Introducing Department of Decentralization, DWeb Camp 2026 partner

Name: Open For Whom? Access to Knowledge in the Age of AI
Start: 2026-09-10T10:00:00-08:00
End: 2026-09-10T11:00:00-08:00
Location: VIRTUAL

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Tommi Marmo

Since December last year, when we decided DWeb Camp would take place in Europe, we’ve been hard at work to evolve the spirit of our unique event and adapt it to a new context. It took a major leap of faith for us as organizers. We knew it would be an ambitious endeavor, but we felt strongly that it would be worth it. In the 6 months since that decision, we’ve navigated countless challenges behind the scenes.

And at many of those junctures, we would have been lost and out of our depth if it were not for the invaluable support of our local partners; namely, the Department of Decentralization. The DoD is a non-profit active in the advocacy for decentralization and open-source software. They’re deeply rooted in the Berlin community, but also connected with many other networks worldwide.

It all started from a spontaneous reply to one of our posts on the ATmosphere. Afri from DoD proposed that we collaborate in case we chose Berlin as the location of DWeb Camp 2026. When we did, we reached out. As we started collaborating remotely, over video calls and emails, we realized DoD and DWeb’s close values alignment. A few months later, we found ourselves co-organizing what turned out to be a phenomenal in-person meetup at c-base at the end of February.

Looking back, DWeb Camp 2026 would have been impossible without the help we got from the incredible humans of DoD. They welcomed us with open arms, and now, we want to introduce them to you before you can meet them all at Camp. Below are excerpts from interviews we did with DoD’s Raul, Afri, Peter and Franzi. We have made slight edits for reading clarity.

Both as an organisation and as a community of practitioners, DoD profoundly cares about digital rights and Software Freedom. Despite its long history, the open source ecosystem continues to face multiple challenges in this ever-changing world. While we will be diving deeper in these topics at DWeb Camp, we asked the interviewees to share their thoughts.

Raul’s point perfectly summarizes the multi-faceted hurdles around the key problem of sustainable funding:

The FLOSS world has demonstrated remarkable results in development, security, and community building, [and] open source software is the foundation beneath virtually every critical piece of technology in use today. We have proven that a collaborative, collective approach to solving problems is a model that works. Yet the movement’s most pressing challenge, and I acknowledge my bias having worked on this issue for many years, remains its failure to secure stable, non-discretionary funding for the developers and maintainers who underpin our everyday technology stack. This is not a new problem, but it is one we have consistently failed to resolve. Grants and donations, however well-intentioned, are inherently unpredictable and cannot serve as the financial foundation for critical infrastructure. What we need is a path toward sustainability that doesn’t depend on goodwill alone.

What makes this harder is that the challenge is as much internal as it is external. The FLOSS community itself is divided over how to solve it, and those competing visions create real friction within ecosystems that should, ideally, be pulling in the same direction.

Since DoD began as a collective focused on event organising, the issue of funding applies in this scenario, too. How to make events open and accessible, while still remaining independent and autonomously financed? Afri is proud of DoD’s stance on sponsorships:

The most important lesson I learned by organising events with DoD is to refuse sponsor money. Grants, memberships, donations, anything but a logo on the wall. It is harder to fund and easier to run. The atmosphere is unobstructed, the discussions are honest, and people show up in their free time because they want to, not because their employer paid for the booth.

If the environment feels light, welcoming, and free from corporate interest, Peter points out that it becomes even more enticing for volunteers to contribute:

People are happy to participate as volunteers and organisers in events without being paid when they believe in the cause and see that you are not sacrificing it for the sake of convenience.

People who are treated with respect for their views and reasons are extremely nice, proactive, helpful, and very easy to work with.

Raul adds:

Nothing matches the energy that voluntarism brings to spaces like this: not just in getting things done, but in the sense of belonging it creates. For anyone building a new community, the FLOSS world offers the clearest possible model: organic, gradual, rooted in shared interests and shared concerns. A community that grows from genuine common ground is one that is very difficult to break.

It is precisely because of this spirit that we realised DoD was a perfect partner for DWeb. Beyond sharing our values and restlessly pursuing the DWeb Principles, we decided to collaborate with the Department of Decentralisation because of a virtually endless set of skills, competence, and networking—both literally and metaphorically. In a timespan of a few months, DoD truly became the backbone of DWeb Camp 2026.

The volunteers of the DoD will be in charge of fundamental infrastructure and teams at DWeb Camp. Raul’s expertise has been instrumental to help us figure out administrative matters. Afri planned electricity distribution against German VDE norms and will set up the LoRa mesh across the campground. Franzi is involved in the overall content curation alongside the DWeb Core Team and is co-producing the Opening Ceremony. Peter is focusing on the communication infrastructure, closely collaborating with the Freifunk folks, who are some real megaminds behind the network setup.

DoD and their members are responsible for a tea tent and the Roots Music stage. And they’ve been hosting the digital camp infrastructure for ticketing, the Call For Proposals, schedule, and the internal document suite.

Despite the great amount of work we are all facing, we are in the middle of BUILD, impatient for DWeb Camp to start. Here is why Franzi is excited about it.

Conferences are usually short on time, conversations only happen in hallways compressed between talks or in awkward networking events. I’m looking forward to making organic connections, and getting to know new communities!

Afri is looking forward to…

Five days where the people who actually build the decentralized Web are physically in the same forest. Builders, researchers, organisers, kids running between tents. I want the collaborations that form face-to-face in a week tend to outlast the ones that begin on a video call.

If you don’t have a ticket for DWeb Camp yet, here is why Franzi thinks you should get it:

DWeb Camp brings together bright minds from different communities that still exchange too little in their regular day-to-day lives. I believe that many technology puzzle pieces will need to come together to enable human freedom in an increasingly dystopian world—DWeb camp presents a unique opportunity to sync across domains and build stuff that really matters.

Peter boils it down to a perfect metaphor:

[…] this is a really great place for cross-pollination. Like a huge meadow of wildflowers as participants, with ideas as the bees in between!

