Knowledge and culture retained for all by the Internet Archive

Um, hi, I'm Joy Chesebro. I actually lead up all of our philanthropy, so this is gonna be an interesting talk for those of you, ah, though I do work very often with many tech founders and, and many of the tech individuals who support our work. Um, so the Internet Archive, as you all know, has been around for almost 30 years.

Um, so the Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle, who himself was a technologist. Um, so at the time when he began the Internet Archive, we were really just beginning to look at the web. It was the beginning, ah, days of the internet.

So for the archive, we became a, a, a nonprofit, a not a profit-seeking, ah, organization, and that was on purpose. Um, we... Brewster didn't wanna be acquired.

Um, you know, you're obviously have st- you know, stakeholders, and boards and other things. So he really wanted it to be open and free. We're open source.

We're an open source platform, and he really wanted to build it for the people. Um, he really believed that knowledge should be openly shared and should be accessible by everybody. So as you look, the Internet Archive is actually one of the top frequented websites in the world.

Um, we're, I think, in the top 150 in the United States, and I think in the top 500 in the whole world. 2 million people that come to our website every day, frequenting the, internet, looking for everything from books, magazines, obviously tech. You know, I love to, to read Byte.

Remember Aloha? Um, there's all kinds of different, tech, magazines as well. So I'm gonna go into detail about that a little later.

So obviously, the Wayback Machine, we're very noted for the Wayback Machine, especially over the last 30 years. Um, obviously, recently, we have lots of, you know, thousands of different journalists and news, you know, facilitated, stations and things like that that use us, when anything disappears, obviously, we have a record of it on the web. Nothing disappears on the web, as many may not know, especially a lot of our politicians.

So, so everything, can be accessible, and a lot of times we do... When things disappear, we wanna see what it was like prior to that. So for instance, I'll give you an example.

We do an end of term crawl, at the end of every presidency when one walks away, and a new one comes in. We capture our government websites. So it was very interesting in the last year and a half when our new administration went in, and things started disappearing, and things started changing.

So the Department of Education, the CDC, all of these incredible, web pages began to disappear. So thank goodness for the Wayback Machine. We were able to go into action, and we were able to capture what our government website looked like before.

So you can actually access that. The... Another example is during the Ukraine War, when Russia went in, we, we worked with Stanford, and we went in with a lot of engineers, and we were able to capture a, a, a large majority of what was on the web.

So again, culture disappearing. We were able to help Ukraine, and we were able to digitize a number of their cultural artifacts online. So again, the Wayback Machine is super valuable.

It's also great for people like me. You know, you wanna go back in time. I wanna know what Google's website looked like in the 1990s.

Um, so... And I think for marketing people and things like that, it's really important to kinda compare and begin to sort of to launch different type of brand ideas, and it's good to see what things have been in the past. So in a sense, I always say the web, the Wayback Machine is sort of like a time machine for the web.

Um, we also run within the Wayback Machine, we have an Archive-It, and it's an earned income, ah, option that we have. We work with thousands of partners, museums, universities, and cultural, cultural, agencies. We do web archiving.

We do text and data mining, and we do digital preservation through our arc- Archive-It program, so a super, super important program that we run w- in, within the Internet Archive. Um, we also, um... When you look at our mission, many of you may know our mission, it is to provide universal access to all knowledge.

Yeah. A lot of people refer to us as the Library of Alexandria. Um, of course, that was built in 48 BC, and we're a little bit up to more being modern, but we still feel that we are our age's library of, you know, Library of Alexandria.

So I'm gonna give you a little snapshot, 'cause this is always interesting for me, 'cause I love data. I love numbers. I have to track all of this all the time.

So we're already at about 250 petabytes of data. Um, that's... You can imagine the servers we have and, and, and how we house that and how much that costs, 'cause I have to keep track of that.

Um, we have 113 million public media items on the Internet Archive, and we just celebrated this year. We had a huge celebration in October. We hit one trillion web pages on the Internet Archive.

