Internet Archive Blogs

Since our launch on January 22, the Political TV Ad Archive has archived more than 1,080 ads with more than 155,000 airings. We’ve trained hundreds of journalists, students, and other interested members of the public with face-to-face trainings. But much as we would like to, we can’t talk to each of you individually. That’s why we created this video.

Watch the video for an overview of the project, the wealth of information it provides, and how fact checkers and journalists have been using it to enrich their reporting. It is a great introduction for educators to use with students, for civic groups to engage their membership in the political process, and for reporters who want to get the basics on how to use the site.

And remember: we want to hear from you about how you are using the Political TV Ad Archive. Please drop us an email at politicalad@archive.org or tweet us @PolitAdArchive. Over the week ahead, we’ll be highlighting examples of how educators have used the project in their classrooms. We’d love to feature examples of how other members of the public are using this collection to enhance deeper understanding of the 2016 elections.

Going forward, we are tracking ads in the New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC markets. These markets will provide a window on political ads appearing in several upcoming primary states: California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. 

Enjoy!

The Internet Archive, joined by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Society of American Archivists filed an amicus brief in Fox v. TVEyes on March 23, 2016. In the brief, the Internet Archive and its partners urge the court to issue a decision that will support rather than hinder the development of comprehensive archives of television broadcasts.

The case involves a copyright dispute between Fox News and TVEyes, a service that records all content broadcast by more than 1,400 television and radio stations and transforms the content into a searchable database for its subscribers. Fox News sued TVEyes in 2013, alleging that the service violates its copyright. TVEyes asserted that its use of Fox News content is protected by fair use.

Drawing on the Internet Archive’s experience with its TV News Archive and Political TV Ad Archive, the friend-of-the-court brief highlights the public benefits that flow from archiving and making television content available for public access. “The TV News Archive allows the public to view previously aired broadcasts–as they actually went out over the air–to evaluate and understand statements made by public officials, members of the news media, advertising sponsors, and others, encouraging public discourse and political accountability,” said Roger Macdonald, Director of the TV Archive.

Moreover, creating digital databases of television content allows aggregated information about the broadcasts themselves to come to light, unlocking researchers’ ability to process, mine, and analyze media content as data. “Like library collections of books and newspapers, television archives like the TV News Archive and the Political TV Ad Archive allow anyone to thoughtfully assess content from these influential media, enhancing the work of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, civic organizations, and other engaged citizens,” said Tomasz Barczyk, a Berkeley Law student from the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic who helped author the brief.

The brief also explains the importance of fostering a robust community of archiving organizations. Because television broadcasts are ephemeral, content is easily lost if efforts are not made to preserve it systematically.  In fact, a number of historically and culturally significant broadcasts have already been lost, from BBC news coverage of 9/11 to early episodes of Doctor Who. Archiving services prevent this disappearance by collecting, indexing, and preserving broadcast content for future public access.

A decision in this case against fair use would chill these services and could result in the loss of significant cultural resources. “This is an important case for the future of digital archives,” explained William Binkley, the other student attorney who worked on the brief. “If the court rules against TVEyes, there’s a real risk it could discourage efforts by non-profits to create searchable databases of television clips. That would deprive researchers and the general public of a tremendously valuable source of knowledge.”

The Internet Archive would like to thank Tomasz Barczyk, William Binkley, and Brianna Schofield from the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley Law for helping to introduce an important library perspective as the Second Circuit court considers this case with important cultural implications.

The United States Copyright Office is seeking feedback on how the “notice and takedown” system created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the “DMCA Safe Harbors,” is working. Congress decided that in this country, users of the Internet should be allowed to share their ideas with the world via Internet platforms. In order to facilitate this broad goal, Congress established a system that protects platforms from liability for the copyright infringement of their users, as long as the platforms remove material when a copyright holder complains. The DMCA also allows users to challenge improper takedowns.

We filed comments this week, explaining that the DMCA is generally working as Congress intended it to. These provisions allow platforms like the Internet Archive to provide services such as hosting and making available user-generated content without the risk of getting embroiled in lawsuit after lawsuit. We also offered some thoughts on ways the DMCA could work better for nonprofits and libraries, for example, by deterring copyright holders from using the notice and takedown process to silence legitimate commentary or criticism.

The DMCA Safe Harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the growth of the Internet as an engine for innovation and free expression. We are happy to provide our perspective on this important issue to the Copyright Office.

The history of a book isn’t captured merely by the background of the author or its publishing date or its written content. Most books were purchased and read by someone; they are from a specific time and place. That too is part of each book’s history. Sometimes in digitizing books we find pressed flowers or a single leaf or pieces of paper that were used as bookmarks then forgotten. We even found a desiccated chameleon in one book.   When we find something like that at the Internet Archive’s Digitization Centers, we digitize the object because it is part of the history of that book. We see our mission to be archiving each book exactly as it was found, so that when you flip through a book, you are seeing it as if you had the physical copy in your hands, not just black text on a white page.

Take for example this book from the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection:  The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay. In the chapter on Clay’s speeches, you can see what Abraham Lincoln highlighted, points he thought worthy of noting.