DWeb Camp is just three days away. Join us in our journey towards a distributed tech ecosystem, and come meet all the members of the Department of Decentralization!

Vanishing Culture Episode #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca Messarra

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Chris Freeland

As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.

MORE INFO: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/vanishing-culture-1-what-we-stand-to-lose-with-luca-messarra

From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it: from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory and identity. The conversation wraps on a positive note, with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.

Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.

The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.

Introducing the Vanishing Culture Podcast Series: Exploring What We Stand to Lose

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Chris Freeland

Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it.

Hosted by musician Vida Vojić, the series features conversations with researchers, archivists, librarians, and creators working to safeguard everything from cookbooks and queer archives to African folktales and endangered languages. Together, they examine how copyright, digital platforms, and changing technologies are reshaping our collective memory, while highlighting the communities finding new ways to keep culture alive. Through personal stories and global perspectives, Vanishing Culture reveals that preservation isn’t just about protecting the past, it’s about ensuring that future generations can access, understand, and build upon our shared cultural record.

Vanishing Culture #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca Messarra

LISTEN NOW: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/vanishing-culture-1-what-we-stand-to-lose-with-luca-messarra

As more of our cultural heritage moves online, a troubling question is emerging: what happens when the things we create, share, and cherish simply disappear? In the first episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with researcher, book historian, and literary sociologist Luca Messarra, author of the Internet Archive’s Vanishing Culture report, about the growing threat of cultural loss in the digital age.

From disappearing websites and deleted social media archives to lost films, books, music, and video games, Luca explores why culture vanishes and why it matters. He explains how copyright law, corporate control of digital platforms, and the shift from ownership to licensing are making it harder for libraries, archives, and communities to preserve cultural memory. Along the way, he shares stories that illustrate both the fragility of our digital heritage and the importance of preserving it—from a favorite YouTube recipe rescued by the Wayback Machine to the role cultural artifacts play in memory, identity, and human dignity. The conversation concludes with a look toward solutions and what creators, libraries, and everyday citizens can do to help ensure culture remains accessible for generations to come.

Vanishing Culture #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston

RELEASE DATE: JULY 8, 2026

Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.

From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.

Vanishing Culture #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke Palmieri

RELEASE DATE: JULY 15, 2026

Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.

The conversation traces how queer communities have built their own archives in response to historical exclusion from mainstream institutions, creating spaces where stories of love, activism, creativity, and survival can be preserved and shared. Brooke reflects on the power of community-led archiving, the opportunities digital platforms create for expanding access to queer history, and the challenges posed by disappearing information, online misinformation, and unequal access to cultural heritage. Together, Vida and Brooke explore how preserving queer archives helps ensure that marginalized histories remain visible, accessible, and available to future generations.

Vanishing Culture #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura Gibbs

RELEASE DATE: JULY 22, 2026

Folktales are more than stories—they are living records of culture, identity, and collective memory. In the fourth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer and researcher Helen Nde, founder of Mythological Africans, and folklorist Laura Gibbs about the importance of preserving African folklore in the digital age. Together, they explore how stories help communities understand themselves, pass down knowledge across generations, and make sense of a changing world.

The conversation examines the challenges of preserving oral traditions, from the distortions introduced by colonial collectors to the loss of context when dynamic storytelling practices are reduced to written records. Helen and Laura discuss how digitization can help make folklore more accessible and discoverable, while also opening new possibilities for communities to share and reinterpret their stories online. They also reflect on the importance of trustworthy archives in an era when myths and historical narratives are increasingly used to shape political and cultural identities. Ultimately, the episode asks what it will take to ensure that these rich storytelling traditions remain available—not as relics of the past, but as living resources for future generations.

Vanishing Culture #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter Scholing

RELEASE DATE: JULY 29, 2026

Languages can vanish just as easily as books, websites, or archives—and when they do, entire ways of understanding the world can disappear with them. In the fifth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Peter Scholing of Biblioteca Nacional Aruba and the Coleccion Aruba digital heritage platform about the importance of preserving Papiamento, Aruba’s creole language, and the cultural heritage it carries.

Peter shares the story of how Aruba’s libraries, archives, and cultural institutions came together to build a digital collection that now preserves hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, newspapers, recordings, and books. The conversation explores the unique preservation challenges facing island communities, from geographic isolation and climate risks to the legacy of colonialism, which has scattered much of Aruba’s historical record across multiple countries and languages. Peter explains why expanding access to materials in Papiamento is essential for education, cultural identity, and historical understanding, and how digitization is helping unlock previously inaccessible collections. Looking ahead, he discusses the opportunities new technologies offer for smaller languages and why ensuring a vibrant digital future for Papiamento is a crucial part of preserving Aruba’s culture for generations to come.

Vanishing Culture #6: What We’ve Learned with Vida Vojić & Alice Bridgwood

RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 6, 2026

What does it mean to preserve culture in an age of disappearing websites, platform-controlled media, and fragile digital memories? In the final episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, Future Knowledge hosts Dave Hansen and Chris Freeland sit down with musician and series host Vida Vojić and producer Alice Bridgwood to reflect on the conversations, ideas, and lessons that emerged throughout the series.

Looking back on discussions about cookbooks, queer archives, African folklore, Papiamento, and more, Vida and Alice explore the common threads connecting seemingly disparate forms of cultural preservation. They reflect on how culture is shaped not only by institutions, but by communities and individuals who choose what to remember, share, and pass on. The conversation examines the challenges of living in an “age of platforms,” the risks of relying on technology and corporations to steward cultural memory, and the growing movement toward community-driven preservation efforts. Along the way, the group discusses what surprised them most, how the series changed their own habits and perspectives, and why they remain hopeful that people everywhere can play an active role in keeping culture alive. Rather than ending on a note of loss, the episode offers a hopeful reminder that culture survives when people care enough to preserve, share, and reimagine it together.