We are 10 times as large as our own US, Library of Congress. We're 10 times larger than that, as far as when you look at all the archive data we have. And you can see the rest.

I mean, we're already over 56 million texts in the collections. Um, to continue, we do television, movies. A lot of people don't realize that.

We... Audio, old-time radio. We have software, images, incredible collections of photography, everything under the sun.

I'm sure many of you are using it for a variety of reasons to access. And so I get to, to work with-All of our supporters all over the world, and I hear all these incredible stories of how they're accessing and using the Internet Archive. I mean I've talked to huge genealogy groups I've talked to huge tech groups I've talked to people who love old, manuals to build cars.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's everything under the sun- Mm-hmm ...

when you look at the individuals accessing our wide variety, this amazing library. Um, so the public loves us. I have to work with the public.

That's what I do. Um, you can see... And I hear the stories.

We get thousands and thousands of these, comments every day. " I think vanishing culture, we actually helped the, country of Aruba digitize a vast amount of their culture online, which I think is super important when you're looking at the world and how everything is starting to disapp- Everything is on the web, right? We all use the web.

We do everything on the web. We have now chatbots, everything. Well, it can take one second to disappear.

Yahoo, you know, they wanted to delete vast amounts of information. " So I think knowledge in itself, we're in a digital knowledge world, and it's gonna be even more imperative for organizations like us to ensure that all of this incredible knowledge and information is saved into perpetuity for future generations. Um, so I want to play something.

This is... Oh, the sound. No sound?

Yeah, there's sound. Okay. Okay.

This guy is on Instagram, okay? I love him. He's always going to Internet Archive and showcasing some really cool- ...

collections. Um, and I'll have to give you his, his, URL or his, his tag in Instagram. Um, and it's kind of funny kind of what he says because he goes into these obscure...

He finds the most obscure collections, stuff I don't even know about. So it is a black hole. I mean, once you go down, he talks about it, it just leads to one thing, to the next, to the next.

You really need to get in there and really discover incredible, collections that we have digitized. Here's another person. Um, he talks about the Wayback Machine and all of the different things that we've been, you know, scanning, crawling, capturing, and the importance of the, the Wayback Machine.

So we have people all over the world like this, that I get to work with, supporters and just avid, you know, fan... It's like a fan base that we have in a way that are using the Internet Archive. I mean, newspaper articles, all k- you know, drama, television.

Um, each of us has a really, you know, interesting life, and we're very interested in specific things. So the Internet Archive I think is one of those places where you can find almost anything that you're interested in. I'm sorry this doesn't work, but it's kind of interest- We also ran a 24/7 scanning, online where we were scanning the books, and we thought, "This kind of seems...

" We had thousands of people watch just a book being scanned online. I mean, I thought maybe this is what's happened to our society today. We just want something mundane.

We're so stressed out. The world is in a situation. I just want to watch a book being scanned.

So we had thousands of people log in 24/7 watching. It was kind of like that thing where I was watching that eagle birth an egg, and I sat there all the time every time, you know, at night watching, waiting for that eagle, that small eagle to birth. But this was even more popular.

Um, so basically when you're looking at the projects, the Wayback Machine, as many of you already probably know, you know, we're crawling the web and preserving all of these web pages. We're looking at making sure culture doesn't vanish, and we, we launched Democracy's Library. So what we're doing is we're now digitizing all government docs, not th- just in the United States, but also in Canada and Europe and other areas, and that's why we're expanding into Europe because we also want to help them.

Um, so yes, we do the end of term crawl like I mentioned. It ended up archiving four million web pages, two million videos, and 300,000 data sets, all of which would've been lost through our government if we had not done this. Um, also Community Webs, I, I think this is a program that I, I really love because a lot of times there is people in positions of power or privilege, and a lot of times the voices of minorities, and the marginalized sometimes get downplayed.

