Carl Malamud's FedFlix project is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) whereby he takes NTIS videos, digitizes them and uploads them to the Internet Archive.

Well now he's expanding FedFlix to include public domain videos from the National Archives. He's released 41 videos into the public domain in this way, but has put together an Amazon Wish List in order to expand public access to public domain video content from the National Archives. If you see anything you'd like to buy the public domain, they'll take your DVD and upload the video to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and to public.resource.org's own rsync/ftp public domain stock footage library. So why not add a gift of the public domain to your favorite person's/people's stockings this year? We'll all be glad we did!

UPDATE 12/25/09: The wish list has been fulfilled. You can watch all of the donated NARA videos on YouTube, Internet Archive, or public.resource.org's bulk server. Thanks Carl!

[HT BoingBoing!]

This is a presentation that is definitely worth seeing!

• Web of Books, Peter Brantley, Presentation at Tools of Change Frankfurt introducing the BookServer architecture. Brief description of history, motivations, and technical outline.

  "Creating a new architecture using common, open standards that permits people to ?nd, buy, acquire, and read books from any source, on any device, using many different ebook applications."

I had known that the Internet Archive had submitted a response to the GPO's RFP for mass digitization. A friend just sent me the link to the proposal submitted to GPO (embedded below and here's the link to the proposal and supporting documents).

As you can probably guess, we've been pulling for the Archive to get the bid, not least of which because the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library and we've stated on more than one occasion that privatization of public domain government information is a very bad idea. But also, we've been heartened by the quality of the Archive's scans to date, their openness and willingness to be collaborative in their processes and data access and sharing. Those qualities certainly come through in their proposal for mass digitization -- not to mention the fact that they've actually made their proposal public!

While the award has not been officially announced, we really hope that the Archive wins the award. Perhaps GPO will name them as an official depository library and work with them not only on the "legacy" collection (there needs to be a better description of the deep and rich collections of depository libraries than the somewhat pejorative "legacy" :-| ) but on digital deposit of government documents going forward.

--that is all.

Of all the things I have read about the Google book digitization project and its consequences, this is one of the best. Listen to the interview (Lunchtime Listen!) or read the transcript.

• Google Faces Antitrust Investigation for Agreement to Digitize Millions of Books Online, interview with Brewster Kahle, Democracy Now!, April 30, 2009.

This is relevant to government documents since so many are in the project. The way they are treated and controlled by Google and Google's contracts and licenses and agreements will have lasting impact on long-term, free, public access.

Kahle highlights two things that, for me, are very important. First, at least some of the participating libraries are relying solely on Google and its restrictions and are not even getting digital copies from Google although they could.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Let's take the out of copyright, the stuff that's really--it's public domain, meaning belongs to the public. It's lived long enough to become part of the public sphere. But there are perpetual restrictions that the libraries must perform, that if they get these digital copies back, they must put up restrictions on use, such that they cannot be accessible by the general public.

AMY GOODMAN: Who can they be accessed by?

BREWSTER KAHLE: People on campus can use them, for the out-of-copyright works, but just on campus. And otherwise, they have to put up restrictions. And what's turning out is a lot of these libraries aren't even bothering to get copies back, because what can they use them for? I mean, in the future, people are going to want to have access to as many books as possible. And what Google is doing is pulling these together for many libraries to build a great collection. Terrific. But the bits and pieces that are going back to these libraries don't make up a great collection. And what they can do with them is very, very limited. So these libraries aren't, in many cases, even bothering to get the digital copies back.

Second, when Kahle asked if Google would share copies of digitized books with the Internet Archive, Google refused.

AMY GOODMAN: Conceivably, Google could give you the digitized copies, is that right?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Yes, Google could, but they have refused.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

BREWSTER KAHLE: They say that they've paid for the work. They want to be the place that people go to get them. So they are going to be the proprietors of the public domain.

Although Google claims its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," it would be more accurate to say its mission is to make money controlling the world's information.

The Economist has an online article "The Internet's Librarian" that is also in the March 5th, 2009 print edition.

...the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade. “We are trying to build Alexandria 2.0,” says Mr Kahle with a wide-eyed, boyish grin. Sure, and plenty of people are trying to abolish hunger, too.

It would be easy to dismiss Mr Kahle as an idealistic fruitcake, but for one thing: he has an impressive record when it comes to setting lofty goals and then lining up the people and technology needed to get the job done. “Brewster is a visionary who looks at things differently,” says Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto. “He is able to imagine doing things that everyone else thinks are impossible. But then he does them.”

This is probably my favorite quote:

“Come back when you have a warrant,” reads the floor mat underneath his office recliner. It was a gift from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (an activist group on whose board Mr Kahle sits) after Mr Kahle refused to hand over information about one of the Internet Archive’s users to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2007.

