What is an onion address?
Tor (The Onion Router) is a privacy-focused network that helps protect users’ identities and browsing activity by routing traffic through encrypted layers. Visiting the Internet Archive through Tor allows users to explore the Wayback Machine, books, audio, video, and other collections with an added layer of anonymity, which is an important option for researchers, journalists, and anyone seeking greater privacy or access in regions where the open web may be restricted.
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The 2026 Public Song Project is here — and for the first time, WNYC’s Public Song Project is partnering with the Internet Archive!
Here’s what you need to know:
Anyone can participate. You don’t need to be a professional musician. Voice memos welcome. Bedroom producers, shower singers, full bands — the public domain is for everyone.
What’s the public domain? It’s the vast commons of creative works not protected by copyright — meaning you’re free to enjoy, remix, adapt, and build on them. In the U.S., that includes creative works published in 1930 or earlier, sound recordings from 1925 or earlier, plus U.S. federal government works from any year.
What’s new this year? This year’s playlist will live not only with WNYC, but also on the Internet Archive, where millions can stream and share it.
Fun fact: The submission deadline (May 10) falls on the Internet Archive’s 30th birthday!
Learn more: Check out the rules and guidelines at https://www.wnyc.org/story/2026-public-song-project/
Optional 2026 Bonus Prompt
This year marks:
- 250 years since America declared independence
- 50 years since the Copyright Act of 1976
Some ideas:
- Rewrite a public domain poem in your own language
- Highlight a historically marginalized artist
- Remix a government work (they’re all public domain!)
- Reimagine the national anthem
- Tell your family’s story through inherited songs
There’s no right or wrong way to do this. The public domain belongs to you. It’s a tool to celebrate, question, remix, critique, and create.
- Submit your song by May 10.
- Submission form, contest rules & more info available from WNYC.
- Questions? Email [email protected]
Internet Archive’s latest Artist in Residence, Cindy Rehm, has created The Seers, a project comprised of one hundred college drawings using images largely sourced from historic books at the Internet Archive. The Seers is inspired by the work of Hélène Cixous and Carolee Schneemann around their interest in the creative process, and mysticism often centered in the figure of the cat. Rehm searched historic books related to women and their feline companions including books on the history of cats in mysticism and witchcraft. For her collages, she gleaned images for their aesthetic and symbolic resonance, focusing on books related to histories of women including books on textiles and handiwork, art history, nature, cats, and other creatures.
For the format of the series, Rehm researched Internet Archive’s collection of antique scrapbooks. The scrapbook is a vernacular form often associated with women and their private lives, and also shares a process relationship with collage, where small fragments are cut and pasted. Historic scrapbooks were often made using repurposed books like catalogs, ledgers, and music books. Rehm borrowed this gesture of layering fragments over a main image, as image cut outs were repeated and remixed across the series to develop a symbolic language and esoteric taxonomy.
Sample scrapbooks:
Helen Louise Bailey scrapbook, 1920
https://archive.org/details/helenlouisebaileyscrapbook/page/n3/mode/2up
Edwina Devendorf Scrapbook, 1915/1936
https://archive.org/details/ccarm_008888
Charlotte Roese, “Album of a Family” 1895/1945
https://archive.org/details/cmlpl_000893
As part of her project, Rehm created a limited-edition poster that she distributed during her participation in Public Domain Day on site at Internet Archive. Rehm gave a talk about her project and process, view the livestream recording here.
In February, Rehm will take The Seers to Automata in Los Angeles for a residency focused on extending the project to include an installation and performance. Please visit Rehm’s website to view The Seers full series.
About the artist
Cindy Rehm (https://www.cindyrehm.com/) is a Los Angeles-based artist and an educator. She serves as co-facilitator of the Cixous Reading Group, and is co-founder of the feminist-centered projects Craftswoman House and Feminist Love Letters. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD. In 2021, she launched HEXENTEXTE, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text and the body.
Rehm has held residencies at Performing Arts Forum in Saint Ermes, France and at Casa Lü, Mexico City. A book of her collage drawings, Transference, was released by Curious Publishing in 2022.
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As reported by Nieman Lab last month, some major media organizations—including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Reddit—have started blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving their sites over unfounded concerns about AI scraping.
Last week, tech writer Mike Masnick (Techdirt) explained why this is “a mistake we’re going to regret for generations.”