About the Future Knowledge podcast

Future Knowledge explores the intersection of technology, culture, and information policy with leading authors, scholars, and experts. From copyright and open access to AI and digital preservation, we discuss the big issues shaping knowledge and creativity in the digital age. Future Knowledge is brought to you by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance.

The Declaration of Independence, America at 250 and Past Centennials

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Sterling Dudley

As America celebrates its Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) this year, explore a curated list of materials preserved at the Internet Archive documenting the nation’s founding, the Declaration of Independence, past ephemera created for the nation’s anniversaries, and new efforts to capture and preserve the materials published by democracies.

Democracy’s Library

The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project helps preserve critical information and publications produced by federal, state, provincial, and municipal governments, and makes them available for users to access and to anyone wanting to build new services on these public documents. Learn more about Democracy’s Library.

Declaration of Independence

The National Archives of the United States lists three documents as the “Founding Documents”: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence was ratified on July 4, 1776, creating a historical date that Americans observe every year as “Independence Day.” Internet Archive preserves many materials related to the Declaration including a souvenir copy, a full reading of the text from LibriVox, and more educational and informative items.

The Declaration of Independence on the Wayback Machine

Internet Archive has been archiving the National Archives and Records Administration website since 1997. Compare the earliest capture (June 6, 1997) of the page displaying the Declaration of Independence via the Wayback Machine to a more recent capture (June 16, 2026). These preserved web pages allow Americans and other observers to trace the ways that presentation of the document has changed online over nearly 30 years.

How has America celebrated past ‘-Ennial’ anniversaries

Since its founding America has always told stories about itself. These stories see hotspots every 50 years during the various ‘-ennial’ anniversaries dating back to 1826. Below is a selection of materials highlighting each past anniversary. To explore more, check out the broader collections linked within the relevant sections.

Semi-centennial (1826)

On its first 50-year anniversary, America still was in living memory of the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Almost symbolically, two titans of that moment would pass on that very day: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was instrumental in drafting the original Declaration while Adams was one of the 56 signatories. Each man served as President during the earliest years of the United States’ history.

Within the Internet Archive’s collections is The John Adams Library at the Boston Public Library, containing many items related to Adams’ life. To learn more about the dual death of Adams and Jefferson please read more at the Library of Congress Blog.

The Semi-Centennial was commonly referred to as the American Jubilee at the time. The document below is a printed version of a speech given by Reverend William B. Johnson in 1826:

An Oration on the First Jubilee of American Independence (1826)

The speech traces a providential history of America from European settlement through the Revolution and into the nation’s first fifty years, reflecting the patriotic and deeply religious tone common to many Jubilee observances. It offers a snapshot of how Americans in 1826 understood their country’s past and envisioned its future.

Centennial (1876)

Following the American Civil War, the late 1860s and 1870s saw the passage of the Civil War Amendments (XIII, XIV, XV) that altered the civic order of the nation. As the 100th anniversary came about, the United States hosted the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Explore more from this moment in our collections.

1872 Map from Caldwell’s Illustrated Combination Centennial Atlas Of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. by J.A. Caldwell (1876).

This map of the United States, published by cartographer J.A. Caldwell around the time of the nation’s Centennial celebrations in 1876, reflects how Americans visualized their country at its 100th anniversary. As a Centennial-era artifact, it captures both the geographic reach of the United States and the national growth, infrastructure, and westward development in the decades following the Civil War.

Valuable recipes for cooking Duryeas’ Improved Corn Starch. Presented at the Centennial Exposition 1876 by the Duryeas’ Glen Cove Starch M’nf’g Co. (1876).

This 1876 recipe booklet from the collections of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives illustrates how Centennial-era businesses tied themselves to the celebration of American progress and industry. The booklet offers a glimpse into everyday domestic life during the Centennial year, while also demonstrating how companies used cookbooks as an early form of marketing to reach households across the country.

Sesquicentennial (1926)

Part of the Roaring Twenties, the 150th Anniversary of the United States was informed by the cultural and technological expansion of American society. Once again coinciding with an Exposition, this celebration saw a greater focus on the contentious topic of immigration and technological modernity. Explore more from this moment in our collections.

Sesquicentennial Exposition March (1926).

One of the official musical works of Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition, John Philip Sousa’s Sesquicentennial Exposition March transformed the anniversary of American independence into sound. Written by the nation’s most famous bandleader, the march reflects the exposition’s blend of historical commemoration, civic pride, and large-scale public celebration. This recording comes from the United States Marine Band.

United States Public health service. What does it do for me? (1926).

Created for the 1926 National Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, this booklet explained the United States Public Health Service’s responsibilities through photographs and descriptions of medical practices. The booklet reflects a period of heightened concern over immigration and public health in the United States, coming just two years after the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, when medical screening and exclusion of immigrants were central features of federal immigration policy.

50 years of progress as told by your telephone (1926).

Created for visitors to the Bell Telephone System exhibit at Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition, this booklet celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the telephone through a first-person narrative spoken by the technology itself.

Bicentennial (1976)

The 200th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing coincided with an all-out blitz of media and governmental efforts to commemorate the occasion. From Congressional Committees, to civic engagement, and the leveraging of Hollywood Stars, the 200th anniversary was everywhere. Explore more from this moment in our collections.

US Savings Bonds With John Wayne (1976).

Produced during the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebrations, this television advertisement features John Wayne promoting U.S. Savings Bonds as a way for Americans to participate in the nation’s future while commemorating its 200th anniversary.

This Amtrak brochure promoted a special Bicentennial-era excursion ticket that allowed travelers to visit cities closely associated with the American Revolution and the nation’s founding. By combining discounted rail travel with visits to historic landmarks, the brochure demonstrates how the 1976 Bicentennial transformed heritage tourism into a national pastime.

A New Spirit for ’76

Produced as part of the Bicentennial celebration, New Spirit for ’76 demonstrates how organizers and promoters sought to frame the nation’s 200th anniversary as a moment of reflection, optimism, and shared identity.

