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The Public Domain Image Archive and more from The Public Domain Review
Infinite View, Shuffle View, and Catalogue View are three ways to explore the Public Domain Image Archive recently announced by The Public Domain Review. Coverage at Open Culture and Hyperallergic. More details about the project. Bluesky account to follow for updates. Also at The Public Domain Review this week: "The public airing of grievances continues in the next and final issue of 391 ... Picabia describes Surrealism as 'Dada disguised as an advertising balloon for the house of Breton & Co.', and Breton as 'an actor who wants all the leading roles in the theatre of illusionists'"--Daisy Sainsbury on "Perpetual Movement: Francis Picabia's 391 Review (1917–1924)." Bluesky account for The Public Domain Review.
Will Anyone Care?
Digital technology is changing the very face of archival materials, as there emerges a new generation of authors who’ve never known what it’s like to pound out a book on a typewriter or scribble one out longhand.
40 years of pipe organ music
Pipedreams.org has aired 1-2 hours of pipe organ music a week for since 1982. And it's all online for anyone to listen to. (Note: The latest episode is always a one-minute preview. But all of the other episodes make the full, hours-long audio available.) [more inside]
A machine for inducing nostalgia for a brief period not too long ago.
IMG_0001: "Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. [...] I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly." [more inside]
From Awooga to Whistling Wind
USC Optical Sound Effects Library Classic movie sound effects on optical and magnetic tape from the 30's to the 80's, all carefully restored, catalogued and posted on the Internet Archive [more inside]
How To Live Forever
The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse. [New Yorker / Archive]
Libraries of life on earth
The Crucial Role of Herbaria in Science by Dr. Cassandra Quave. Podcast episode (on Youtube) includes Dr. Quave's WaPo opinion piece. In February, Duke University announced that it was shuttering its herbarium, to widespread dismay from scientists across the globe. With one of the nation's largest collections of algae, lichens, fungi, and mosses, Duke's herbarium is "highly unusual" for its depth and variety. It's also where the Lady Gaga Fern is held, named for the artist's outfit at the 2010 Grammys which looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte.
☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 It was like fireworks. ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡
It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells. [more inside]
The Getty Makes 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like
The Getty museum has released a huge trove of images under a CC0 license (essentially waiving copyright). Images can be downloaded in high resolution. [more inside]
Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story
For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. from Poets in the Machine
Friday Flash Fun Forever
Still mourning the death of Flash, and with it an entire era of online gaming? Enter ooooooooo.ooo (9o3o), the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend for the incredible Flashpoint preservation project. Browse over 145,000 preserved Flash games powered by the Ruffle emulator, and share your favorites with a simple link. Highlights:
DICEWARS -
Fly Guy -
Alien Hominid -
Samorost -
Crimson Room -
Nanaca Crash! -
Line Rider -
Don't Shoot the Puppy -
Bloxorz -
Gimme Friction Baby -
The Impossible Quiz -
Portal: The Flash Version -
Feed the Head -
Sprout -
Achievement Unlocked -
QWOP -
Cursor*10 -
Dino Run -
Grid16 -
Meat Boy -
SHIFT -
You Have to Burn the Rope -
6 Differences -
Canabalt -
Don't Shit Your Pants! -
Nevermore 3 - Small Worlds -
Don't Look Back -
Redder -
VVVVVV (demo) -
Synopsis Quest -
The Room Tribute -
The Scale of the Universe -
Mitoza -
Wonderputt -
Bullet Bill 3 -
Frog Fractions -
Dys4ia -
Snakes on a Cartesian Plane -
Want (gulp) more? Download Flashpoint Infinity to stream over 156,000 games from 70+ platforms (including Shockwave, Java, and Unity) plus over 27,000 animations... or clear some space for the monster 1.76 terabyte Flashpoint Ultimate to store every single file locally. So much more inside! [more inside]
Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape
An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time [Kotaku] “The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) partnered with the Software Preservation Network, an organization intent on advancing software preservation through collective action, to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games. “Classic” in this case has been defined as all games released before 2010, which the VGHF noted is the “year when digital game distribution started to take off.” In the study, the two groups found that 87 percent of these classic games are not in release and considered critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.” You can read the full 50-page study on the open repository Zenodo. [more inside]
An archive of video game history digitized from physical media