Today, Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, has published a response to the Nieman Lab reporting, pushing back on the media organizations’ concerns about the Wayback Machine being a backdoor to AI scraping. Graham writes:
“These concerns are understandable, but unfounded… like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse.”
Read the post to learn how Graham is working to protect the integrity of the Wayback Machine, and why limiting web archiving threatens our shared digital history.
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Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.
WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.
The free Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, publicly launched last fall, combats link rot by seamlessly redirecting the user to a reliable backup page when it encounters a missing page. When the plugin is added to a website, it will do a scan, see what pages exist, and then automatically save those pages to a queue to be archived. If it doesn’t exist, then it will be sent for capture.
Once the software is installed on a WordPress website, the plugin will auto redirect users to the Wayback Machine version of a missing page.
Broken links are one of the web’s most relentless problems. Pew Research found that 38% of the web has disappeared over the past decade and for web admins, “It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to keep links working,” said Matt Blumberg, Product Manager with the Wayback Machine. “This new tool prevents those inevitable 404s by automatically updating links to a preserved copy and it proactively archives pages in the Wayback Machine, where they’re kept accessible for free, long-term, so your site stays usable without manual fixes.”
“It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory. We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.”
Alexander Rose, Director of Long-term Futures for Automattic Inc.
Many WordPress websites are homespun and are most susceptible to having links go dead. Remedying this problem is not only valuable to individuals, but also to the overall culture, said Alexander Rose, Director of Long-term Futures for Automattic Inc., the technology company behind WordPress.com.
“We need to have an accurate memory of the things that get said, posted, and the ways that we have communicated over time,” Rose said. “Otherwise we’re either doomed to repeat errors or we’re going to make choices that are uninformed by the past.”
The link fixer is expanding the “heroic effort” made by the Internet Archive over the years to preserve everything from small websites to NASA.gov and WhiteHouse.gov, he said.
“It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory,” Rose said. “We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.”
As the plugin rolls out, Rose and Blumberg said they are open to feedback. The goal is to make the software as easy as possible to use. Next, they will fine tune the features and promote its broad use.
“As it becomes a solid piece of software that people know and like, then I think it has a path to being integrated much more deeply,” Rose said. “It’s early days, but every person I’ve talked to about it is excited to see the potential end of the dreaded 404 error.”
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The webinar opened with a stark reality check: For generations, libraries, archives, museums, and other memory institutions have relied on social and legal norms that allow them to collect, preserve, and lend materials. But nowadays, digital content is increasingly being controlled by restrictive licenses on gated, paywalled platforms. This new distribution stream prohibits memory institutions from doing what they’ve historically been able to do in the physical world, curtailing their essential functions of preserving and providing long-term access to knowledge.
Webinar attendees heard from recent signatories Charlie Barlow, Executive Director of the Boston Library Consortium, and John Chrastka, Executive Director of the EveryLibrary Institute. Their participation highlighted the crisis facing memory institutions—and the demands necessary to overcome it.
“When we have publishers or vendors coming in and saying that we can’t do something that we perceive as foundational and essential,” said Barlow, “we’re in real trouble.”
Chrastka added, “We’ve got gases, solids, liquids, plasma, and ebooks! Seriously, when you think about it, I can’t own it unless the IP owner wants to distribute that right to us. It’s a violation, in some ways, of a natural order.”
To combat this dire situation, Our Future Memory is building consensus around the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. Originating from discussions at the Library Leaders Forum and first endorsed by the National Library of Aruba in 2024, the Statement proposes the simple solution of letting memory institutions do what they were always able to do before the digital age. Specifically, they need the legal rights and practical ability to:
- Collect digital materials
- Preserve digital collections
- Provide controlled digital access
- Cooperate across institutions
The Statement’s focus on foundational norms is what compelled the Boston Library Consortium to join the coalition, and Barlow emphasized its value as a tool for asserting that traditional library functions must not be treated as negotiable.
“We chose to sign this one because for us, it really established a clear, public baseline that we can point to when long-standing library rights are being treated as optional or the exception,” he explained. “It really is about making those foundational rights visible and shared and harder to dismiss.”
For Chrastka and the EveryLibrary Institute, endorsing the Statement was a necessary step toward building the political momentum required to change the status quo.