Preserving the First Draft of History: Reflections from the National Summit on Local News Preservation

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Anna Trammell

Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.

This urgent challenge is what brought two very different professions together on June 17 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the Internet Archive with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the National Summit on Local News Preservation gathered journalists, editors, archivists, librarians, and researchers to start a conversation between the newsrooms producing local journalism and the memory institutions preserving it. This event was a part of the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, an Internet Archive initiative supported by a grant from Press Forward. The program provides training, tools, and support directly to up to 300 newsrooms nationwide and helps develop collaborative partnerships between archives and news organizations.

Librarians and archivists understand what’s at stake and have been working to address these challenges for a long time. Local news supports a range of information needs for the historians, scholars, students, and citizens they serve. Frequent updates, complex multimedia content, and paywalls are just some of the obstacles they face when working to capture online news while still stewarding decades of journalism produced on physical formats. Journalists also understand how valuable their work is as a record of the communities they cover. Faced with reduced staffing and shrinking budgets, they are forced to focus on tomorrow’s deadline, not who will need access to this story fifty years from now. While the challenges and urgency are well understood by both sectors, there are few models for working together to address this crisis. Taking steps towards developing an actionable plan was the purpose of the Summit.

Panelists Randa Cardwell (Photojournalism Archive Project), Becca Bender (Rhode Island News Media Archive), Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance), Cassidy Meurer (University of Louisville), and Frank LoMonte (CNN) discuss the particular challenges of preserving TV news and photojournalism.

The day mixed expert panels with structured discussion. Panelists tackled hard questions: conflicts over rights and revenue, how to connect communities to archived news, and how libraries and newsrooms can realistically partner together. One panel focused on the particular difficulty of preserving local TV news and photojournalism. Case studies were shared from the professionals doing this work right now in newsrooms, public libraries, state libraries, non-profits, and research groups.

An attendee reports out on their group’s discussion

Then attendees worked together in breakout discussion groups built around five topics: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Organizational Culture and Partnerships; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; and Sustainability and Advocacy. Each group named the obstacles in their area and drafted short and long term recommendations aimed at addressing them. Common themes emerged from across all of the groups. Several groups advocated for immediate action across both types of organizations stating that holding out for perfect standards or reliable national infrastructure would result in more information loss. Groups also kept returning to a point that publishers may find counterintuitive: making an archive discoverable and freely accessible tends to directly benefit newsrooms. And more than one group, working separately, proposed the same ambitious idea: a Report for America style fellowship that places archivists inside newsrooms to develop preservation plans and workflows that can be embedded into core operations. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of the event. Later this summer, a full report will be published and shared widely.

A group of attendees discuss organizational culture and partnerships

As some publishers block the preservation of their websites and local newsrooms continue to shrink, this work has never been more urgent. But the stakeholders who can do something about ensuring that local news persists, that it continues being produced and preserved, are thinking big and taking action. Many of them spent June 17 in National Harbor, working together towards a future where local news isn’t at risk of vanishing.

Interested in learning more or getting your local newsroom involved? Learn more about the Today’s News for Tomorrow program or contact us at tnt@archive.org.

Top Hats, Tails, and Timeless Cinema: Celebrating Marlene Dietrich’s “Morocco”

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Chris Freeland

On June 9, the Internet Archive welcomed film lovers, public domain enthusiasts, and fashionably dressed guests for an evening celebrating one of cinema’s enduring classics: Morocco (1930).

Our “Top Hat & Tails” screening marked the film’s first year in the public domain, bringing nearly a century-old story to a new generation of viewers. Guests embraced the spirit of the evening by arriving in everything from classic tuxedos and evening gowns to playful reinterpretations of Marlene Dietrich’s legendary look.

Browse event photos:

The evening began with an introduction from filmmaker, writer, and curator Denah Johnston, placing the film in the context of Pre-Code Hollywood and exploring why Morocco remains such an enduring work. Johnston highlighted the film’s artistic legacy, its groundbreaking approach to gender expression, and the cultural significance of Dietrich’s iconic tuxedo performance, culminating in one of the earliest same-gender kisses in mainstream cinema.

Watch Denah’s intro:

Following the screening, Johnston joined attendees for a Q&A that explored the film’s production, Dietrich’s career, the evolution of queer representation on screen, and the importance of preserving and providing access to public domain films.

Watch the Q&A:

Missed the event? You can still watch Morocco for free on the Internet Archive and experience one of the defining films of the Pre-Code era for yourself. As long as we preserve our cultural heritage—and keep it accessible—these remarkable works will continue finding new audiences for generations to come.

Watch Morocco (1930):

Roots System: Introducing the Pollinators of DWebCamp 2026

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Tommi Marmo

by Marie Kochsiek

Decentralized technologies have the potential to create a better web: one that upholds people’s privacy, security, and self-determination. Yet, for many communities, the current web has failed to provide these foundations. Marginalized and underserved groups, those most impacted by surveillance, censorship, and systemic exclusion, stand to gain the most from decentralized tools. These tools can offer lifelines: secure identity verification, censorship-resistant communication, community-owned networks, and the preservation of cultural knowledge. We’ve seen this in action from grassroots mesh networks that keep communities connected during internet shutdowns, to decentralized archives that protect the histories of displaced peoples, to platforms that empower individuals to reclaim control over their data and narratives.

Tools are most powerful when built with, not just for, the communities they serve. This is why the Pollinator Program seeks out those who are already doing the work: past DWeb Fellows and Node leaders who continue to imagine and actively build a better web.

This July, we are thrilled to welcome a fantastic group of 12 Pollinators from eight countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, and West Africa — all of whom will be joining us at Alte Hölle, Germany for DWeb Camp: Root Systems (July 8–12, 2026) to share their knowledge, learn, and connect. Together, we will explore how decentralized technologies can foster resilience, justice, and autonomy. Our Pollinators represent a rich diversity of backgrounds: activists, technologists, artists, educators, and more. They are all united by a commitment to building a web that is truly by and for the people.

