Life working as an archivist for The Internet Archive has been going fantabulous, thanks for asking.  I start to feel like one of those individuals tweeting or writing about “being in an amazing environment working with great people on world-changing projects”, except in fact I am not working in some primary-color-and-convenient-free-coffee cube farm that is trying to create Douchenozzle XL in a field of Douchenozzle Plus so they can gain 60 percent of Douchenozzle market share and charge subscriptions. I am literally working for a non-profit dedicated to spreading as much information and knowledge as possible to as many people as possible, a mission I set out on in my early teens.  But Internet Archive is doing it at an amazing scale, with a relatively small staff, in an incredible location and with a style and grace that’s hard to be cynical about.

I’ve just been informed that I have surpassed one terabyte uploaded to archive.org since joining up. For some that’s a lot, others are saying to me “you slacker”. Just to take the second group seriously, the deal is that I am trying to upload things in a curated, properly handled fashion, with completeness and accuracy the watchword. It is so easy to drown in this incoming waterfall of data and then never have it be found by anyone again… literally the “stacks” one expects at a large archive or library, where someone rooting around years later finds precious things stuck halfway between two travel brochures. I hope I can avoid that.

So allow me to announce my second major collection on Archive.org (arcade manuals being the first). This new collection is one which will be familiar to some readers and unfamiliar to others.

I call it The Reader Service Collection, and what it is is a collection of mostly 1980s-era advertisements, flyers, mailings and catalogs I collected in my early teens.  Right now it’s 139 items but I expect it to eventually grow to about a thousand or so, maybe a thousand and a half.  It’s called the “Reader Service” collection because I got them filling out Reader Service Cards in the back of my computer magazines, and I’d just circle them ALL. So then I ended up with a box of these things, and I kept them for a long time, and now here we are.

Again, if this sounds familiar, that’s because this was once digitize.textfiles.com.  In fact, this is a ported mirror of the entire contents of digitize.textfiles.com, including the massive TIFF file originals, and all the descriptions I’d cooked up. For extra fun, you can browse around on this very weblog and read the spectacular online fight I had with Benj about the morality of watermarking scans,  the announcement of digitize.textfiles.com,   where I start to wonder how to scale it,   and the look back on all this from Benj himself.

Enmeshing myself with librarians and archivists, as well as my work in digital preservation, means that I encounter a lot of hand-wringing about archives and libraries and what they’re “for” and what they “do” and the rest.  My concerns are a little more reptile-brain oriented and reflect a few that an entire subculture and aspect of life (home computer era of the 70s and 80s) was in danger of being forgotten, and whatever means necessary to get it accessible was the top priority. But that’s getting slightly easier, and the concern now is getting it searchable, browseable and findable. That’s where we are now.

So by pulling digitize.textfiles.com into archive.org in the guise of this Reader Service collection, I get the advantages of more drive space, more bandwidth capacity, and a ton of derived formats for each item, meaning it’s easier to get it in front of you. If you want it in PDF, great. An archive of JPEG or TIFF files? Got it. Kindle-compatible? EPUB-ready? All set. It’s amazing!

Oh, you want some highlights? Sure. How about:

• A 1983 Electronics catalog with gizmos, gadgets, tools and a whole bunch of massive-sized plastic cases?
• A brochure for a nice rustic computer summer camp where you can learn assembly language?
• The brilliantly named Honeybox Omnisonic Imager?
• The true lowdown about the BASF 5 1/4″ Floppy Qualimetric standard?
• The secret weapon in beating Atari 2600-related hand cramps which we called The Stick Station?
• IBM trying to convince you that using a computer is a good idea?
• A catalog of primarily computer-themed candy and novelties?
• And finally, the worst-drawn computer game catalog in history?

Somehow, a post just seemed like it would be drowned in a sea of other posts and the usual sad debates about the mass deletion of information. So, I recorded an mp3.

A Message to Salon.Com (3 minutes)

If you’d like to help, please visit the Tabletalk.Salon.Com project page on the Archive Team website.

Archive Team, that ruthless band of site-saving scalliwags, has been working like crazy on a new downloading project, and we really, really need your help.