And honestly, the, the historical record isn't there for the reasons I've mentioned. So the modern digital world, it offers an opportunity, especially us in, at the Internet Archive, to change that, to change the narrative for those who, those voices who are sometimes not heard. Um, so we do work.

We give those voices, the silent majority a record of impact. So basically the program works where we work with, libraries all over the United States, sometimes in rural areas. Um, like we, we digitize the Black diaspora, in America.

That was a project that we did. Um, we work with, you know, indigenous groups to make sure their voices are digitized online. LGBTQ, making sure that doesn't disappear.

Um, those voices are important. All of these different voices need to be heard, and they need to be part of our cultural heritage. Another program, Open Library.

Someone had mentioned to me accessibility was really important for those with disabilities. That is an also important area for us. Um, we really work with Open Library.

Um, we have millions and millions of books, for those who, you know ... Um, I think it's called OCR, capabilities. Also, we have voi- you know, which is voice activated.

We can ... The type can, can get larger for those with, visual issues. Um, so there's a lot of, on the back end built, to ensure those with disabilities have the opportunity to read a book, to hear a book.

We have lots of e-books, through Open Library, millions of e-books that can also be accessible. Um, what was interesting, I didn't realize only 7% of published works are currently available in accessible formats. I thought that was really sad.

Um, so I do really, um ... I'm super happy that the Internet Archive has made this part of one of our projects to ensure those with, disabilities are, are, are, are, are ... We, we cater to, to those, that group.

Um, the WayBack Machine and Automattic. So, WordPress, we have a great partnership. Um, I work very closely with WordPress and their foundation.

Um, so we, worked on the, corporate side. Automattic is a affiliate with WordPress, and we did a link- link fest- fixer, project. We do all these interesting projects, so maybe some of, like I said, our engineers in that could come in and talk more deeply about all of how they built these different projects with, with a variety of partners.

But basically link rot, we all ... You know, 404s, you know. We, we really work hard.

In fact, we did a partnership with Wikipedia. We're turning all their links blue. So I used to go and click on it, we go to a 404.

" So now we, we have millions of, of links that go to periodicals in the actual page, so when you go to, Wikipedia, it comes to the Internet Archive. Mm. So we're partnering and helping them, the functionality, to be a, a better resource for people.

Um, so this is another partnership, as you can read, with, with Automattic that we, we formed. Um, so I'm gonna get into philanthropy a little. Hope you enjoy this, but this is my passion.

This is what I do. This is what I been trained to do. This is what I get up every morning and I can't wait to do.

Um, so love to hear about all of you, because I know you have your own passions. But, you know, it's ... We're a purpose-driven nonprofit, and we, we did this on purpose because it really ...

We wanted the Internet, Archive to last, and we really wanted to build something for the public. We're a public service, and I think it's really important that we're structured as an independent nonprofit so that we can offer everything for free. We don't track anything.

We don't have ads. We don't monetize. We're really about the core value of privacy.

Besides open source, we're very much about privacy for our patrons. Um, we also, um ... If you look at the big scope, I love going big and then small, and where does the Internet Archive fit?

Um, I don't know if many of you know, but this is what the nonprofit sector contributes here in America. Over $592 billion goes into the nonprofit sector in America, and we are a small piece of that. Our operating budget's 30 million, but the, the wealth of work and impact that we make is unbelievable.

And the fact is that we utilize that money so efficiently. That's one thing Brewster is very conscious of, is making sure every single penny, every dollar goes to building the Internet Archive. " Um, and then they'll be ...

" So I think our brand is the WayBack Machine. Um, but we're about 14% of this market, of the 592. It's education and cultural- Yeah ...

you know, organizations. So you can kind of see, unfortunately, and my favorite and my passion also is environment conservation. It's only 3%, which tells you something.

It might be even less now. Um, but we do have one of the coolest collections. It's called the Biodiversity Heritage Library Collection on the Internet Archive.

