites readers to reconsider what it means to preserve culture in a digital age, and to recognize that without intentional effort, much of what we create today may not be available tomorrow.

Read the book, explore the essays, and join us in the work of preserving our digital past before more of it disappears.

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

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TL;DR: A Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade, are now inaccessible; our analysis shows that the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise dead pages.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center published a link-rot study, “When Online Content Disappears”. They stated, “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later”. They further noted, “a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible”. This is not an isolated report that quantified the rate of loss of the online information. Numerous other link-rot studies in the last two decades have reported similar numbers or worse, depending on the context and samples. For example, Ahrefs, an SEO company, reported in the same year, “At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead”. In 2021, Jonathan Zittrain published an article in the Atlantic, “The Internet Is Rotting”, in which his team analyzed about 2 million external links from New York Times (NYTimes) articles and reported that 25% of deep links have rotted. They further noted that 72% of the older links from 1998 were dead. A recent longitudinal study on link-rot from the Old Dominion University (ODU), “Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral”, analyzed 27.3 million URL samples from the Wayback Machine since 1996 and reported that about 65% of the sampled URLs were found dead on the live Web, when checked in 2023. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has been citing numbers from the early days of the Web and stating the average life of webpages to be anywhere from 40 to 100 days. A 2026 book, “Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record”, by Messarra et al. highlights underlying causes of numerous recent cultural digital losses while emphasizing the critical roles libraries and archives must play to maintain our cultural history for the future. Different studies have looked at the problem from different perspectives and contexts, hence it is often difficult to compare them side-by-side, but they all agree that an increasing number of links are rotting with the passage of time. However, some of these studies (not all) have failed to acknowledge the existence of Web archives, such as the Wayback Machine, where a portion of the dead Web might be preserved and can be used as a fallback when a reference leads to a broken link.

In this post we go through some of the link-rot studies and look at them from the perspective of the Wayback Machine to see how much of the dead Web can be rescued. Table 1 shows the status of the dead and rescued Web at a glance as sampled by a few different studies.

StudyYearPeriodSamplesDeadRescued
Pew (All)20242013-20235.4M26%16%
Pew (General)20242013-20231M27%13%
Zittrain NYT*20212013-201388K40%38%
ODU NYPW20241996-202127.3M65%65%
Table 1: Dead links from various link-rot studies rescued by the Wayback Machine.
* The NYT numbers are based on our recreated dataset.

Let us begin by looking at the study from Pew Research Center. They have generously shared their dataset with us so it was rather trivial for us (after performing some transformations and extractions, as the original dataset was stored in Parquet files) to check the URLs against the Wayback Machine to see if and when each of those were archived the first time. Their dataset contains 5.4 million unique URLs in general, news, government, and Wikipedia references categories sampled from the Common Crawl archive and Wikipedia pages. They also reported on Tweets in their post, but that dataset was not shared with us due to the restrictions posed by the usage policies.

Before we dive into our findings, below are brief descriptions of some terminologies that we will use frequently:

  • Alive: URLs that return 200 OK HTTP status code when resolved
  • Dead: URLs that return HTTP error status codes, TCP connection errors, or DNS failures when resolved
  • Preserved: URLs that are Alive on the live Web as well as present in a Web archive
  • Rescued: URLs that are Dead on the live Web, but are present in a Web archive
  • Endangered: URLs that are Alive on the live Web, but are not present in any Web archive
  • Vanished: URLs that are Dead on the live Web and also not present in any Web archive
  • Archived: Preserved + Rescued
  • Accessible: Preserved + Rescued + Endangered

When we do not take any Web archives into account, about a quarter of all the 5.4 million sampled URLs would be considered inaccessible or dead as illustrated in Figure 1. However, when we leverage the Wayback Machine to access otherwise dead URLs, the fraction of inaccessible or vanished URLs drops from one in every four down to only one in every ten. The Wayback Machine has about 72% of the entire dataset archived, of which 56% are preserved from the URLs that are still alive on the live Web and 16% are rescued from the dead. There are 18% of the URLs from the sample that are still alive, but have not been archived in the Wayback Machine yet, which we call endangered, as they may become vanished if they cease to exist on the live Web ever. It is worth noting that we did not account for any captures of these URLs that might be present in any of the many smaller Web archives other than the Wayback Machine, which if accounted for, might increase the percentage of the accessible URLs a little more. Moreover, we relied on HTTP status codes and did not look into the contents of the pages to check for any soft-404s (i.e., error pages that wrongly return a 200 OK HTTP status code) or other irrelevant content, which might change the numbers further.

Figure 1: Archiving status of all the URLs from the Pew dataset in the Wayback Machine.

A subset of about 1 million URLs from the Pew dataset is a sample of general webpages from the last decade, spanning across 11 years from 2013 to 2023. They noted that about a quarter of the URLs from this subset were dead in 2023, with older URLs having a greater percentage of loss, all the way to 38% for links from 2013. We recreated their yearly graph in Figure 2 in orange color with an overlay of rescued URLs by the Wayback Machine in green color. We found that about 38% of the 38% dead URLs from 2013 (i.e., about 15% of the total) are rescued by the Wayback Machine. Moreover, about a quarter of the accumulative URLs of the general sample which were considered dead, about half of them were rescued by the Wayback Machine. It is worth noting that the last three years in Figure 2 seem to be rescued almost completely, but it is a side-effect of ingestion of Common Crawl data from the recent years into the Wayback Machine, which happens to be the source of the sample of the Pew dataset.