Please meet our 2026 DWeb Camp Pollinators.

Andrew

I firmly believe that everyone deserves the ability to have autonomy over their data. We should be able to choose where it lives and how it’s shared. The usefulness of protocols is building the tools and practices necessary to achieve this, regardless of the current state of the tech. Tech changes and in some domains, it changes quite rapidly. That’s a fact of life. Protocols are meant to represent stability and shared understanding such that it’s relatively immune to these changes.

Andrew is a technologist based in New York City that has always had a strong curiosity for decentralized technologies. He has worked on peer-to-peer applications focused on data autonomy and offline-first use cases since 2021, primarily in the form of data collection and mapping tools for indigenous communities at Awana Digital.

Project links: https://awana.digital/ & https://comapeo.app/

Join his session at DWebCamp 2026: Peer-to-Peer in Production

Blake

Decentralization matters because the current web concentrates power over information, visibility, and truth—often reinforcing structural inequities. Communities that are already marginalized are frequently excluded from contributing to, or being accurately represented within, the systems that shape public understanding.

Blake Stoner stands at the intersection of legacy and innovation, building infrastructure for the next chapter of civic innovation. Inspired by a lineage of public service, his work focuses on expanding how communities are seen, understood, and represented in the systems shaping society.

Stoner is the Founder and CEO of Vngle, a Civic Insights Company designing trusted systems for real-time, community-verified insight. He also serves as Board Chair of Heart of South Downtown, stewarding the revitalization of ten historic blocks in Downtown Atlanta into America’s most ambitious district for doers, creatives, and innovators. To advance nonpartisan progress, Stoner launched the Institute for Nonpartisan Innovation in partnership with the City University of New York, building collaborative research and civic technology that elevates community-powered breakthroughs. His leadership has earned national recognition, including honors from MIT Solve, American Public Media Group, and Special Congressional Recognition from the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

A recognized thought leader and fellow of Harvard, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and the Goldin Institute, Stoner is also part of the UCLA x National University of Singapore Global Executive MBA program, where he studies markets and shifting power dynamics across the USA and Asia. He holds an MS in Strategic Communication from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Morehouse College.

Project links: https://www.vngle.com

Who Gets Seen? Rebuilding Trust and Visibility in the Age of AI will be his session at DWebCamp 2026.

Billion

In an era of information monopolies and algorithmic gatekeeping, the only way to safeguard the integrity and resilience of truth is distribution of power and data sovereignty. For Cofacts, decentralization is a commitment to democratic practice, making fact-checking data remains transparent and free from the censorship or technical vulnerabilities of any centralized platform.

Billion is the co-founder of Cofacts, a project she initiated in 2016. She is a staunch advocate for marriage equality and open freedom, dedicating herself to bridging diverse communities and providing empowerment courses to combat disinformation. She is an expert in civic technology and digital democracy.

Project links: https://en.cofacts.tw/

Join her session at DWebCamp 2026: From Blood to Bits: Building a Decentralized Truth.

Camille

My thinking has moved from decentralization as a technical question to a governance question. Who controls the keys, who can fork, who can exit. Working across civic mapping projects and local government AI, I keep returning to the same problem: the communities most affected by these systems have the least visibility into how they work and the least power to change them.

Camille Nibungco is a UX designer and civic technologist based in Los Angeles. They work across healthcare AI systems and community-centered civic tech, and they build at the intersection of complex systems and the people those systems routinely fail.

Project links: http://camillenibung.co

Human-in-the-Loop for Who? will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Esther

More than ever, decentralized tools and protocols are necessary to protect the privacy and safety of vulnerable communities, such as those being currently targeted by the US fascist political regime. The rush of our professional and technical communities in computer science towards maximizing AI use has made the centralization and collection of our data by a few companies even more of a risk than before.

Esther is a postdoc in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She has deployed community networks around the world, and teaches technical networking at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB). Since 2019, she is a Founder and Director of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Local Connectivity Lab (LCL). Their Seattle Community Network (SCN) digital equity project builds DIY Internet infrastructure serving hundreds of users.

Project links: https://seattlecommunitynetwork.org/

Join her session at DWebCamp 2026: Seattle Community Network.

fauno

Internet in Latin America is specially centralized from the cabling up, similar to other media, like TV and radio. We’ve been part of community networks and autonomous infrastructure (alternative hosting providers) and we’ve always put this work in the context of community media and the right to communication. Folks have been building their own stations, and we do this with servers and WiFi.

It’s a big opportunity for us all to implement distributed services in an infrastructure that’s our own.

His work and activism is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure.

In the last seven years he has been working almost exclusively on resilient web sites using Jekyll and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called [Sutty](https://sutty.coop.ar/en). In 2024, he also became an organizer and facilitator at [Escuela Común](https://escuelacomun.yanapak.org/) and developer and sysadmin at [Red Abya Yala](https://abyaya.la/).

Project links: sutty.nl, sutty.coop.ar, https://dweb.sutty.nl, and escuelacomun.yanapak.org.

Escuela Común and Red Abya Yala – local infrastructure for land defense and Let’s host a Coopcloud server during camp! will be his sessions at DWebCamp 2026.

Luandro

Decentralized tools matter because communities should not have to depend on distant platforms, opaque policies, or extractive business models to communicate, organize, preserve knowledge, or care for territory. For many of the communities I work with, centralization is not an abstract technical issue; it directly shapes exclusion, surveillance, fragility, and loss of control.
My perspective has evolved from seeing decentralization mainly as a technical architecture to understanding it as a social and political practice. It is about governance, legibility, maintenance, and whether people can actually use and shape the tools that affect their lives. A system is not truly liberatory if it is decentralized in theory but unusable, unaffordable, or impossible to maintain locally.

Tinker, florester and admirer of originary cultures. Luandro believes and lives a better world where communities are empowered and self-governed, people have the time and spirit to tend their human and non-human peers and tools are hacked or built for the well-being of people and the planet.

