This is just utterly amazing. If you make use of the internet archive, do you have any concept of how old documents are digitized? Now, you can watch the archiving life streamed, as it is happening.
Ever wonder how government documents, locked away on tiny sheets of microfiche, become searchable and accessible online? Now you can see it happen in real time.
This is the Internet Archive’s microfiche digitization livestream—part of our effort to build Democracy’s Library by preserving government documents and making them free for everyone, this happens during one shift of its operation
When: Monday–Friday, 7:30am - 3:30pm Pacific Time or in your local time (ignore the date) 2025-05-05T14:30:00Z→2025-05-09T22:30:00Z
When archiving is not happening, the livestream will cycle through films and images from NASA and other public domain collections at the Internet Archive. In addition, you can join a live chat, where sometimes you might see chief Digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
Honestly, if you just need a break from everything online, I can highly recommend just taking a 5 minute break to watch the archiving of microfiche (with some relaxing background lofi beat music).
There is a fascinating backstory, here!
In another video This is Where All the Internet is Stored, where. Sophia Tung explains how she was disturbed by regular activity of Waymo self driving taxis parking and moving around right outside her window.
She playfully set up a livestream with Lofi music “as a meme” and it did gain so much popularity that Brewster Kahle reached out and asked Sophia help set up the internet archive livestream. We see her visit to the archive, a custom tour with Kahle, and then a full demo of the archiving process.
As Sophia states, it’s very claiming to see this live stream with relaxing music.
This is a fantastic story of someone building something for their own creative interest, sharing it, and then have it grow into something even larger and of more value to all of us.
This is in many ways, what open education does, can, and should keep on doing.
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