Figure 2: Yearly archiving status of URLs from the general sample of the Pew dataset in the Wayback Machine.

We tried getting access to the dataset of about 2 million URLs from the Zittrain’s NYTimes outlinks study, but we did not get it yet. However, in the interim we created our own dataset by downloading all the NYTimes pages published in 2013 that are present in the Wayback Machine, extracting all the outlinks from them, and excluding all the links to pages from NYTimes itself. We were able to collect about 88 thousand such URLs this way. Then we checked the live Web status of each of the URLs (after following up to 5 redirects, if any) and also checked for their presence in the Wayback Machine. We found that 40% of the external links from NYTimes pages from 2013 were found dead on the live Web, but 96% of those URLs are archived in the Wayback Machine. This means, only about 2% URLs from this sample have vanished. However, this impressive number needs to be taken with a grain of salt because we do not have the original URL sample and our own sample is derived from pages present in the Wayback Machine, which has an inherent bias of outlinks from those pages being more likely to be archived than the outlinks of the pages that are not present in the Wayback Machine. That said, we will be keen to revisit these numbers if and when we get access to the original sample of URLs used in Zittrain’s study.

A recent, and perhaps the most comprehensive, longitudinal link-rot study from ODU, to which we are a collaborator, analyzed 27.3 million URLs sampled from the index of the Wayback Machine spanning over more than two and a half decades. They reported about 65% of the sampled URLs from 1996 to 2021 were found dead in 2023. A significant number of these samples were not even resolving the DNS, indicating that many of those domain names were not registered anymore. They found that most of the URLs die rapidly in the first few years of their existence, but some of the longest living sites are not dead yet. Luckily, all of the dead URLs in this sample are rescued by the Wayback Machine by the virtue of it being the source of the sample in the first place. This also means, the ODU study would not be able to tell the percentages of endangered or vanished URLs, because its dataset contains no URLs that were never archived.

In summary, all of the link-rot studies, with varying numbers, indicate that the Web is brittle and an increasing number of Web resources die with the passage of time. However, we found that Web archives like the Wayback Machine play an increasingly important role in rescuing the dead Web and minimizing the fracture of the knowledge graph on the Web, but there is a lot more to do. For example, the Turn All References Blue (TARB) project has fixed more than 30 million broken links (and counting) on hundreds of wikis with the help of the InternetArchiveBot, the WaybackMedic bot, and the Wayback Machine.

While there is not a lot that can be done to resurrect the vanished Web other than attempting to find alternate locations where the content might have moved to (via projects like FABLE), we are determined to minimize the percentage of the endangered URLs. However, there are some internal and external factors that limit our ability to make it ZERO, such as, resource limitations, JavaScript-heavy pages, bot blocking, loginwalls, paywalls, deepweb, lack of timely discovery, etc. We strive to narrow down the potential loss of our cultural heritage via different means such as ingesting feeds from MediaCloud, GDELT, Wikipedia EventStream, and more recently, becoming part of the IndexNow initiative for link discovery soon after corresponding page creation or update on the Web. Moreover, we have the Save Page Now (SPN) service and urge that when you “See Something, Save Something!”. Your continued support will help us preserve the Web more and better.

NOTE: This work was presented at the IIPC WAC 2025, with the talk recording available on YouTube and slides hosted in the UNT Digital Library. It was also presented at the WADL 2025.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We thank our friends at the Pew Research Center and the Old Dominion University and our colleagues Jake LaFountain, Stephen Balbach, Chris Freeland, and Mark Graham for their help and support in this work.

—
Dr. Sawood Alam
Research Lead, Wayback Machine
Internet Archive

U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs: The Arguments That Shaped America, Now Freely Available

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Thanks to a generous gift of materials from the Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, and the Internet Archive’s mission to digitize and provide universal access to knowledge, we are pleased to share more than 125,000 U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs. These materials which span nearly two centuries of American law are now freely accessible online. 

Why This Matters

Most people are familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court opinions as public documents. But the opinions are only part of the story. Behind every landmark ruling lies a vast archive of briefs, petitions, appendices, and supporting records; these are the the arguments, evidence, and voices that shaped each decision. The Supreme Court may receive 7,000-8,000 petitions each year, but only grants a writ of certiorari to hear the case for about 80 cases. This collection includes records and briefs received by the court, both those granted certiorari and those denied certiorari; the latter category is much more voluminous than the former. Until now, these important public documents have only been available in limited ways — in print form in a limited number of law libraries, and in other formats in other libraries but not generally available for all people to freely access. 

That has now changed. As part of Democracy’s Library, the Internet Archive’s large-scale effort to preserve and open government information, this collection includes records and briefs spanning cases from 1830 through 2019, making it one of the most comprehensive archives of freely available Supreme Court materials ever assembled in one place.

