Meet the Librarians of the Internet Archive
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2025 6:35 am
In celebration of National Library Week, we’d like to introduce you to some of the professional librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in projects closely associated with our programs. Over the next two weeks, you’ll hear from librarians and other information professionals who are using their education and training in library science and related fields to support the Internet Archive’s patrons.
Alexis Rossi
What draws librarians to work at the Internet Archive? From patron buy telemarketing data services to collection management to web archiving, the answers are as varied as the departments in which these professionals work. But a common theme emerges from the profiles—that of professionals wanting to use their skills and knowledge in support of the Internet Archive’s mission: “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
We hope that over these next two weeks you’ll learn something about the librarians working behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, and you’ll come to appreciate the training and dedication that influence their daily work. We’re pleased to help you “Meet the Librarians” during this National Library Week and beyond:
Jessamyn West, accessibility – Vermont Mutual Aid Society
Catherine Falls, Community Webs – Internet Archive
Sawood Alam, web archiving – Internet Archive
Lisa Seaberg, patron services – Internet Archive
Alexis Rossi, media and access – Internet Archive (Online April 13)
Posted in Archive-It, Books Archive, News, Video Archive, Wayback Machine - Web Archive, Web & Data Services |
Internet Archive Joins Opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”
Posted on March 29, 2022 by Peter M. Routhier
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised “Online Streaming Act” comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new “Online Safety Bill” seeks to censor “legal but harmful content” in a way that would threaten open digital spaces. And in the USA, content filtering is once again being floated as the answer to online copyright infringement, this time via the “SMART Copyright Act of 2022“.
If the SMART Copyright Act were to pass, the Copyright Office would select a “technical measure” every three years that online service providers would be required to implement. The intent, as supporters have made clear, is for the Copyright Office to mandate technical measures that would automatically “filter out” allegedly infringing material. Lobbyists and lawyers for the owners of these technologies would be allowed to petition the Copyright Office to require the adoption of their own products. Whatever technology is adopted would then have to be purchased and implemented by anyone swept up by the law—from big tech platforms to your local research library. Failure to do so could be punishable by millions of dollars in civil penalties, among other things. As Professor Eric Goldman has written:
The SMART Copyright Act is a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering of copyrighted works. . . mandatory filters are error-prone in ways that hurt consumers, and they raise entry barriers in ways that reduce competition.
More generally, the SMART Copyright Act would give the Copyright Office a truly extraordinary power–the ability to force thousands of businesses to adopt, at their expense, technology they don’t want and may not need, and the mandated technologies could reshape how the Internet works.
Wouldn’t It Be Great if Internet Services Had to License Technologies Selected by Hollywood? (Comments on the Very Dumb “SMART Copyright Act”), from Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog on March 23, 2022
This bill and its supporters do not represent the public’s interest in fair copyright policy and a robust and accessible public domain. That is a shame, because much good could be done if policymakers would put the public’s interest first. For example, the Copyright Office—which holds records of every copyright ever registered, including all those works which have passed into the public domain—could help catalogue the public domain and prevent it from being swept up by today’s already-overzealous automated filtering technologies (an idea inspired by this white paper from Paul Keller and Felix Reda). Instead, the public domain continues to be treated as acceptable collateral damage in the quest to impose ever-greater restrictions on free expression online.
Alexis Rossi
What draws librarians to work at the Internet Archive? From patron buy telemarketing data services to collection management to web archiving, the answers are as varied as the departments in which these professionals work. But a common theme emerges from the profiles—that of professionals wanting to use their skills and knowledge in support of the Internet Archive’s mission: “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
We hope that over these next two weeks you’ll learn something about the librarians working behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, and you’ll come to appreciate the training and dedication that influence their daily work. We’re pleased to help you “Meet the Librarians” during this National Library Week and beyond:
Jessamyn West, accessibility – Vermont Mutual Aid Society
Catherine Falls, Community Webs – Internet Archive
Sawood Alam, web archiving – Internet Archive
Lisa Seaberg, patron services – Internet Archive
Alexis Rossi, media and access – Internet Archive (Online April 13)
Posted in Archive-It, Books Archive, News, Video Archive, Wayback Machine - Web Archive, Web & Data Services |
Internet Archive Joins Opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”
Posted on March 29, 2022 by Peter M. Routhier
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised “Online Streaming Act” comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new “Online Safety Bill” seeks to censor “legal but harmful content” in a way that would threaten open digital spaces. And in the USA, content filtering is once again being floated as the answer to online copyright infringement, this time via the “SMART Copyright Act of 2022“.
If the SMART Copyright Act were to pass, the Copyright Office would select a “technical measure” every three years that online service providers would be required to implement. The intent, as supporters have made clear, is for the Copyright Office to mandate technical measures that would automatically “filter out” allegedly infringing material. Lobbyists and lawyers for the owners of these technologies would be allowed to petition the Copyright Office to require the adoption of their own products. Whatever technology is adopted would then have to be purchased and implemented by anyone swept up by the law—from big tech platforms to your local research library. Failure to do so could be punishable by millions of dollars in civil penalties, among other things. As Professor Eric Goldman has written:
The SMART Copyright Act is a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering of copyrighted works. . . mandatory filters are error-prone in ways that hurt consumers, and they raise entry barriers in ways that reduce competition.
More generally, the SMART Copyright Act would give the Copyright Office a truly extraordinary power–the ability to force thousands of businesses to adopt, at their expense, technology they don’t want and may not need, and the mandated technologies could reshape how the Internet works.
Wouldn’t It Be Great if Internet Services Had to License Technologies Selected by Hollywood? (Comments on the Very Dumb “SMART Copyright Act”), from Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog on March 23, 2022
This bill and its supporters do not represent the public’s interest in fair copyright policy and a robust and accessible public domain. That is a shame, because much good could be done if policymakers would put the public’s interest first. For example, the Copyright Office—which holds records of every copyright ever registered, including all those works which have passed into the public domain—could help catalogue the public domain and prevent it from being swept up by today’s already-overzealous automated filtering technologies (an idea inspired by this white paper from Paul Keller and Felix Reda). Instead, the public domain continues to be treated as acceptable collateral damage in the quest to impose ever-greater restrictions on free expression online.