Check it out. It's, it's really a fanta- a, a wonderful biodiversity if you're into that. 4 trillion.

Um, that's the kind of activity that goes on in the nonprofit sector. Um, so a little du- deeper dive. You can kind of see over the years, it's really fascinated me.

Look at the data. How are we trending? How are things growing?

Why are they growing? Inflation plays a big role. All of these things play a big role in how, you know, fundraising and the nonprofit, sector scales.

So it ... There's, there's positive points, low points. Obviously 2008, '9, all of that yellow, that was during the, bubble, the real estate bubble and collapse here from 2008 and two th- to 2010.

That hit the nonprofit sector in a huge way. Um, hopefully nothing like that happens with AI. There is no AI bubble.

Um, we, we don't know. Um- I assume that one between '99 and 2004 is the dot-com bubble. Yes.

Yeah. Yes. Thank you.

I was just gonna mention, yes, that is the dot-com bubble. Um, so you can see how all of this has a, a huge impact in giving. Um, so philanthropy supports the mission here at the Internet Archive.

I have a great team. Um, we work with, you know, millions and hundreds of ... I think it was over 200, almost 250,000 individuals my team and I worked with this past year.

These are unique individuals who donate to the Internet Archive. Um, so we've been building that over the last number of years. Um, we've scaled.

We've, actually grown. Um, so my background mainly was working for very large institutions and globally as well as with universities and hospital systems and things like that. So, you know, I took a lot of those best practices and brought them into the Internet Archive, and I love, absolutely love the archive.

So these are the kind of four areas that philanthropy at the Internet Archive focuses on. We focus on database management. All of the information and data on everyone that comes in, is very secure.

Um, there's a, a lot of anonymity, and we're... Like I said, there's a lot of privacy built into that. Um, we also do all the fundraising and external communication.

So if you wanna join our newsletter or wanna get inside and know what's going on, you can sign up, and my team, manages all of that. Then we do a ton of A/B testing on all three of our sites, Open Library, Wayback Machine, and the Internet Archive. Those are our three main sites.

Um, so we A/B test through my team all of the communication and all the messaging that comes and goes through that. So there's a lot of analytics. I use a Metabase analytics, to kind of track mostly, not the individuals, but the trends and how, philanthropy is being tracked within Metabase.

And then, of course, we handle all of our events, partnerships, with the corporate sector, foundations, and all kinds of things. So, we did... I launched crowdfunding recently, last year.

It actually performed really well. Um, the reason why crowdfunding performs well is because we had a l- really large base, so we were able to activate that base around specific cool projects, maybe like Link, Link Fixer or, you know, our trillionth, you know, website. Um, we kind of...

I kind of play a little bit with campaigns, and then I really activate people who are passionate about it, and we did fantastic with our crowdfunding. And we focus on the web we've built, so that was the campaign. Um, and then of course, we do all kinds of events.

I love meeting everyone across the country. Um, Brewster comes and speaks, and we really are just building our brand and building knowledge and understanding. I notice on, in the, on the East Coast, they're not as well, versed or i, you know, understanding how the Internet Archive works versus here in the Bay.

Mm. Everybody kind of understands what we do. Um, again, I track all of our analytics and performance monitoring.

Um, this is well-tracked. I'm really into making sure... You know, philanthropy is more of a science than it is an art.

Um, it's very, very science-based. Um, everything has trends. Everything, you know, every month, everything we're doing.

We have a lot going on. Um, we have eight to nine different, funding channels now. Um, when I started, I think there was one or two, and now there's nine.

So we have earned income, you know, major corporate estate planning, and we have, new funding, you know, token-based funding. You know, when you're looking at, um... well, now it's not doing it, but, you know, crypto, you know, the whole crypto, sector.

Um, I launched a lot of these things at the Internet Archive. Um, so we've been growing. Um, some of these numbers, as you can see on the philanthropic side, which one thing I wanted to spotlight was the average donation is a lot higher than most nonprofits in America.