What’s Now Available

The collection covers three kinds of materials:

  • The first is the official records from the lower court(s): the trial transcripts, evidence, and procedural documents that travel with each case up through the federal judiciary. 
  • The second is the briefs: the petitions, responses, amicus filings, and supporting appendices submitted by the litigants themselves and by interested third parties. These briefs are the raw material of American constitutional argument. They capture the perspectives of individuals, corporations, civil society organizations, and government agencies pressing their cases before the nation’s highest court. 
  • The third category is the opinions (for cases that are heard by the Supreme Court): the ultimate decisions reached by the highest court in the United States, demonstrating the logic and reasoning of the court.

Taken together, they form a detailed documentary record of how legal arguments, social concerns, and political priorities have evolved over nearly two hundred years of American life.

Three Cases, Three Windows Into History

To understand what this collection makes possible, consider three landmark cases — one celebrated, one lesser-known, and one that provides a relevant window into the importance of public access — that together show why access to the full record matters.

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

Linda Brown Smith, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, Harry Briggs, Jr., and Spottswood Bolling, Jr. — all plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education during a 1964 press conference. Image from the Library of Congress.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional is one of the most studied decisions in American history. But the briefs filed in Brown reveal dimensions that the opinion itself does not capture. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled social-science evidence, testimony from psychologists, and firsthand accounts from families to argue that separation was inherently unequal — not just legally, but psychologically. The record shows the Kansas district court’s own finding that segregation harmed Black children psychologically and that the practice was widely understood as a statement of racial inferiority. Testimony provided by sociologist Dr. Wilbur Bookover framed this issue: 

In American society we consistently present to the child a model of democratic equality of opportunity… At the same time, in a segregated school situation he is presented a contradictory or inharmonious model. He is presented a school situation in which it is obvious that he is a subordinate, inferior kind of a citizen… the segregated schools perpetuate this conflict in expectancies, condemns the negro child to an ineffective role as a citizen and member of society.

— Dr. Wilbur Brookover, expert witness, trial testimony (1951).

The U.S. government filed an amicus brief urging desegregation — a striking signal of the federal government’s position at a pivotal moment in the civil rights era. 

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)

Less well-known than Brown, but no less significant, Loving v. Virginia is the case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Mildred and Richard Loving — a Black woman and a white man from rural Virginia — married in Washington, D.C. in June 1958 and returned to live as husband and wife in Caroline County, Virginia. Warrants were issued for their arrest the following month, and they were charged with the felony of having married across racial lines and returned to the state. A judge suspended their one-year prison sentences on the condition that they leave Virginia for twenty-five years.

The briefs make clear what was at stake beyond the criminal charge: the voiding of their marriage under Virginia law, the potential illegitimacy of their children, and the loss of inheritance rights, Social Security benefits, and other protections contingent on a legally recognized union. Language from the briefs illustrates the pain of separation and disruption that these laws caused for couples like the Lovings who were “prohibited from establishing a family abode and raising their children in places where they and their family have often been long established and where many blood relatives still reside.” Brief for Appellants, Loving v. Virginia (1967). To understand the legal and social world those briefs were arguing against, it helps to read the 1965 written opinion of Judge Leon Bazile from the Circuit Court of Caroline County, Virginia denying the Lovings’ earlier appeal — a document accessible in this collection. In it, he explained his reasoning:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” These views were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court two years later.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Lovings’ conviction in 1967, holding that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” The briefs that built that argument — and the lower-court records that documented what the Lovings were up against — are now open to all.

Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555 (1980)

In September 1978, a judge in Hanover County, Virginia cleared a courtroom during a murder trial, expelling reporters from Richmond Newspapers along with all other members of the public — the first time in the courthouse’s 243-year history that such a closure had occurred. A Richmond newspaper challenged the closure, and the case produced the U.S. Supreme Court’s first explicit ruling that the First Amendment guarantees the public and press a right to attend criminal trials. An excerpt from the documents make it clear why access to trials is so important:

“Imagine an America in which secret trials had been held in the prosecutions of Aaron Burr, John Peter Zenger, or John Thomas Scopes; of John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan; of the Chicago Eight, the Watergate Seven, or the Wilmington Ten.”  — Brief for Appellants, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia (1979).

The briefs filed by the newspaper’s attorneys make an open access argument that extends naturally to legal records of every kind:

“The right of the individual to attend and observe any criminal trial… is of constitutional dimension because its derogation would undermine the logic of the constitutional scheme — a logic that relies crucially upon the publicity and openness of the state’s ultimate confrontations with its citizens.” — Brief for Appellants, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia (1979).

If the public has a constitutional stake in observing civil and criminal proceedings, it has an equal stake in reading the arguments that shaped those proceedings. This collection makes that possible for the first time at scale — not just for scholars with institutional access, but for anyone.