In fact, by seeing what Lincoln underscored as he read this book and by reading his notes, you get a glimpse into what may have shaped his ideas; how he might have then used certain concepts to express his thoughts and policies about slavery and its abolition. The history of this book, which was held and read and annotated by Abraham Lincoln, had a direct effect on the history of this nation. A historic book that also has a history of it’s own.

We’ve digitized over 125,000 items here at the Midwest Regional Digitization Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In several books we digitized for the University of Pittsburgh’s Darlington Collection, we found some treasures. In one, we found a note by William Henry Harrison , then governor of the Indian Territory in 1803. (Scroll down the pages to see the letters in situ.)

In another we found a promissory note by Aaron Burr from 1796 for a large sum of money. Burr was a controversial person to say the least. He was not only a Revolutionary War hero, Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President and a presidential candidate himself, but also the man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Once someone at the University of Pittsburgh contacted me regarding an item a digital reader had made them aware of:  a previously unknown, original survey report written by none other than Daniel Boone!  He asked me if  I knew anything about it. I verified that we had found and digitized it–along with the note by Aaron Burr  and the letter by William Henry Harrison. I got a shocked reply, “Where??”  Apparently digitizing not only opened up access to these books, it also rediscovered long-lost manuscripts stuck between the pages, penned by important figures in American history. 

The history of these books turned out to contain the history of this country, highlighted in a very personal way. Whether it is someone pressing a violet between the pages, Abe Lincoln researching abolition, or a forgotten survey report by Daniel Boone, sometimes the material we digitize can bring our past alive.  What will you discover lodged between the pages in our three million digital books?

Take a tour of the Midwest Regional Digitization with Jeff Sharpe in this recent video.

Jeff Sharpe is Senior Digitization Manager for the Midwest Region.

Jeff’s work experience in administration and research led him to the Internet Archive’s digitization center in the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne Indiana. He’s proud of his role in helping to bring well over a hundred thousand books online for universal access, including more than fifteen thousand items digitized by volunteers at the Midwest Center. Jeff is a voracious reader and loves books. He has a passion for history and archaeology– particularly from the Mayan civilization which has led him to  travel extensively to Mayan ruins. He enjoys among other things bicycle riding, gardening, and hanging out with his wife, two kids, and their two dogs.

This is Fair Use Week, an annual recognition of the most important user right in U.S. copyright law. Today we celebrate fair use and fair dealing along with a host of other participating groups and organizations.

The fundamental goal of fair use aligns with the Internet Archive’s mission of providing universal access to all human knowledge. Fair use is often called the “safety valve” of copyright law, built in to ensure that the protection granted to authors doesn’t stifle the very creativity and innovation it was designed to promote. Libraries serve as guardians of the public’s access to information and facilitate education, research, scholarship, creativity, and discovery—activities essential to the functioning of our democratic society. Fair use plays a similar role in the legal world, allowing access and reuse of materials in order to criticize or comment on them, for educational purposes, or in ways that alter the original with a new message or meaning.

Over the years, the flexible nature of fair use has supported the creation and use of new technologies, like the VCR for home recording of television programs, or search engines for the web. It has also helped libraries to adapt to new technologies and bring traditional library functions into the digital age, for example, by allowing libraries to digitize books in their collections for the purposes of building search tools and providing access to the blind and print disabled. Fair use allows artists and musicians to reuse materials to comment on society and the world around them, bloggers to use photos of the people and organizations they are criticizing, and citizens to use videos to comment on the effectiveness of their elected officials. Fair use also allows regular people to engage with our culture, from debating the color of a dress to making creative mashups of existing works.

People across the web have engaged in the creative remixing of materials hosted here at the Archive. For example, we have a collection dedicated to mashups created from the Prelinger film archives. Take a look at one of our favorites: https://archive.org/details/bonobocirrus

Want to make your own mashup from our collection, but not sure how fair use works exactly? Check out this guide to best practices in fair use for online video, which provides some helpful guidelines for understanding how to use fair use. Fair use week is the perfect time to learn about and exercise your own fair use rights.

New, free website archives political TV ads in 2016 primaries married with fact-checking and reporting from award-winning journalism partners

After sifting through more than 100,000 hours of broadcast television coverage and counting, the Internet Archive today launches its new, free Political TV Ad Archive website —PoliticalAdArchive.org — with more than 30,000 ad airings archived. This new resource will bring journalists, researchers, and the public resources to help hold politicians accountable for the messages they deliver in TV ads.

Each ad is accompanied by underlying, downloadable data on how often it has aired, where, and when in 20 TV markets throughout eight key primary states. In addition, the site links to fact-checking and follow-the-money journalism by the project’s partners: the American Press Institute, the Center for Responsive Politics, the Center for Public Integrity, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’sFact Checker.

The ads range from Democrat Bernie Sanders’ ad blanketing Iowa with more than 1,300 airings that proclaims him to be a “pragmatist”; to Marco Rubio’s proclamation that “this is the greatest country in the world, and acting like it,” which aired more than 1,700 times in Iowa and New Hampshire; to the negative ad sponsored by super PAC Right to Rise, which supports Jeb Bush, that takes a swing at rivals Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio in thirty seconds flat.