Oh. And that is a testament to my team. Um, we've worked really hard over the years to build loyalty, and I think it's because the Internet Archive is a beloved tool and service to our country and un- and really the world.

And people see the value of what would happen if the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine went away, so the, our, our average rate is so high, our donation, because people don't want it to go away. They wanna make sure it's supported into perpetuity. Um, this, you know, the great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

Um, the Internet Archive will it last- outlast me, it will outlast all of you in this room, and it should because it is a Library of Alexandria. Um, and it should be given to future generations that are coming behind me, and we wanna make sure it continues to digitize all of the world's, as much as we can, culture and history. Um, we're built on knowledge.

Everything that we're all doing in this room, everything that I do, is built on knowledge. And what I always think, I like dystopian thinking sometimes, what would the world be if knowledge was taken away? Um, I mean, we kind of have some examples of that in history, when knowledge was e- either controlled, or erased or changed, and so that's what we're up against, is why the value of the Internet Archive is so important, is because we are living in times where, certain regimes in certain areas have the ability to turn the lights off, or change the narrative, or culture can vanish.

And then what do we have to prove? And there's also the, the realm of misinformation. Um, what are the facts?

How do we go to ensure that this is truth? Um, we need a foundation, a library that we can go to, to fact-check, to ensure that our culture stays stable and that we do know what truth is. And so that's one of the other things why the Internet Archive is so incredibly important.

So that's the end of my presentation. Um, the last thing I'll say is right now we're really, focusing on vanishing culture, and link rot because the internet is f-Fraught with link rot. And so that is also something that we're, we're putting a lot of, of energy around.

A lot of our engineers and, those in the tech side are really building out to ensure that, we c- we tackle a lot of the link rot. And, so that's, you know, something maybe later on you might wanna talk with some of them. It's very interesting some of the, the infrastructure they're building around that.

So are there any questions? More like- Yeah ... a statement.

Um, this was, like, for me, pure nostalgia. So when I first got out of college, I did UX and UI design. This saved me a lot when, either, A, we goofed up on something as we were designing it live.

We would use Wayback Machine. Yeah. Yeah.

" You go to their site and it's like, "Oh, this one's kinda crappy. " I'm trying to remember what they did- Yeah ... for inspiration.

WayBack Machine. Awesome. That's a great...

Yeah. No, I hear the stories. So w- so, when you went back, were...

Did you do it with multiple, like, to see the iterations? Go- Yeah ... go through the timeline?

Yeah. Do that. Because as, like, especially when I was doing web design for the front end, you're, you're literally trying to create something from a blank s- Nothing ...

right? Yeah, sometimes. And so sometimes, yeah, or a lot of times you need inspiration, and there's just this one thing that caught your eye way back when, and of course their site has completely changed.

You're like, "I don't like this new one- ... " Yeah. Wayback Machine.

It's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, our UI is sort of, there's sort of a, a back and forth about our U- UI, and there's a reason why we don't wanna make it too easy- ...

to find, you know? But, what's great is you can. You can see the iteration.

Mm-hmm. " You know? That.

Yeah. A lot of the time was, like, with Google. Um, but no, I, I like it.

I think also, like, the UI, how it is for me, like, is I'm probably biased- Yeah ... but definitely nostalgic where the UI is like, yo, I love this. I still go there, like, every so often now still, and I'm always happy to see that it's still around, to be honest.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's, it's a b- it's our brand.

Like, I don't think you're gonna come in and be this, this really smooth looking, like- ... you know? I, I do worry, you know, we- we're trying to work out with chatbots, like, how, you know, the whole AI aspect of things.

Um, that's a whole nother conversation, because a lot of organizations, as you've seen, there's lots of laws and things coming into play because these crawlers are going everywhere and grabbing all of these, the, the data. Um, and so, yeah, you have to have some... But that's great.

That-