Who Benefits

Opening this collection to all matters. Legal scholars and historians can now trace the evolution of constitutional doctrine without traveling to law libraries or paying for access to expensive databases. Journalists investigating civil rights, criminal justice, or government power can dig into the primary record. Law students can study cases that never made it before the court, and can discover not just how the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, but how the best advocates in the country made their cases. And curious citizens — anyone who wants to understand how the American judicial system works through the highest court in the land — can read these documents for themselves.

A basic democratic principle is also at stake. Public confidence in legal institutions depends on free public access to legal records. When significant portions of the constitutional archive exist only behind paywalls or in specialized collections, the historical record becomes available only to the few. Records and briefs are not peripheral materials — they are essential ingredients in the judicial decisions comprising our nation’s law. Making them freely available is a matter of civic accountability, not just scholarly convenience.

What’s Next

The collection is available now through the Internet Archive, fully searchable and freely downloadable. Whether you’re tracing the history of a constitutional doctrine, researching a case that affected your community, or simply curious about the arguments behind a ruling you’ve heard about, we invite you to explore. This archive of American constitutional argument is now truly open to everyone. This collection falls under the auspices of Democracy’s Library which is built on a straightforward but urgent premise: governments have created an abundance of information and put it in the public domain, but the public can’t easily access it.

Thank you to Leslie Street, Director, Wolf Law Library, William & Mary Law School for helping make this possible. Special thanks to the Free Law Project and CourtListener for providing metadata to enrich records in this collection.

King of Jazz and the Construction of Names

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Where do public monikers come from and what do they say about culture?

One of the more eclectic titles to enter the public domain in 2026 was Universal’s King of Jazz, a two-strip Technicolor musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, Bing Crosby, and even Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The work features stunning visuals, comical moments, and grand musical numbers. At the center of it all is the titular “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman.

While the film does not accurately explain how Whiteman came to receive the name—instead presenting a fictional animated sequence from in-house director Walter Lantz—it presents the moniker as his. But how did Whiteman actually come to be known as the “King of Jazz,” and what does that say about cultural production? Let’s break down the origins of this moniker.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band ca. 1921

Jazz as a recorded venture originated with the 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. The earliest origin of the word was traced to “jass” for playing something “with pep” before the spelling changed to jazz. Following this, the earliest known references to a “King of Jazz/Jass” date to 1919. On January 12, 1919, the New York based paper, The Sun, referenced Ted Lewis as “the King of Jazz.” That same year, the Ted Lewis Jazz Band recorded “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave Me” for Columbia.

An image of jazz clarinetist, Horace George circa 1914. The text below him reads: Expert Clarionet Leader, Who Resigned from the Monogram Theatre
Horace George ca. 1914

On April 9, 1919, the East St. Louis Daily Journal gave clarinetist Horace George the moniker “the King of Jass.” Notably, Horace George was also referred to as the “Clarinet King.” Horace George’s history in music has been largely overlooked, but he was present throughout the earliest years of jazz’s development. George’s recording career—as best as we can understand today—was sparse, with only a handful of records being cut under his own name. One crucial pairing was with Shelton Brooks, composer of the jazz standard, “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The pairing’s partnership dissolved in June 1920. 

Paul Whiteman began recording music in 1920 with his “Ambassador Orchestra” while performing at Atlantic City’s Ambassador Hotel, before dropping the Ambassador title altogether later. Their first release came under Victor Records with “Best Ever Medley,” which included Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Throughout the 1920s, the group—commonly known as the Paul Whiteman Orchestra—would record many popular hits. In 1924, the Orchestra teamed up with George Gershwin to make the first ever recording of “Rhapsody in Blue.” By 1930, Whiteman was the star personality called the “King of Jazz,” meant to carry the Universal Picture film of the same name. Whiteman received this name as early as August 15, 1923 at an event with New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON BIRDS ON ANTENNA TIE UP JAZZ RADIOED FROM GOTHAM DINNER A flock of harmless-looking swallows, perched on the antenna of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company’s radio broadcasting station WCAP, played havoc for a time last night with the jazzy strains of Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra as they started on a long journey over the ether waves. Whiteman was being crowned “King of Jazz” at a banquet given in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and the music from his aggregation of jazz artists was “coming through clearly.” Suddenly and apparently without reason the wave length increased from 469 to 479 meters. The vacuum tubes, so necessary to radio broadcasting, got hot and the plate current increased so greatly that it was necessary to reduce the voltage to save the tubes. Even after this reduction the plate current was 650 milamperes, instead of a normal 700 milamperes. All emergency apparatus was placed in readiness for immediate use. A break was thought certain. The engineers were puzzled. About this time some one in the…
Excerpt from the August 15, 1923 edition of The Evening Star

That Paul Whiteman is the one to end up as the “King of Jazz” in a major Hollywood motion picture of the day is not surprising, given the social benefits that he enjoyed as a white male in the early twentieth century. Jazz was created and shaped by Black musicians, many of whom were marginalized by the recording, touring, and publicity systems that elevated white bandleaders like Whiteman. Artists like Horace George, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and countless others innovated and shaped the sound and musical language of jazz.