The ad collection also gathers instances where news broadcasts have played excerpts of ads or even entire ads as part of their reporting — in other words, “earned media.” For example, Trump’s first ad, which focused on immigration, was aired several times as part of news reports.

On the new website, each ad is archived on its own page, along with downloadable metadata on how often the ad has aired, on which TV stations, where, and when. These data also include information on who is sponsoring the ad, the subject(s) covered in the ad, which candidates are targeted in the ad, and the type of legal designation of the sponsor — e.g., super PAC, campaign committee, 501(c), and so on.

“Public libraries are a cornerstone of democracy; by providing information to anyone who seeks it, they give citizens the ability to make better decisions,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “We’re creating this library of political ads so that voters have some control over the messages that politicians and outside groups pile on at election time.”

“Before the primaries are over, the public in key primary states will be buried in campaign ads generating more heat than light. This new website will be a resource for journalists, academics, civic groups and the general public to have a better chance at separating lies from truths and learn who is paying for the ads,” said Roger Macdonald, director of the Television Archive for the Internet Archive.

Internet Archive senior engineer, Dan Schultz, an innovator in harnessing technology for fact checking, tapped an open source audio fingerprinting tool developed by Columbia University known as “audfprint” to track down airings of political TV ads in the television broadcast airwaves. He built on engineering created by Tracey Jaquith, architect of the TV Archive. The new system, whimsically named the “Duplitron,” is also open source and should prove useful in other video/audio analysis projects.

“Thanks to technological advances, we can find a copy of a political ad, create an unique fingerprint, and then match it to other segments of audio that share that same fingerprint. The result: we can figure out how many times ads have aired, where, and when,” said Schultz.

Key findings so far from the project’s journalism partners include:

• PolitiFact rated a claim in this Donald Trump campaign ad as “Pants on Fire” because it proclaimed that Trump would “stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for,” while showing footage not of Mexican immigrants, but rather of refugees streaming into Morocco that had been pulled from an Italian news network. See the ad here.
• FactCheck.org reported that a Hillary Clinton TV ad that claimed that drug prices had doubled in the last seven years was inaccurate: “A report, provided by her campaign, says brand-name drug prices on average have more than doubled. But more than 80 percent of filled prescriptions are generic drugs, and those prices have declined by nearly 63 percent, that same report says.” See the ad here.
• The Washington Post’sFact Checker gave four Pinocchios to a claim in an ad sponsored by Ted Cruz’s campaign charging that Sen. Marco Rubio, Fla., had compromised on the immigration issue. This claim comes from Cruz’ contention that Rubio supported a bill that would give “President Obama blanket authority to admit Syrian refugees…without mandating meaningful background checks…” The fact-checking group pointed to immigration experts who say this interpretation of the immigration bill in question is wrong. See the ad here.
• The Center for Public Integrity has reported that an ad targeting Trump, Rubio, and Cruz, sponsored by the super PAC Right to Rise, which supports Jeb Bush, was funded by “close confidants of Bush and his storied political family.” This includes scions of banks and equity firms. See the ad here.
• More than 80 percent of ads run in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries are sponsored by super PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, up 71 percent over 2011 and a 12,000 percent jump over 2007. The analysis was done in conjunction with Wesleyan Media Project.

The Political TV Ad Archive is collecting television from key primary states before the primary or caucus in that particular state. Instances of airings captured by the website include both paid media and “earned media” — when TV news broadcasts air significant portions of ads while doing stories about them.

The Political TV Ad Archive is funded by the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Challenge is a joint effort of the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. Christopher Buck and Craig Newmark have made individual contributions to the project. In addition, the Internet Archive has received funding from the Democracy Fund to conduct joint trainings of journalists in key primary states in partnership with the American Press Institute. The launch event is co-sponsored by the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

“This new tool has the potential to bring more accountability to the voting process, providing a resource to uncover and verify important information in the lead up to the 2016 elections,” said John Bracken, Knight Foundation vice president for media innovation.

So you think you can internet? Help Wikipedia get more citations.

This week is Wikipedia’s 15th birthday and the Wikipedia Library has created the #1lib1ref campaign this week to encourage information professionals and others to add one citation to Wikipedia’s many [citation needed] tags in their articles. If every librarian in the world added one citation, there would be no more [citation needed] tags!

The Internet Archive is a great source for fact checking and our web-native content is easy to cite! Here’s some more information if you’d like to get started.

• There’s a Facebook group for the event if you’d like to ask questions or you can send messages to the Wikipedia Library on Twitter.
• This Citation Hunt tool can help you find articles needing cites.
• Not sure how to add a citation? Look at these citation templates. You can also read this help page about citing Internet Archive pages specifically (pdf tip sheet).

You can start from our texts collection, use our advanced search or try Open Library’s full text search. You can even add citations to content from our TV News Archive which can search captions or find historical information about the internet using the Wayback Machine. The campaign only goes through the 23rd but please feel free to keep adding citations and increasing the usefulness of Wikipedia by using our primary and secondary source materials.