The Shelf Now Starts in 1981
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in News
The collection’s operator record now reaches back to 1981. We’ve accessioned the TCP-IP list — 39,123 messages, 13 October 1981 through December 1994, from the securitydigest.org archive — along with its digest edition (1981–1983) and the …
Reconstructing the missing decks
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Of the 11,688 video recordings in the collection’s talk holdings, 11,240 — ninety-six percent — have no accompanying slide deck. The deck is usually where the substance is: the numbers, the network …
Reading a journal that has no text
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. ConneXions — The Interoperability Report (1987–1996) came to the collection as page scans with no text layer at all: 115 issues, 3,573 pages, unreadable to search and to everything downstream of search. …
Fiber route maps in the conference record
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Operators have been putting maps of their fiber builds on conference slides for thirty years. Most of those maps were shown once and filed away. This note describes finding them in the collection, judging …
New on the Shelves
Friday, July 24, 2026 in News
The catalog has added some ninety Works over the past two months. A few worth browsing: the Soviet Coup Internet Archive — the Relcom/Demos traffic that carried news in and out of Moscow during the August 1991 coup, while the broadcast media were …
Internet Talk Radio
Friday, July 24, 2026 in News
We’ve accessioned the Internet Talk Radio collection — Carl Malamud’s pioneering audio program (1993–1996), 567 items mirrored from archive.org. To make the audio searchable and citable we’re generating transcripts, using the …
Browsing the New Corpora
Friday, July 24, 2026 in News
In June we promised more on how to browse the newest accessions. The Cypherpunks main list (1992–2016), PacNOG, AfNOG, and W3C www-talk are now indexed and searchable in the Reading Room alongside the rest of the collection. The Africa Internet …
Using collection context to reduce errors in automated transcription of historical audio
Thursday, July 23, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Background We recently accessioned the Internet Talk Radio collection (Carl Malamud, 1993–1996; 567 audio items mirrored from archive.org). To make the audio searchable and citable we need transcripts. We …
The IHI Reading Room
Friday, July 10, 2026 in News
We’ve soft-launched the IHI Reading Room, a prototype public home for the collection we’ve been assembling: the mailing lists, conference talks, and documents in which the Internet’s operator and standards communities argued the …