A 1930 poster promoting King of Jazz with a caricature of Paul Whiteman on it.
A 1930 poster for King of Jazz

Recognizing this does not diminish Whiteman’s popularity or influence in his own time. Rather, it highlights the whitewashing and flattening of history and culture that arises over time. This kingly title exists within the broader social and commercial structures that shaped the musical landscape of the early twentieth century. The persistence of the moniker tells us as much about race, access, and media power as it does about musical achievement, and invites us to revisit the era with a wider lens.

Now in the public domain, King of Jazz and other recordings by Whiteman are accessible and tangible to many more of us by a simple click. The celebration of these past works further emphasizes his social benefits, but also allow for closer examination of this historical moment. There is the potential for us to discover more of Horace George’s work and other overlooked jazz artists of the time—to disentangle the moniker from one man, and to understand the broader moment without barrier.

To dive in more check out our curated list of media referenced in this post.

DLARC Adds New Radio Resources to Celebrate World Amateur Radio Day

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Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications, a library devoted to ham radio, shortwave, and related topics, announces a number of new collections to mark World Amateur Radio Day.

DLARC Logo

DLARC now offers a selection of each of the “big three” American amateur radio magazines: CQ, QST, and 73. The library recently added every issue of CQ Amateur Radio magazine published from its launch in 1946 through 1963, 230 issues in all. In addition, DLARC includes 530 issues of QST Magazine from its founding in 1915 through 1961, and every issue of 73 Amateur Radio: 516 issues published from 1960 to 2003.

73 Amateur Radio was published by Wayne Green W2NSD, who donated a complete set of the magazines to Internet Archive before he died so that they would be freely available to the world. QST is published by The American Radio Relay League, a membership organization for U.S. ham radio operators founded in 1914. CQ was published by Dick Ross, K2MGA. The issues of QST and CQ in the DLARC collections have entered the public domain. These three magazine collections are just a small part of the more than 9,500 issues of ham radio magazines available in the DLARC library.

In addition, DLARC has added a new collection of Review of International Broadcasting newsletters. Review of International Broadcasting was a newsletter devoted to the shortwave listening hobby, covering notable content heard on the air, news about legitimate broadcasters and pirate radio stations, program schedules, and radio hardware tips. The new collection includes 107 issues published from 1978 through 1997, many of which were scanned from the collection of publisher Glenn Hauser.

A selection of issues of Review of International Broadcasting

Finally, DLARC is home to a new collection of material from the Texas A&M Amateur Radio Club. The collection includes club newsletters, QSL cards, meeting minutes, slides, and other material collected and created by the group. Founded in 1912, the club is one of the oldest university radio clubs in existence. 

World Amateur Radio Day is celebrated annually on April 18 to commemorate the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union in Paris in 1925.

Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a generous grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact me at kay@archive.org.

Digital Preservationists at the After Violence Project and HMML Lend Their Voices to the Our Future Memory Campaign

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Few organizations understand the moral imperative of digital preservation better than the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) and the After Violence Project. That is why both have just endorsed Our Future Memory’s “Statement on Digital Rights,” joining a growing roster of organizations committed to preserving vulnerable archives and insisting on the four basic rights that they and other memory institutions need to do their critical work:

  1. COLLECT digital materials;
  2. PRESERVE those materials;
  3. PROVIDE CONTROLLED ACCESS; and
  4. COOPERATE with other memory institutions.

HMML is a nonprofit engaged in photographing, cataloging, and providing free access to manuscripts housed in libraries around the world. Now celebrating over 60 years of operation, it was founded at Saint John’s University (SJU) in Minnesota when the threat of the Cold War loomed large. Father Colman Barry of the Order of Saint Benedict envisioned that SJU could provide a safe repository for microfilms of the Benedictine manuscripts held in European libraries. After that, HMML expanded its mission to preserve copies of manuscripts from different religious traditions in other regions. It now serves as a digital life raft for irreplaceable documents from Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, and other war-torn areas, with an enormous collection of digitized manuscripts hosted in its online Reading Room.

“HMML is delighted to join Our Future Memory in advocating the 4 Rights,” said Dr. Columba Andrew Stewart, CEO and Executive Director. “As an organization dedicated to digital preservation and online access, HMML regards its care for the handwritten voices of our ancestors as a moral imperative. We have promised communities in dozens of countries that we will keep their manuscript heritage safe forever in digital form, and they in turn have trusted us to share that heritage with the world. We encourage all institutions, organizations, and concerned individuals to stand with us in defending the power of open information.”

The After Violence Project answered the same call in pursuit of its own archival mission. With roots in Austin, Texas, the organization is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the endangered knowledge of communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence and erasure. Its first oral history project, now called the After Violence General Collection, comprises reflections from individuals, family members, and activists about the effects that carceral and capital punishment have had on their lives. And in 2021, the After Violence Archive was created to retain interviews, correspondence, records, and all sorts of keepsakes from vulnerable and traumatized people. These projects enable everyone to bear witness to the pervasive social and psychological impacts of state violence—in defiance of concerted efforts to erase that testimony.

“The state has always tried to destroy the records of its own violence,” explained Hannah Whelan, Associate Director of Programs and Strategy. “Today that threat is more organized and better resourced than ever, as we witness federally-funded knowledge initiatives being destroyed, libraries gutted, and public access to information under attack.”

