The Internet Archive Turns 20
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 6:53 am
We’ll kick off the evening with cocktails, tacos trucks and hands-on demos of our coolest tools. Come scan a book, play in a virtual reality arcade, or try out the brand new search feature in the Wayback Machine. When you arrive, be sure to get your library card. “Check out” all the stations on your card and we’ll reward you with a special gift commemorating our 20th anniversary.
Starting at 7 p.m., we’ve commissioned Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky — composer, author and multimedia artist — to create a short musical montage drawn from the Internet Archive’s audio collections. We’ll whatsapp lead look back on some of the defining digital moments of the past 20 years, and explore how media and messaging captured in our Political TV Ad Archive is impacting the 2016 Election.
And to keep you dancing into the evening, DJ Phast Phreddie the Boogaloo Omnibus, will be spinning 45rpm records from 8-9:30. We hope you can join our celebration!
While audio CDs whiz by at about 500 revolutions per minute, the earliest flat disks offering music whirled at 78rpm. They were mostly made from shellac, i.e., beetle (the bug, not The Beatles) resin and were the brittle predecessors to the LP (microgroove) era. The format is obsolete, and the surface noise is often unbearable and just picking them up can break your heart as they break apart in your hands. So why does the Internet Archive have more than 200,000 in our physical possession.
Starting at 7 p.m., we’ve commissioned Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky — composer, author and multimedia artist — to create a short musical montage drawn from the Internet Archive’s audio collections. We’ll whatsapp lead look back on some of the defining digital moments of the past 20 years, and explore how media and messaging captured in our Political TV Ad Archive is impacting the 2016 Election.
And to keep you dancing into the evening, DJ Phast Phreddie the Boogaloo Omnibus, will be spinning 45rpm records from 8-9:30. We hope you can join our celebration!
While audio CDs whiz by at about 500 revolutions per minute, the earliest flat disks offering music whirled at 78rpm. They were mostly made from shellac, i.e., beetle (the bug, not The Beatles) resin and were the brittle predecessors to the LP (microgroove) era. The format is obsolete, and the surface noise is often unbearable and just picking them up can break your heart as they break apart in your hands. So why does the Internet Archive have more than 200,000 in our physical possession.