Project links: https://Awana.digital

Join his sessions at DWebCamp 2026: Peer-to-Peer, AI, Other Buzzwords, and Technologies for a Thriving Planet and Peer-to-Peer, AI, Other Buzzwords, and Technologies for a Thriving Planet.

LX

If we continue to work and play in the centralized, captured, corporate web, we will be both impeded from making change in the world that does not serve the incentives of corporations and the governments they support. We will increasingly be not only surveilled but limited in the information we can access. However, just tools and technologies will not extricate us. We have to also practice and develop social, cultural, and interpersonal approaches that are not coercive and extractive, we will need different economic models, and we will need to have the emotional capacity to be with one another, and the corporate systems work against these goals as well, leading to isolation, substituting money for care, and making their own implicit goals seem synonymous with taking action.

LX Cast is a researcher, community convener, program designer, strategist, and product leader who has worked on communication and collaboration tech serving millions of people for over a decade. LX is currently co-founder of Spacious, a peer-to-peer group audio app. They are the steward of Folk Tech, a 2026 Voqal Fellow, Curator at DWeb Camp, Chair of the Board at Tech Fleet, a board member at Prosocial Design Network, a steering committee member of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion, a member of Aspen Institute’s Virtually Human working group, a space steward at DWeb Camp, a mentor with PDX Women in Tech, All Tech is Human, and Mentor Me Collective, and the teacher of The UX of Community. ~They work with organizations to develop communities of practice. LX is a founder at Changemaker PM, helping nonprofits develop product discovery practices. Past roles include Head of Research at Marco Polo, Sr. Product Manager at Notion, Chief Storyteller at Olark, Program Designer at AI Stewardship Practice Program, Practice Designer at the emergence network, Product Strategist at Lightningrod Labs.~ Resident Fellow in Community at Integrity Institute, a steward at Collaborative Technology Alliance, and the host of Belonging Builders. Belonging = Freedom = Responsibility is their core organizing principle. How we are with ourselves, our families and friends, our teams, our communities and our culture are interdependent and pattern one another. For this reason, they are committed to their own work in collective practice to be in right relation as a source of possibility for change.

Project links: https://folketechnology.org, https://dwebyvr.org and https://spacious.audio

Building Folk Tech will be their session at DWeb Camp 2026.

Michael

Our communities face extreme challenges: deliberate internet blackouts, severe kinetic and surveillance threats from the SAC, rugged mountainous topography, and the Monsoon factor that destroys traditional hardware.

Developing decentralized tools is vital because centralized systems optimize for profit and control, leaving rural populations vulnerable. My perspective has evolved dramatically from purely seeking connectivity to engineering digital sovereignty and survival. Initially, ASORCOM aimed simply to bring Wi-Fi to the Siyin Valley. However, after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the state weaponized centralized infrastructure by cutting fiber lines and cellular towers to blind communities. Now, my focus is on building fail-graceful systems. If a network requires external cloud authentication or state power grids to exist, it is compromised. We need decentralized protocols like LoRa mesh and HF SDR to operate below the noise floor, evading Deep Packet Inspection and surveillance by the State Administration Council (SAC). Decentralization ensures that when the outside internet is cut, local community knowledge and coordination stay alive.”

Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak is the Founder of eimiAI and the Founder & Director of Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities (ASORCOM). A two-time recognized DWeb Fellow, Michael dedicates his work to building resilient, decentralized technologies for marginalized, stateless, and deep-rural communities. Through ASORCOM, he facilitates the deployment of community-owned, offline-first mesh networks that thrive despite severe hardware and power constraints. With eimiAI, Michael is pioneering localized, sovereign artificial intelligence designed to break down linguistic barriers and provide accessible tech for populations traditionally ignored by centralized tech giants. He is a passionate advocate for bottom-up infrastructure, ecological awareness, and ensuring the decentralized web truly serves the rural edge.

Project links: https://eimiAI.com & https://asorcom.net

Join his sessions at DWebCamp 2026: Voices of the Edge: How to Build Low-Resource Language AI for Rural Communities and Building Local Networks & Marginalized Public AI at the Rural Edge.

Nádia

Especially in the global south, where we are working to establish systemic decolonization, it makes no sense to replicate centralized digital infrastructure. Both in terms of resource consumption and political organization, this model is not appropriate for the relationships we are trying to build between users and their tech.

We dream of Freirean schools where we can build and manage our systems in local contexts, so having a decentralized architecture is important for making the digital system more aligned with the social one. It is important and necessary to develop, discuss, exchange, co-create tools and protocols that enable our community to take collaborative care of the tools we own, and horizontally address the challenges we face, in terms of digital technology.

With an electrical engineering background, Nádia transitioned to the agtech field through photovoltaic irrigation systems. In contact with organic farmers and Brazilian agro-ecological movement, she started to orient her perspective towards digital systems that support collective work, while diving in the hacker culture and politics. She lives in a small farm in southeast Brazil.

Project links: https://www.tekopora.top

Social aspects of communities that build sovereign technologies will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Riley

Infrastructure is political, and I believe in developing decentralized tools and protocols by and with communities who are most vulnerable to risk and repression. Right now in the US that includes communities of trans people, immigrants, and organizers, especially those of color. With technofascism on the rise, mass deportations of immigrants, transgender people having their IDs invalidated and revoked, adoption of digital identity systems and biometric surveillance, privacy protections for vulnerable communities are as urgent as ever. I see decentralization as a framework for privacy, equity, and resilience, enabling tools for democratic processes, censorship resistance, power redistribution, and community privacy.

Riley Wong is the Principal of Emergent Research, a research lab and consultancy investigating digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent. Their work explores the intersections of cryptographic tooling, cooperative governance, and community-led design, with a particular focus on how communities facing surveillance and repression can build and govern their own community infrastructure.