“This epistemic violence also comes from the slow monopolization of knowledge itself: platforms that lock up information behind paywalls, predatory contracts that strip memory institutions of their ability to collect, preserve, and share materials freely, and commercially-motivated systems that decide what gets remembered and what disappears. The state doesn’t just commit violence; it works hand in hand with these infrastructures to erase all evidence of how and why that violence functions.

“We signed the Our Future Memory statement because the communities we work with, namely people impacted by police brutality, mass incarceration, and the death penalty, deserve archives that can collect thoughtfully, preserve carefully, and share their stories without interference. Protecting those rights is not a technical matter or a vague policy issue. It is a critical condition under which resistance becomes possible.”

Needless to say, the Our Future Memory coalition is thrilled to welcome these distinct but complementary digital preservation efforts into the fold. With these and other signatories, the push to protect memory institutions’ traditional work keeps gaining momentum—at a time when that work is more urgent than ever before.

Ready to Join?

It’s easy! Your organization can join the movement and sign the Statement by going to the Our Future Memory website, downloading and signing the statement, and sending it back to campaigns@internetarchive.eu.

Want to Learn More?

ATTEND: If you’re in the Minneapolis area, register and attend HMML’s upcoming events, including workshops on Ethiopic manuscripts and a keynote by Dr. Stewart on its “Museum without Glass” ethos.

LISTEN: To hear more about the origins of the Our Future Memory campaign, be sure to listen to the Future Knowledge podcast on the Four Digital Rights.

WATCH: To see interviews with recent signatories from library world, watch the recording of February’s “Protect Our Future Memory” webinar.

PARTICIPATE: Going to the Rare Book and Manuscript Section conference in Milwaukee? Stop by our workshop, “Protect Our Future Memory: Developing Digital Rights for Special Collections.”

Introducing the DWeb Camp 2026 Venue: Alte Hölle

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As our group of DWeb Camp organizers arrived at Wiesenburg station, frazzled by countless train delays in Berlin, a light rain and a blossoming gray winter sky welcomed us.

Moments after our arrival, a car and a van swooped up in front of us. Two of Alte Hölle’s stewards, Marv and Störte, had come to pick us up. During our days at this former forest hotel, we heard a common refrain: Imagine this place greener and warmer. Still, we did not have to stretch our imaginations very far. From the very first moment we laid eyes on Alte Hölle e.V., the only thing we could see was DWeb Camp 2026.

“We are just starting to wake up,” Marv told us while we looked across the property in late February. Just a couple of weeks earlier, snow levels reached an almost record 71 cm, and temperatures sank to double digits below zero. We arrived at this Brandenburg event space as bare trees, families of wild boars, and humans alike were emerging from their winter hibernation.

A photo of the main building of Alte Hölle during our Winter visit

Alte Hölle has a very special history. Originally built in the 1800s as a Prussian forestry administration center, it later became a recreational facility for the Secret Service of communist Eastern Germany. Then a woman purchased it in the 1990s and managed it for three decades as a forest getaway spot. By 2021, the hotel wasn’t making a profit and she was searching for successors to take over. The full potential of this historic venue was yet to be recognized and realized.

A photo of Alte Hölle during the summer
The pool of Alte Hölle at night

At the same time, a diverse ensemble of friends who met at Chaos Communication Congress got together, looking for a place to establish a physical base to gather, build and host events and festivals. The old forest hotel was finally seen by the right sets of eyes, imagining it in a new light!

The façade of the hotel at night, lit by coloured lights

These ardent builders and dreamers booked the whole hotel for a week, coming up with ideas and ways to infuse the space with new life. After witnessing their process, the original owner slowly decided that selling her life’s work to a loose group of DIY enthusiasts was really the best option.

In 2021, this group purchased Alte Hölle, transferring the property to an association to ensure its long-term stability as individual involvement shifts and changes. Ownership by an association establishes Alte Hölle as a collectively-run physical commons. The members of the collective chipped in smaller amounts to secure a long term loan, thus collectivizing and decentralizing ownership and financial risk.

Rural Brandenburg isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot attracting scores of young people. Yet, for the Alte Hölle collective this place offers an opportunity to usher in change and a new cultural presence in the Brandenburg area. We don’t want to be a group of happy dropouts isolated from society, Störte explained to us. Our intention is to look outward, participating in local initiatives, bringing people to this place, and being a backbone for community organising and democratic practice.

The Alte Hölle collective welcomes open involvement in decision-making and shaping the future of the project. Alte Hölle’s governance model is non-hierarchical and based on consensus. It’s hard to distinguish between who lives there and who doesn’t: people come and go, but they still actively contribute to decision-making and developing Alte Hölle’s infrastructure. We want to blur the lines as much as possible between who is here and who is not, because not everyone can afford to work remotely and stay long term, but this should not influence their sense of belonging to the project, says Franzi, one of the stewards of the venue.