I only wish more interviews with Brewster would discuss the plethora of government documents that are in Internet Archive. It's a valuable resource and it keeps growing!

FLYP online magazine published an interview with Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, entitled "Know It All". There is a text version of the article, but the interactive multi-media verison is much more fun! Plus, it contains a nice video showing Brewster explaining the mission of Internet Archive.

Brewster Kahle wants to give you digital access to every book, film, video, song, TV show and periodical ever published. If he succeeds, the world will be a different place.

Starting on January 5, 2009, the Department of Labor (DOL) archived all DOL agency Web sites as they existed at that time.

• DOL Web Site Archive
• Labor Department launches digital snapshot project, By Wyatt Kash, Government Computer News, Jan 15, 2009.

According to the GCN article, the Department was concerned that, in the Library of Congress project to crawl and harvest agency web sites at the end of the Bush administration, the Department had no control over what would be archived and when and there will be limitations on what gets preserved and the searchability of those pages. The Department's snapshot will give it control over dates and areas on the site preserved and will allow users to search for key words and text.

The department estimates that it has roughly 1.6 million pages of information. With a service agreement with the Internet Archive, the department will be able to archive up to 5 million Web pages and related documents over the course of a year.

The Internet Archive is also working separately with the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine.

Here's an It's-a-wonderful-life-esque look at the US Congress for your friday afternoon viewing pleasure. This video can be found at the Internet Archive's Prelinger Archives. I happened upon this film when it jumped out at me from the credits of John Hodgman's Spamasterpiece Theater Vol II: "Wuthering Wire Transfers."

that is all.

Harvest time, By William Jackson, GCN, 10/27/08.

A nice article about the end-of-administration web harvest.

See also: Library Partnership Saves Government Sites.

I'd like to survey you, our loyal FGI readers. I'm co-presenting with Molly Bragg at next week's Depository Library Council conference about digital collections using archive-it (see title and abstract below). I've got an outline but I'd really like to know what questions YOU have about archive-it and digital collections. What do YOU want to know about archive-it? So, please please please leave a comment here so that my presentation will be even more amazing :-)

Title of Presentation:

Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: Archiving and Preserving Born Digital Government Documents

Abstract:

Stanford University Library has been a federal depository library since 1895. In 2007, the library began collecting born digital documents using Archive-It, the web archiving service from Internet Archive (www.archive-it.org). In this presentation James Jacobs will discuss his group's objectives and procedures for selecting and archiving digital content and share examples of the unique content preserved. Molly Bragg will present an overview of web archiving projects and tools used and developed by Internet Archive. These tools are used by libraries around the world to preserve government documents and other born digital content.

You may or may not have heard of "disaster capitalism." Well here's a case of "disaster web harvesting!" I just got an email from our friends at the Internet Archive. They're the ones that preserve the 85 billion+ web pages from 1996 to the present and make them all freely accessible in the Wayback Machine (WOW!!).

Well at 4:30 Pacific Time, they're going to set up an Archive-It collection to crawl sites regarding the crisis unfolding between Russia and Georgia. If you've got a favorite site that you've been using to track this crisis, please send urls to Molly Bragg (mbragg AT archive DOT org).

Thanks!

According to a press release, NASA and Internet Archive on Thursday "made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video.... [T]he Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource."

• NASA and Internet Archive Launch Centralized Resource for Images, PRNewsWire, July 24, 2008.
• NASA Images

The Internet Archives says that it entered into an agreement with NASA in 2007 to create this service, but that the it receives no financial support from NASA. The project is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation and and IA is encouraging users of the site to help support this project.

Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence has posted the full text of one of its guidebooks, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis originally published in 1999. you can get it on the CIA site, but I also took the liberty of downloading it and then uploading it to the Internet Archive's government documents collection. That link is stable and would be appropriate for adding to the 856 field of your bib record. Wouldn't it be really cool if all of those 4412 govt documents in the IA's collection had downloadable MARC records?

Intelligence analysts, in seeking to make sound judgments, are always under challenge from the complexities of the issues they address and from the demands made on them for timeliness and volume of production…

How many times have we encountered situations in which completely plausible premises, based on solid expertise, have been used to construct a logically valid forecast–with virtually unanimous agreement–that turned out to be dead wrong?

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

Erik Ringmar, professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, wants others to join him in putting restricted government documents on the web.

I say this is awesome! There's certainly precedent for this kind of activism: Jared Benedict liberated a bunch of USGS maps and just last week, I uploaded the Iraqi Perspectives Report to the Internet Archive. Anyone else out there set free a government document? Leave us a comment.

So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me).

I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market capitalism.