Riley co-founded the Community Privacy Residency in Taipei and Berlin, convening an international network of experts to co-create privacy infrastructure by and with vulnerable communities. Their background spans privacy-preserving data governance, consent infrastructure, and decentralized collective governance at Metagov, 0xPARC, and DWeb; machine learning engineering and AI ethics at Google; and award-winning investigative data journalism at ProPublica. Their work has been published or presented at MIT, Harvard Kennedy School, Yale, and Penn.

Project links: https://www.emergentresearch.net/blog/community-infrastructure-for-privacy-agency-and-consent

Join their session at DWebCamp 2026: Community Infrastructure for Privacy, Agency, and Consent.

Senka

Reliable, affordable internet access depends on building equitable tech policy. The focus is shifting from grassroots advocacy into high-level government discussions regarding digital inclusion and community-centred connectivity. Integrating decentralization into these early frameworks is vital to prevent replicating old, top-down monopolies. Ultimately, decentralized networks ensure communities maintain reliable and inclusive access, even when major providers prioritize profit over people.

Senka Hadzic is a telecom engineer, researcher and public interest technologist working on affordable connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. She is part of the iNethi team, a Cape Town based project enabling decentralized content distribution in community networks.

Project links: https://www.inethi.org.za/

The Art of Not Being Invisible will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Shadrach

Decentralized tools and protocols give users the autonomy to decide on the platform, infrastructure, and features they want and even build their own infrastructure. Compared to corporate ones, decentralized tools are built with shared community values, such as inclusivity, trust, care, and a collaborative spirit.

For my community, decentralized infrastructure is an enabler. It ensures equitable access to the internet, civic participation, local ownership, financial inclusion, and long-term support and sustainability of community infrastructure.

Shadrach Ankrah is an IT Specialist and the Founder of the Africa Rural Internet and STEM Initiative (AFRISTEMI) based in Ghana. He works at the intersection of technical deployment and policy advocacy.

He currently focus on deploying community-owned Wi-Fi mesh networks in remote communities. These networks are built by the community, owned and managed by them, fostering accessibility and affordability, hence allowing user control. The local communities he serves are mainly remote, rural, and underserved, facing many challenges, including poor education, poor health, and ICT and infrastructure.

Project links: https://afristemi.org, https://snetgh.org, https://one4allalliance.org/ and https://isoc.gh/

Join his sessions at DWeb Camp 2026: Building the People’s Internet: Mesh Networks and Policy Advocacy in Ghana and Root to Rise: Morning Aerobics & Movement.

Tzu Tung

China’s interference — from the South China Sea to sustained information warfare against Taiwan — has made information protection urgent, now in direct tension with the openness decentralized communities have long championed. Decentralized communities have shifted accordingly: from encouraging open organization and surveying democratic opinion, to preserving it and building network resilience against censorship, severed cables, and legal intimidation.

War is deeply masculine in its logic, and so is much of our technical imagination. As an artist working within this landscape, the next focus is to feminize decentralized tools — in how they are conceived, narrated, and made accessible to different bodies, vulnerabilities, and ways of caring for one another.

Lee Tzu Tung (李紫彤) is an artist and curator whose work integrates anthropological field research, political action, and economic critique. Their work explores how global majorities queer up current authoritarian and colonial systems through open-source methods, decentralized tools, and participatory projects.

Politically active, Lee has organized Café Philo Chicago (2016– 2018), and participated in Overseas Taiwanese for Democracy. They were also a key organizer for major rallies in Taiwan’s 2016 civic movements – including Anti-Black Box Education, Equality of Same-Sex Marriage, and Passage of Time (Indigenous protest) – and have spoken out in Taiwan’s #MeToo movement.

A graduate of MIT and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received the New Artist Society Scholarship and Transmedia Storytelling Fellowship. Lee’s works have been shown widely, including at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MIT Museum, Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing, Asymmetry Foundation UK, and Skövde Museum Sweden. They are also the founder of Tinyverse NPO, which supports transdisciplinary art and organizes Hackathon for Artists.

Project links: tzutung.com

Temple of the Wandering Daughters will be their session at DWebCamp 2026.

Government Information Belongs to Everyone: Democracy’s Library in 2026

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Merrilee Proffitt

Governments produce an abundance of information and put that information in the public domain, but often the public can’t easily find or access it. The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project is helping by preserving critical information and publications produced by governments: federal, state, provincial, and municipal– and making them available to anyone wanting to build new services on them.

Since the program’s launch in 2022, the Internet Archive has built on this already strong foundation by becoming a designated Federal Depository Library—joining 1,100+ peer libraries—and by utilizing Democracy’s Library as a means to connect to libraries, archives, and patrons with purpose.

What’s in Democracy’s Library?

Examples of what is in our growing collection of over 11 million items include recent additions like the the Supreme Court Records & Briefs, which joins established varied and important collections such as those from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, government documents from the nation of Aruba, NASA Technical Reports, the End of Term Crawls, the IGS/UC Berkeley California local government documents project, records from the US Census, the Canadian Government Publications Portal, and more.

Although it would be convenient to tie the practice of preserving government information to the messy birth of the United States, grounded as it was in principles around liberty and democratic process, we lack pithy quotes from the founders on this exact topic. What we do see is recognition in the very first Congress that citizens needed access to documentation of the business of their government.

In 1789, the House of Representatives provided for the printing and distribution of the laws and proceedings of the new Congress. From this modest beginning, the US Government rapidly rose to become the largest publisher in the world. Over the following century, a series of legislative milestones followed: the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1860, and the Government Printing Act of 1895, which centralized GPO’s authority as the primary channel for distributing the federal record.

Taken together, these efforts reflect a consistent, if imperfectly realized, principle: that government information belongs to the people and that information should be freely distributed to its citizens for their own use. It is important to note that libraries were identified as the natural and primary means of getting that information into the hands of citizens.

Who are the audiences for government information?

First and foremost, government itself; it is essential that law and policy makers understand prior law and policy. With an abundance of outputs, governments are not always the best record keepers and frequently turn to libraries to find appropriate documentation.