Alte Hölle runs as a seminar hotel for a broad variety of groups. Other collectives come there to organize retreats, literary groups hold reading events on the grounds, bike enthusiasts come for week-long workshops. And from July 8-12 2026, Alte Hölle is welcoming DWeb Camp.

How did we select this unique place an hour southwest of Berlin? It becomes clear if you look back at the history of Camp and the principles that guide our decisions.

Since our first outdoor convening, we’ve aspired to work closely with our venue’s stewards to help improve the land. We did so at the Mushroom Farm in 2019, when we brought stable internet to the remote California coastal location by building a tower and installing antennas across the property to establish a local mesh network. We want DWeb Camp to be firmly grounded in a place. A place with history, community, strong values, and aspirations. A place that shares our principles of giving agency to people, distributing value and power broadly. DWeb seeks to achieve this in the digital realm; Alte Hölle does so in a collectively-run 100,000 square meters of forest and field.

In November, we sent an email to share our ideas and explore the possibility of hosting Camp at Alte Hölle. Marv was the first to see our inquiry. As I read that email, a few things immediately just clicked. The right values, talks and workshops with interesting content and initiatives. I sent a very enthusiastic reply, and a couple of weeks later we were walking the place together with a first exploratory delegation from DWeb.

Then in February, a dozen members of our team convened to survey the site and start planning the details.

Marv of Alte Holle pointing out power, connectivity, and other features of the 100,000 square meters of the property.
Marv of Alte Holle pointing out power, connectivity, and other features of the 100,000 square meters of the property.

So now, the organizing machine is in full motion. We are meeting the vibrant culture of Alte Hölle with the joyful spirit of DWeb Camp. Not only will we have a lot of infrastructure to build, but also many things to make! Using wood sourced from local forests, we plan to craft benches, tables, and some other key structures we’ll need at camp.

The DWeb and Department of Decentralization organizers and the Alte Hölle community are looking forward to welcoming you to this land of rich history and abundant promise.

As Franzi shared, I love the idea and the principles behind DWeb Camp, and I am really looking forward to having an international event with many people coming from all around the world!

A music festival at Alte Hölle
Sunrays and people walking on the Alte Hölle field.

How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

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At the legendary c-base, technologists, activists, and artists gathered to shape the next chapter of the decentralized web.

c-base is a space station that “crashed” and is being reconstructed along the Spree river by a group of Berlin hackers. Some call it the mother of all hackerspaces.

On a gray February morning in Berlin, people wandered down a dark ramp into a space station.

Not a metaphorical one—at least not entirely. c-base, with its blinking lights, maze of cables, and decades of hacker lore, has long described itself as a space station that crashed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Since the mid-1990s it has been a gathering place for coders and tinkerers who prefer to build the future themselves rather than wait for it to arrive.

On this particular morning, they had come to design something new.

In February, an invitation had circulated across Europe’s decentralized technology networks: come to c-base and help shape the next DWeb Camp, a five-day gathering that will take place this July in the forests of Brandenburg.

There was no fixed agenda, and no finished plan.

Just a question.

If we were to build the next version of DWeb Camp together, what might it look like?

Before long, the room filled. Peer-to-peer developers had come from Edinburgh, free-software advocates from Berlin, privacy-first technologists from Shanghai, and policy thinkers from Copenhagen. Artists, funders, open-source builders, and organizers filtered in carrying laptops and winter coats. Most of them had never met before.

They had come not just to attend—but to help build something.

The timing was not accidental. Across the world, the systems shaping the internet—and increasingly public life—are consolidating. Governments tighten control. Platforms encroach on our privacy. The internet as we know it is splintering, and along with it, our consensus about what is true. For many in the room that morning, the pressing question was can we restructure the web before it hardens into something more destructive than its early architects ever imagined?

DWeb Camp, first held in Northern California in 2019, grew out of that concern. The gathering was conceived as a place where technologists, artists, organizers, and policymakers might come together to begin building a more decentralized web.

A web built less like a pyramid and more like a forest. Distributed. Resilient. Sharing resources underground.

This summer, DWeb Camp’s theme is “Root Systems,” and it moves to Europe for the first time. The meeting at c-base was an early step in imagining what might grow there.

For an hour, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle answered the questions of DWeb Sr. Organizer, Wendy Hanamura, in a wide-ranging chat about public AI, his successes and failures, and the imperative for decentralization in this political moment.

Origins of a Decentralized Gathering

“It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.

“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

Collective Intelligence

“It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.

“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

Collective Intelligence

At c-base, Kahle and a dozen core organizers didn’t arrive with a finished program. Instead they facilitated breakout conversations, solicited unconference topics, and most importantly, listened.

Throughout the day, small circles formed across the space station, and similar themes surfaced again and again.

Not everything, participants suggested, needs to scale to billions of users. Perhaps some of the most important decentralized tools will serve smaller networks—families, communities, groups of collaborators who know one another. An intimate web, as some people called it, rather than the global one.

Others spoke about shared infrastructure in a broader sense: not just software, but the resources communities could distribute. Buildings. Time. Convenings. Knowledge. The question, several people suggested, was not simply how to build better tools but how to sustain the ecosystems that allow those tools to exist.