“We haven’t been necessarily talking as a sector out loud together as frequently and as vociferously as we need to about what this should all look like,” Chrastka said. “We want to lean into this conversation.”
How can organizations participate?
It is because memory institutions speak louder when they stand together that Our Future Memory is actively accepting signatures from institutions, organizations, and government entities. If you are ready to stand with a global community committed to protecting the past to power the future, here is how you can join:
- Download the Statement from ourfuturememory.org (or email [email protected] for a copy).
- Sign the document (either by hand or using an electronic signature tool).
- Send the signed document back to [email protected].
Once received, your organization will be added to the list of signatories.
Want to learn more? If you missed the live event, you can watch the full recording or visit the Our Future Memory website for resources to help you advocate for these rights in your own community.
]]>This work was supported by the Centre for Digital Culture and Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and developed further through collaborations with researchers and students at the University of Amsterdam.
Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages.
The web has become not only a source of information but also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists to use digital archives to reconstruct timelines, verify claims, uncover hidden connections and hold powerful actors to account.
As online materials grow more fragile and prone to disappearance, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been critical in making “lost” web pages available – recently celebrating archiving over a trillion pages.
As we’ve previously written about on this blog, the Wayback Machine is an important resource for our work as media researchers, helping us to trace histories of digital media objects (for example, changes in ad tracker signatures of viral “fake news” sites over time).
We are also interested in how others use web archives across fields, and what we can learn from each other.
In this piece we draw on the Internet Archive’s News Stories collection to surface practices and use cultures of the Wayback Machine amongst journalists and media organisations. We analysed a dataset of about 8,600 news articles, assembled by the IA via daily Google News keyword searches since 2018.
Drawing on a combination of digital methods, machine learning and lots of reading – we surfaced nine ways that journalists use the Wayback Machine in their reporting.
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1. following what is deleted
Shifting political alliances are a common driver of online footprint erasure. Deleted tweets have revealed past critics in current allies (here and here), and current career aspirations were juxtaposed with earlier conflicting stances in personal blogs and websites (here, here, here and here).
Unannounced takedowns of collections or site sections on government websites often prompt investigations using archival snapshots. Examples include removed editions of presidential newsletters and deleted staff contact lists for services supporting vulnerable groups, signaling access-to-information breaches.
The removal of official publications also enticed further contextualisation, revealing cases in which information was deleted due to being incomplete, inaccurate or inconveniently timed.
Beyond politics, erasing on corporate websites highlights commercial and reputational pressures, such as deleted statements on forced labour, product safety and climate deception.
2. following what has been altered
Subtle alterations on webpages can also reveal a plain-to-see effort to reshape narratives.
Reporting based on archived pages shows how wording edits can move in opposite directions: from hardening language on migration ahead of a policy announcement to softening controversial statements in view of a political nomination, or erasing customer protection promises prior to a bankruptcy filing.
In other cases, small additions to online content have proved just as revealing. A before and after snapshot of a blog post showed how a supposed early warning about a virus threat was added only after the pandemic began. Similarly, changes to a social media platform’s API rules appeared shortly after third-party apps were banned, subtly reframing the policy to align with new restrictions.
3. following what is banned
Sometimes removals are deliberate, often at the request of companies seeking to enforce copyright, control branding, or limit liability.
Reports from media investigations highlight how such bans can affect games (here, here, here and here), apps and technical reviews.
In some cases, the bans intersect with political pressures, such as Hong Kong news outlets being shuttered under pro‑Beijing pressure, and disinformation networks being taken down due to links to state actors.
4. following what is broken
Archived snapshots are also often the only way to reconstruct what preceded a link break, when it happened, and what information was effectively cut off.
For example, an investigation into a set of broken URLs on a government website revealed that the pages themselves had not been removed, but the links pointed to outdated servers, creating a false impression of secrecy that sparked a conspiracy theory.
In another case, a major technical glitch took multiple Nigerian government websites offline, cutting off access to official information and showing how even unintentional failures can undermine transparency.
5. following what is hacked
Compromised versions of hacked websites and social media accounts present another form of using archived snapshots as traceable historical record.
For example, past screenshots of Twitter’s bio page revealed inconsistencies in claims about an alleged takeover of the US president’s social media account. In other cases, such snapshots helped surface a forensic trail and distinguish unauthorised activity carried out by activists (here and here) from the ones linked to cybercriminal groups (here).