Friendster, one of the first social sites that took off in a big way until being overtaken by other services, has been bought out by a company that intends to convert it into some sort of entertainment site. To that end, they’ve announced that on May 31st, they’re deleting all user content on their 124 million accounts. 124 million!

We’ve constructed software to go in, guns blazing, and pull out photos, blogs, notes and anything else within reach for each of these accounts. It’s going swimmingly, millions of accounts will be archived, but at current rates we’ll be lucky to get ten percent of the accounts. We could really use some volunteers to help.

If you have a unix/linux variant, a couple hundred gigs of disk space free, and bandwidth you don’t mind donating to a good cause, please come to #archiveteam on the IRC Channel EFNet and let us know you want to help.

Everything works – we just need more help.

Thanks.

Hello Jason,

Hey there, Nathanael.

Well, first, let’s start with Facebook itself.

Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing.  First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Facebook is a living computer nightmare.  Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Each era of computing has had companies that rose above the others, whose stratospheric rise in income and success and mindshare and whatever else marketing fucktards want to call it turned heads. A start-up goes from an eyebrow-raiser to a non-proper noun to a verb. A million asshole salespeople and technological wannabes and pundits and sniffing elites make the word longer, as in “like facebook”. Something is like facebook, does something like facebook, wants to be like facebook, is like facebook but in some way different that somehow will magically propel it in even farther, without realizing that under contemporary situations, facebook is as high up as you want to go.

Microsoft did awful fucking things. I mean, all the time. Really awful things. So did IBM, way back when. Compaq? Assholery. Sony? Doing ten awful fucking things this morning before breakfast. Of course awful things are on the agenda and the lifeblood of any firm so big that it can affect law, affect standards, make millionaires just sucking under its folding metal chair for breadcrumbs. Facebook is just doing it to People.

People aren’t just eating Facebook’s Shit Sherbet of overnight upgrades, of lack of guarantees and standards, of enveloping tendrils of web standard breaking. They are shoveling it down. They’re grabbing two crazy handfuls of Facebook every minute of every day when they’re not forced to walk down a hallway or look up from their phones or ipads or laptops or consoles. They’re grabbing buckets of Facebook and finding ways to shove it down with one hand while pawing around for a second bucket.  People have bought the fuck in.

Remember that week when Facebook decided which of your friends would show up on your what’s new thing? That was great. Remember a week or two ago when they changed the behavior of the Enter key in text boxes? Awesome. How about that nosebleed you got when they changed privacy/information standards six different ways, trying them on like new Malibu Stacy hats, as an audience ranging from barely literate mouthbreathers to computer scientists got to experience One True Rogering Of Personal Information. And there we all were! We wondered if there was some sort of App we could install in Facebook to give us a third bucket and arm to keep that Sherbet coming.

The old saw is that people don’t understand that Facebook doesn’t consider the users their customers – they consider the advertisers their customers. Make no mistake, this is true... but it implies that Facebook takes some sort of benign “let’s keep humming along and use this big herd of moos to our advantage”. But it doesn’t. Facebook actively and constantly changes up the game, makes things more intrusive, couldn’t give less of a shit about your identity, your worth, your culture, your knowledge, your humanity, or even the cohesive maintenance of what makes you you. Facebook couldn’t care less about you than if it was born in your lower intestine and ripped out of you in the middle of the night.

I use Facebook every single day. Because of its disgust and distaste for borders and stratum, I’ve gotten back in touch with some very important folks in my past, and used Facebook to get information about a variety of people and figures that are relevant to my work in history and research. I can do this because Facebook lets you rip through millions of profiles to spearfish just the knowledge you need, out of a blazing torrent of intrusion and exposure, and grab the tailcoat of a person’s life and yank hard, real hard. I use Facebook, in other words, like a search tool on human beings. For that, it is really great.

But the fact that anyone would put anything of any unique nature on there, that matters to them, is beyond insanity – it’s identity suicide. It’s like you are intentionally driving down the road of life, ripping pages of your journal and photo albums, and tossing them out the window. Good luck finding anything again. Good luck knowing in six months, a year, something will even be findable. Try and communicate with anyone using their designed-by-a-second-trimester-fetus “message” system with any of the features from the last 30 years. Go back and try and negotiate it for search and topic control and usefulness. No. Not happening. Everything on Facebook is Now. Nothing, and I mean nothing on Facebook is Then. Or even last month.