Hölke Brammer, of the Hypercerts Foundation, offered a framework that drew nods around the table.

“It’s said, first you need the values,” he recited.
“Then governance.
Then the right incentives.
And finally the technology to build it.”

DWeb Camp tries to bring all of those layers together in the same place at the same time. Which means inviting not just engineers but researchers, economists and storytellers.

Marek Tuszynski, co-founder of Tactical Tech, offered a wry observation about how the technology world often divides itself.

“They say technology is inspired in San Francisco,” he recounted. “It’s built in China. And criticized in Europe.”

The challenge, he suggested, was to move beyond those boxes—to collaborate across them.

Later, when participants were asked what would make the camp most valuable, one answer surfaced repeatedly.

“To find the people I want to work with after Camp,” someone said, “and figure out how to keep working together on an on-going basis.”

Grounded in Place

Franzi and Marv, two of the stewards of the Alte Holle Collective, share the terrain of the 100,000 sq. meters retreat site.

DWeb Camp has always been shaped by the places where it occurs.

When organizers began looking for a European site, they eventually settled on Alte Hölle, a forested property in Brandenburg about an hour southwest of Berlin.

The decision had as much to do with the people stewarding the land as with the landscape itself.

In 2021, a collective of friends who met at Chaos Communications Camp purchased the property—once a Stasi recreation site—with the intention of turning it into a long-term gathering place for artists, hackers, and activists.

Their question was straightforward.

Why build a camp only to dismantle it a few days later?   Why not create infrastructure that could remain?

Two of the site’s stewards, Franzi and Marv, joined the gathering at c-base. Rather than simply presenting the site, they participated in the discussions, listening carefully to the people who will soon gather there.

“We share a lot of the same values,” they said. “We are a volunteer group that supports [you] and is an ally for [your] event.” 

The goal, for DWeb organizers, is not merely to occupy Alte Hölle but to contribute to it—to plant something, rather than simply passing through.

The field where some 700+ campers will pitch their tents in Brandenburg.

Partners with Principles

Afri of Department of Decentralization demonstrates the programmable badge his team is developing for DWeb Camp. Via radio waves, you will be able to talk person to person at Camp, without going to the cloud or WIFI.

Strong collaborators don’t just support your vision. They push you to live up to it.

Berlin’s Department of Decentralization (DoD)—a collective formed after organizing ETHBerlin in 2018—has encouraged DWeb Camp organizers to align our tools more closely with our principles. That means prioritizing open-source infrastructure wherever possible.

Tickets will be sold through PreTix.
The schedule will run on PreTalx.
Collaborative documents will live on CryptPad.
Camp communications will be via Matrix.

Tools designed with privacy and security in mind. Not just talking about decentralization, but practicing it.

Building Across Borders

Some of the organizers of DWeb Camp from Alte Hölle, Department of Decentralization and the Internet Archive came together at c-base in February to plan for July.

Based across North America and Europe, the organizers of DWeb Camp 2026 have lineages that span the globe—Nigeria, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, and the United States. We come from different political contexts. Different assumptions about technology. Different cultural norms. The challenge–and the promise–is to weave those perspectives into something coherent, yet distinct. 

Toward the end of the day at c-base, Kahle returned to a theme that was disarmingly simple.

Welcome.

“This is a really special community…they welcomed me twenty years ago,” he said. “You may not be aware of the effect you have by saying ‘welcome’ to somebody from a foreign place. I think it is a hallmark of a community that is living and thriving.”

That small gesture, he suggested, can shape the direction of entire communities. “I hope that DWeb Camp is to your liking, if it’s not, say so, and let’s basically make it better. Let’s build something together.” 

Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.

It is something closer to a living system. It’s shaped by the people who show up, the relationships they form, and the ideas that take hold.

And in the forests of Brandenburg this July, those connections—technical, social, and human—will begin to spread beneath the surface.

Like any root system, their real strength may lie in what we cannot see.

View the fireside chat with Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura.

Brewster Kahle to Receive Computer History Museum’s Fellow Award on April 25

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Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, has been named a 2026 Fellow by the Computer History Museum. The annual Fellow Award, to be presented on April 25, 2026, honors pioneers whose work has shaped the foundations of computing and expanded access to knowledge in the digital age. Brewster is recognized for his pioneering roles in online search engines, as well as his enduring leadership in digital preservation and open access through the Internet Archive. He joins an extraordinary group of past Fellows, including Steve Wozniak, Katherine Johnson, Gordon Moore, and Tim Berners-Lee.

The Computer History Museum describes this year’s Fellows as individuals who have “changed the world through their advancements in computing and evolution of the digital age”—a description that resonates deeply with Brewster’s decades-long mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

Everyone is invited to join us online for the Fellow Awards ceremony livestream, starting at 7:30pm PT on April 25th. In-person attendance at the awards ceremony is by invitation only. During the awards ceremony, attendees will hear directly from honorees through reflections on their journeys, video tributes, and remarks on their visions for the future.

For the Internet Archive community, this recognition is not only a celebration of Brewster’s work, but of the shared effort to preserve our digital heritage and keep it accessible for generations to come.