6. following what is connected
Archived web data often uncovers unexpected linkages between domains’ ownership that appear unrelated on the surface.
For example, journalists used analytics codes of copies of sites maintained by the Wayback Machine to uncover disinformation networks. In another investigation, archived records verified that a website redirect to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign was unrelated to him, debunking conspiracy theories about the domain’s ownership.
Snapshots of a fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page and its associated websites allowed reporters to trace the individuals behind the operation. Similarly, archived versions of Amazon storefronts exposed networks of accounts generating affiliate revenue from coordinated product listings.
7. following what is reported
Archived web pages have proven vital for tracing how stories are presented across media outlets and platforms.
Investigations have examined archived versions of individual pages, such as headline coverage relying heavily on unverified claims, a news agency editorial premature assessment, or the unflagging of a branded content.
In another case, snapshots of the Google homepage captured during the 2018 State of the Union speech disproved a viral claim that Google ignored Donald Trump’s address in favour of Barack Obama.
8. following what is unchanged
In other investigations, the most revealing detail is what did not change.
For example, during a bushfire crisis in Australia, archived pages showed that a key policy statement by the Greens party was left untouched, despite a disinformation campaign claiming to the contrary.
Similarly, a social media account circulated as having been reactivated under a new wave of laissez-faire moderation was, in fact, never suspended.
9. following what is saved
When forums, platforms and websites vanish, it’s the work of crowdsourced archivists that capture their traces before they vanish for good.
In several reported cases, users raced to preserve spaces such as a long-running forum for sex workers, a 16-year-old Q&A site, a meme-sharing platform, and a free music library.
Archiving web pages can become part of the story.
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These are some of the ways we’ve noticed journalists using web archives – and there are many more! If you know of other interesting examples, we’d love to hear from you.
We hope that these nine ways may help to inspire critical and creative uses of web archives to “follow the changes” – exploring what they can tell us about digital culture and society, and the times we live in.
This work was supported by the Centre for Digital Culture and Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and developed further through collaborations with researchers and students at the University of Amsterdam.
About the authors
Thais Lobo is research associate at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, with a previous career in journalism.
Jonathan W. Y. Gray is Co-director of the Centre for Digital Culture and Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab; research associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work at jonathangray.org.
Liliana Bounegru is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Media, Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab, member of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and associate of the Sciences Po Paris médialab. More about her work can be found at lilianabounegru.org.
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Two more organizations—SPARC and Curationist—have decided to sign the Statement on Four Digital Rights for Memory Institutions Online, demonstrating its broad appeal to memory institutions of different stripes.
SPARC and Curationist represent key collaborative institutions from library world and the museum space, respectively. SPARC is an umbrella advocacy group with more than 250 North American research libraries and academic organizations as its members; Curationist, a digital platform helping museums and archives open their collections to each other and to the world.
Notwithstanding their distinct areas of focus, SPARC and Curationist are dedicated memory institutions, specializing to meet the needs of their patrons, members, and users, but never forgetting their shared goal of preserving culture and providing equal access to knowledge. That is why both are concerned about the effect that outdated laws are having on cultural heritage organizations in the digital age—and why they’ve joined Our Future Memory’s fight to protect memory institutions’ absolutely vital operations, in a media environment where affordable access to trustworthy information is at a premium.
“Curationist is signing this statement because the future of cultural memory depends on the ability of museums, libraries, and archives to operate fully and responsibly in the digital world,” said Executive Director Christian Dawson. “These rights are not abstract ideals. They are the practical foundations that allow institutions to preserve knowledge, provide access, and collaborate across borders. Our work exists to help make these rights real in practice, and we are proud to stand with a global community committed to protecting the past to power the future.”
To be sure, these “practical foundations” should not be controversial. They reflect the historical operations that have made libraries, archives, museums, and other memory institutions such an essential part of our information ecosystem. The Statement calls for legal assurances of memory institutions’ right and ability to:
- Collect digital materials
- Preserve digital collections
- Provide controlled digital access
- Cooperate across institutions
Thanks to SPARC and Curationist, the coalition to protect our future memory just got a bit bigger.
Ready to Join?
Your organization can join the movement and sign the Statement by going to the Our Future Memory website.
Want to learn more?