Second, we see serious researchers (including journalists) as those that rely on access to government information. These users seek authoritative sources and want assurances around provenance and reliable sources; libraries provide that authority.

Third, we see curious and motivated citizens. Users in this category include genealogists but can also include people like property owners seeking to understand current or prior ordinances in their jurisdiction, or people seeking to understand the history of their house or neighborhood.

Finally, an emerging category of user is machines; research methods mediated and assisted by computers have been on the rise for some time, but with the advent of LLMs and generative AI tools, a human assisted by a machine is emerging as a distinctive category of user. Looking across these categories, we can assert that government information not only belongs to everyone, but it is for everyone.

Why is Democracy’s Library important today?

Democracy’s Library is more than just collections – it is also a movement to bring people together in common cause, to take action, and to build momentum around increasing access. The Information Stewardship Forum, hosted by the Internet Archive in March, was one such gathering and we look forward to more in the future.

One of the themes that emerged from the Information Stewardship Forum is that, especially in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment, public access to government information cannot be left to chance. As the United States marks 250 years, Democracy’s Library exists to make sure it isn’t. Please join us.

Let us know how we can help you by collaborating to digitize and preserve collections, to build services on existing collections, and to support each other in areas of mutual interest. I welcome your emails at any time. I will be attending GODORT meetings at the June 2026 American Library Association meeting in Chicago, and you can find me there, as well as at the CNI meeting in December in Washington DC, or at our headquarters in San Francisco anytime you are in town.

Keep the News in the Wayback Machine

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Chris Freeland

For nearly 30 years, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has helped preserve the public record.

It has captured more than 1 trillion web pages, documented history in real time, and ensured that journalists, researchers, historians, librarians, and the public can continue to access reporting long after stories are published. From breaking news and investigative journalism to local reporting and public statements, the Wayback Machine has become essential infrastructure for the public’s ability to preserve online news and culture.

Now, that preservation work is under threat.

As reported by Nieman Lab and WIRED, some publishers are blocking the Wayback Machine from preserving their reporting. As a result, some of the most important journalism being produced today may no longer be independently archived for future generations. For details on the publisher blocking, check out our FAQ: Publishers Blocking the Wayback Machine.

In response to these blocks, Fight for the Future has launched an open letter calling on major media organizations to work with the Internet Archive to ensure the news remains preserved and accessible in the Wayback Machine.

Sign the open letter here: https://www.savethearchive.com/NewsLeaders

The letter argues that preserving journalism is not only about access today, but about protecting the historical record itself:

“The freedom of journalists isn’t only the freedom to write, it’s also the freedom to have your work read and remembered for generations to come.”

At a moment when misinformation spreads rapidly, links disappear, websites change, and pressure to alter or erase reporting continues to grow, independent web preservation matters more than ever. The Wayback Machine helps make journalism more resilient by ensuring published reporting can still be referenced, verified, and studied years later.

The campaign also highlights a growing contradiction: while many publishers rely on the Wayback Machine for reporting, research, and fact-checking, some are simultaneously preventing their own journalism from being preserved.

The Internet Archive has long worked collaboratively with publishers and respects requests around access and preservation. The Wayback Machine has been designed for preservation: helping ensure that the historical record of the web is not lost.

If you believe journalism should remain accessible to historians, researchers, educators, and future generations, we encourage you to add your name to the letter.

Sign the open letter here: https://www.savethearchive.com/NewsLeaders

Two Libraries, Two Sets of Superpowers: The Internet Archive and the NOAA Library

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Merrilee Proffitt

Digitization project in progress! Signage at the NOAA Library.

This is the story of two libraries supporting one another to ensure physical preservation and broad access to great research collections.

The first is the NOAA Library, an institution that was established in the early 1970s, building on the inheritance of previous US Federal agency libraries, including those of the National Weather Service, United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The NOAA Library primarily serves the employees and affiliates that have full access to the library’s e-resources and physical holdings. Members of the public can access NOAA publications through the NOAA Institutional Repository or the NOAA Library’s digitized holdings.

The second is the Internet Archive. Having recently celebrated its 30th birthday, the Internet Archive has strong capabilities in digitizing materials at scale as well as safeguarding physical materials in physical archives.

Both libraries are part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). NOAA received the honor of being named the FDLP Library of the year in 1999, while the Internet Archive is the new to the network, having joined in 2025. NOAA’s current FDLP status as a digital access partner made connecting with the Internet Archive a natural decision.

The NOAA Library and the Internet Archive have been working together collaboratively since 2022 when NOAA first donated materials they no longer deemed to be in scope as per the Library’s collection development policy. This collection, however, fell into the Internet Archive’s mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge by acquiring, digitizing, and hosting materials just like this. Since that time, the two libraries have continued to collaborate, sharing a goal and vision of making these materials more available. NOAA collections fit nicely into the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library, which seeks to give broad access to government publications, including those from US Federal agencies and other parts of government.

Liz Rosenberg, who leads the physical donation program, describes the relationship this way. “A lot of folks do not know that we preserve physical materials. So when NOAA reached out to explore this kind of collaboration we were so grateful for the opportunity to help preserve valuable resources from their collections. Our partnership has blossomed over years of collaboration with wonderful NOAA librarians, and we are excited to be bringing broader digital access to their unique collections.”

Ben Hope, director of the NOAA Library also values the partnership. “Libraries are at their best when they combine stewardship with access,” says Hope. “Our partnership with the Internet Archive ensures that NOAA’s scientific and historical collections are not only preserved for future generations, but also made more discoverable and accessible to researchers, educators, and the public worldwide. Together, we are extending the reach and impact of NOAA’s knowledge far beyond the walls of any single library.”

Please check out the digital collections as we are collaboratively building. The NOAA collections contain a wealth of resources around weather, fisheries, deep sea exploration and more! https://archive.org/details/noaa

If you are interested in donating materials or know of other potential collaborations, please contact us.