Anne Ford , American Libraries; Newsmaker: Brewster Kahle
"How has the work of the Internet Archive been affected since Trump took office?
Well, the biggest effect has been getting a lot of attention for what we do. We spend a lot of time on Democracy’s Library, which is a name for collecting all the born-digital and digitized publications of government at the federal, state, and municipal levels. There’s been so much attention about all of the [digital] takedowns that we’ve received lots and lots of volunteer help toward collecting not only web assets but also databases that are being removed from government websites. It’s all hands on deck.
And you just launched a new YouTube channel.
Yes, we unveiled our next-generation microfiche scanning as part of our Democracy’s Library project, because a lot of .gov sites are on microfiche, and people don’t want to use microfiche anymore. Fortunately, the US government in its early era was pro–access to information and made government documents public domain. So we put out a YouTube livestream of the microfiche being digitized.
What would you like to see libraries and librarians do during this challenging time?
We need libraries to have at least as good rights in the digital world as we have in the physical world. There’s an upcoming website [from the Internet Archive and others] called the Four Digital Rights of Libraries, and that is something libraries can sign onto as institutions. [The website will launch during the Association of European Research Libraries’ LIBER 2025 Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2-4.]
People generally don’t know that libraries, in this digital era, are prevented from buying any ebooks or MP3s. They are not allowed by the publishers to have them. They spend and spend and spend, but they don’t end up owning anything. They’re not building collections. So the publishers can change or delete anything at any time, and they do. In their dream case, libraries will never own anything ever again. This is a structural attack on libraries. You don’t need to be a deep historian to know what happens to libraries. They’re actively destroyed by the powerful.
So let’s spend [our collection budgets] buying ebooks, buying music, buying material from small publishers or anybody [else] that will actually sell to us. Make it so we are building our own collections, not this licensing thing where these books disappear.
That’s a big ask. But the great thing about that will be that our libraries start buying things from small publishers, where most of the money goes back to the authors, not stopping with the big multinational publishers. Let’s build a system that works for more players than just big corporations that make a habit of suing libraries."