Register and join our informational webinar this Tuesday, January 27: “Protect Our Future Memory: Join the Call for Library Digital Rights.”
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How do you commemorate the preservation of 1 trillion web pages in a zine? That was Megan Lotts’ challenge when she was contacted by the Internet Archive last summer.
Lotts is an art librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she promotes creativity, play, and makerspaces through her teaching and research. She designs zines (short for magazine), which are self-published, handmade objects that are often copied and shared. It was through Lotts’ involvement with zines at the American Library Association (ALA) conference that she was asked by Internet Archive librarian Chris Freeland to create one for the Internet Archive’s October celebration.
For the project, Lotts collaborated with Louisa Cohen and Drew MacDonald at the Internet Archive on images and text to incorporate. Although an avid user of the Internet Archive, Lotts said making the zine prompted her to take a deep dive and discover all new material.
“As a librarian, this is a space where you go for history,” she said of the Internet Archive. “I’m a kind of curious, reflective person, but there were collections that I came across that I didn’t know existed.”
The final product is an 8-page zine that Lotts has shared on the Internet Archive, along with a close-up view of the pages. It includes the Wayback Machine logo, icons of various collections, an old Polaroid photo of Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, next to a vintage computer.
The zine was printed and shared with attendees at the Oct. 22 Internet Archive party in San Francisco. Lotts took a week off from Rutgers to help unveil the zine at the festivities. Upon returning to Rutgers, she said it was fun to show students her work and explain the process. They were excited to hear about her experience, Lotts said, and what she learned behind the scenes at the headquarters.
“My students grew up with the Wayback Machine. They’ve used it since grade school,” said Lotts, 51, who remembers first accessing the Archive in college. “If you think about 1 trillion pages in less than 30 years, that’s outrageous. It’s preserving information for posterity.”
Zines need to be preserved, Lotts maintains, along with other art and cultural artifacts.
“When I give someone a zine, what I’m really hoping is that I’m giving you a moment,” Lotts said, “whether you recognize it or not, to hold this in your hands and get lost from the rest of the world. It’s just a tiny little book … I want people to look at it and think about it. That’s the beauty of the zine.”
Zines can be as elaborate as the one she produced for the Archive, she said, or as simple as creating something with a piece of paper, pen or pencil and an idea. “Those are things that most of us can access and everybody has a story,” said Lotts, who hopes the project inspires people to consider tapping into their creative side to make a zine.
“I’m noticing—as a scholar and as an educator—that people want to engage with the arts. They want to be creative,” said Lotts, who has degrees in fine arts, library science, painting and art history and teaches a class on play. “It’s really powerful for me to see students come alive and think about information and knowledge creation in a playful and exciting way.”
Lotts is the author of two books published by the American Library Association (ALA): Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement (2021) and The Playful Library: Building Environments for Learning and Creativity (2024).
Check out her scholarship web page and website for more.
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The Our Future Memory movement continues to grow, with the EveryLibrary Institute (ELI) formally joining the global coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. ELI’s participation brings a powerful policy-focused perspective to the effort to ensure that libraries, archives, and museums retain the rights they need to fulfill their public mission in a digital world.
EveryLibrary Institute explained its reason for joining the Our Future Memory movement:
By joining the Our Future Memory coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online, the EveryLibrary Institute is hoping to advance a broader conversation that reaches beyond copyright reform alone and asks deeper questions about ownership, stewardship, creativity, and the future of reading in a digital society. We believe that this conversation must include libraries and educators, but also independent booksellers, independent publishers, authors, technologists, policymakers, and readers themselves. The health of the creative economy and our democratic society depends on getting this right.
About the Statement
The Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online aims to safeguard the essential digital activities of libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as “memory institutions”). It urges policymakers and communities to ensure these institutions retain the same rights and responsibilities online that they have historically held offline, including the rights to:
- Collect digital materials, including through digitization and lawful acquisition;
- Preserve digital works, including repair, backup, and reformatting for long-term access;
- Provide controlled access to digital collections for research and public use; and
- Cooperate across institutions by sharing and transferring digital collections to strengthen preservation and access.
Want to Learn More?
Interested libraries and memory institutions can learn more about the Our Future Memory coalition and Statement at a free, public webinar on Tuesday, January 27 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Register at https://blog.archive.org/event/protect-our-future-memory-join-the-call-for-library-digital-rights/.
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