So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.

As we watch this machine, this engine that runs on memories and identity and watch it sell every last bit of us to anyone who will pay, as it mulches under our self and our dreams and our ideas and turns them into a grey miserable paste suitable for a side dish or the full entree of the human online experience, I am sure many of us will say it’s no big deal. It should say something that in the face of this situation, having watched what has happened, what has transpired and likely will transpire, that I am not even trying. I’m not giving one goddamned second of thought to extraction or archiving or longevity or meaning. I can only hope that all the projects and processes and memories and history that I am focusing on will make me happy in the face of the colorless, null-void cloud of pre-collapsed galaxy that is the Facebook Nebula.

Thanks for your question!

It has been quite a great time at my new position within archive.org, working as I am from a remote location.

Forget hitting the ground running – I’m trying to make the ground have no idea what hit it.

I already just mentioned the MUD archiving work I’m calling out for, but there’s lots more on my radar.

Let me speak of one now in version 1.0: the collected, curated archive of arcade game manuals I am adding.

Right now, it’s at 362 manuals.  Soon it’s going to be 1,700. I added an initial batch to learn how one does bulk importing on archive.org, and then I have been entering metadata (along with a handful of volunteers, who are listed on the front page). With the addition of the metadata to all the manuals, and the whole thing being searchable and browsable, I am declaring it version 1.0 and then will come back to it later this summer.

Manuals are, to me, at the very heart of what makes a library useful. Anyone who has had a junk drawer of discarded instructions, or bought a critical item with 10 unlabelled buttons, or found themselves wondering what to call this part that just snapped off in your hands, knows the in-the-now importance of manuals – but this critical moment comes with weeks or years between emergencies.  Meanwhile, manuals get thrown out, instructions get lost, lore gets forgotten. But if they’re kept in a library, where the community can find and reference them as needed – you ensure the stuff is right there when you need it. In the case of manuals for things like tools, firearms, cars.. a manual can literally save lives with critical information. Less so, of course, with arcade games.

But arcade game manuals have a special place for me. I said as such when I wrote an entry about my initial acquisition of these.  You feel like you have a magic book in your hand, where this wonderful video game has all sorts of options, stories, and explanations you might never know about just being a “player”. Few people are “just players” anymore, of course, so some of this is just technical information, but there’s so many uses for these manuals beyond access to instructions, and the subjects themselves are so interesting, that I get a real charge out of making all of it available.

But while it was great to put that up initially on textfiles.com, making a more canonical version at the Internet Archive means that people can point to an institution, with non-profit status, making these manuals available to people who need them, and to perhaps encourage people who have manuals for games that are not digitized yet to do so. (Personally, I’d wait until I upload the other 1,300, just to be absolutely sure the game manual in question is not already available.) This is all very exciting, and one of many collections I hope to bring to the archive under the guise of my new job/career.

So browse around, download, check them out.

Hey ground, how ya feelin’ about now?

OK, do NOT wear the same dress as me – this is my big coming out party, after all.

Well, more specifically, on June 5th, 2011, the Internet Archive ( my new employers) are having a reception and ceremony and open house around their newest building, the Internet Archive Physical Archive in Richmond, CA. Here are the event details.

This is the Archive moving in a big way into having a physical storage space for donated materials, doing all that great stuff (temperature control, cataloging, just having stuff available) that they weren’t doing before, being a whole bunch of servers all over the world and stuff. As I am in town to do my every-once-in-a-while on-site appearance at the Archive, I will be attending this event too. As if the whole “seeing a new awesome archive” thing wasn’t cool enough, I figure I’d make myself available to fans and followers and friends who want to hang out with me – I’ll be at the event the whole time and would love to meet people.

So consider this your personal invitation, if you’re in the SF Bay area to meet me and check out the awesome things my employer is getting up to.

And how is my new job going? HOW DO YOU THINK?