Patrick Burden
Assignment Five
Branch Assignment
For this assignment I would like to talk about the lesser-known aspect of the Internet Archive. Most
people are familiar with the website via the wayback machine, where you can enter in a web address
and able to view a web site from a previous date. This is an amazing tool, but the Internet Archive is
also known for its digital collection that can be searched.
In the digital age we all important files. These can include videos, audio records, and documents among
others. The Internet Archive will allow you to have a back up of this information on their servers for free
and make it available to all. I have managed to take over 1700 video and audio recordings from my
personal collection and have added it to the website that anyone can view, download, and maintain.
So, if you are looking at numerous files how do you go about uploading them to the archive? The longer
way to do this is to physically mail your discs to the Internet Archive itself. There is a rather long queue
of items where they will scan the information, validate that it is in proper order, and then post on the
website on your behalf. They recommend that you do this for older software and operating system level
items since they are the most difficult to categorize and maintain.
For anything else you can do it yourself quite easily. First you would need to create an account on the
Internet Archive. Once you have signed up you will have a section called My Library. From here you can
view both the information that you have uploaded as well as the items you have checked out from the
library. This can include digital copies of their physical books to other materials that are used for
research purposes. On this page we are going to focus on the upload button.
From here this will take you to a page where you will have two options, most of the time you are going
to select the first option unless you are uploading a live audio recording. Once selected simply navigate
to the file(s) that you want to upload.
A new screen appears that is divided in two columns. On the left is the metadata that you can enter in,
this is setup in such a way that anyone can input the information. All that is required is a description
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Patrick Burden
Assignment Five
Branch Assignment
and at least one tag to help identify what data is contained within. The other items are optional but
recommended. These include things like the date of when it was created, who created the file, as well
as if there is a license associated with the file. Once you fill in the information and confirm everything is
correct the file starts to upload on the servers. This may take some time depending on how active the
site is as well as the size of the file.
Once it is complete you can view the record of the information, however it is not done being processed.
There is more metadata being generated so that the information is easier to search. First it will take a
snapshot at random intervals of the document and whichever one the program deems to contain the
most amount of information is then used as the thumbnail of the file.
The other aspect is that it is generating additional metadata and storing it in three different areas of the
Archive. You can see this when you view the files of the entry, in addition to what you have uploaded it
will also include several other identifiers in order to ensure no duplicates are being confused with one
another.
The first of these XML files is simply the metadata associated with the upload. All the entries that were
entered are formatted so that computers can easily recognize them. The second is a little more
technical, it hashes the contents of the file into various functions to give it its own thumbprint. It then
gets timestamped to when it was created for each item in the upload. It then links them together so
that it all the items are treated as one unit going forward.
Once the page is fully done there are a few items that will allow yourself or any creator to come in and
edit the metadata with additional information or include more files with it. This is optional going
forward but does help if you wanted to include more advanced information with these sets of files.
With this information you should be able to back up your memories to the Internet Archive and ensure
that they will be safely kept for generations to come.
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