We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History [YouTube] Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history. The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. The above video explains the how and what and why of it all. You can subscribe to the archive via the @NoclipArchive YouTube channel or archive.org. Highlights from the archive include: Microsoft E3 2009 Press Conference, A young Hideo Kojima interviewed about the American Metal Gear Solid 4 reveal trailer, Infinity Ward Studio Tour During Development of COD:4 Modern Warfare, Exploring Nintendo of America's Employee-Only Museum, Tony Hawk Half Pipe Demo - Games Convention 2007. [via: Destructoid]
a beautiful retro nostalgia trip
Capcom's 40th Anniversary Site Is An Incredible Digital Museum With Playable Retro Games [Capcom Town] “Capcom has launched a beautiful 40th-anniversary website which celebrates the company's history, as well as shares artwork and design docs, and acts as a hub for some of the developer's biggest titles. [...] The town is segmented into areas for certain franchises — Street Fighter has a dojo in the top right corner, for instance, while Monster Hunter occupies the space in front of the giant arcade machine. If you're an eagle-eyed fan, then you'll spot some other small references to Capcom characters throughout. [...] You can pop into the C.M.D Museum to look at artwork from many of Capcom's best titles — there is some never-before-seen concept art for some games, high-resolution artwork of characters we've never had access to, and design docs for the original Mega Man, Ace Attorney, and Street Fighter II. An archivist's dream, basically. Also, remember the arcade we mentioned above? Well, there are a handful of playable retro games over there — these include Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Mega Man X, Street Fighter II, and Final Fight, and you can play them in English or Japanese. You can also read through the game's instruction manuals and have a look at the cartridges for those titles.” [via: Nintendo Life]
Redditors, in defense of Reddit, destroy Reddit
Anger over an astronomical increase in Reddit's API prices [prev.] boiled over this week as multiple third-party app developers were forced to close down, with one -- Apollo dev Christian Selig -- posting a scathing exposé detailing the company's shady dealings... including a recorded phone call disproving CEO Steve "spez" Huffman's claim that Selig blackmailed them. Huffman took to the site's vaunted AMA format to do damage control, only to double down, ignore tough questions, and reap thousands of downvotes. In response, the community has organized a massive subreddit "blackout" to protest the rate hike that will bankrupt popular apps, hamper critical moderation tools, and exclude blind users. While such protests are not new, this one is unprecedented in scope: 20,000+ mods from over 7,000 subreddits with more than 2 billion collective readers, from familiar mainstays like /r/aww, /r/videos, and /r/todayilearned to niche subs like /r/Eragon and /r/Panda. Facing layoffs, a major pre-IPO valuation cut, and a runaway user revolt reminiscent of Digg [prev.], could this be the end of the "front page of the internet"? Watch the site wink out in real time [livestream], join the fight on /r/Save3rdPartyApps and /r/ModCoord, backup your data, or check out some up-and-coming /r/RedditAlternatives. [more inside]
The Search for the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Tapes Is Over. The Mystery Endures
The System Was Wack, so I had to Scream
"To get you started, here’s an incredibly rare recording of the entire Wilhelm Scream recording session". "Not an 'ow'.... a real scream....". The Wilhelm Scream previously and previously.
866 Wii U and 1547 3DS games were purchased with 464 eShop cards.
YouTuber bought EVERY Nintendo Wii U & 3DS game before the Nintendo eShop closes [YouTube] “Nintendo’s decision to close both the Wii U and 3DS eShops might make commercial sense for the company, but for fans and lovers of video game history it’s a disaster, as it’s feared many of the games being removed will disappear and never be seen or made available ever again. Loads of these games are tiny little indie things that probably haven’t been purchased or heard from for years, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth preserving! [...] In an effort to address this—or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible—YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries.” [via: Kotaku] [more inside]
Marilyn Monroe's Psychoanalysis Notes
Marilyn documented much of her psychoanalytic work in the notebooks she kept throughout the 1950s. Monroe's notebooks reveal a woman versed in Freudian theory. She records her dreams and refers to her unconscious. She coaxes painful histories onto the page.
Europe Stinks
Odeuropa, a project to collect and map Europe's "olfactory heritage," has been building knowledge about Europe's historic fragrances and stenches. Check out the Smell Explorer, follow a BBC reporter in a tour of the "smells and stinks of Amsterdam," or sniff the smells of Hell through art.
“Now you're playing with power!”
Someone Named Gumball Uploaded All 285 Issues Of Nintendo Power To Archive.org “All 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.” [via: Kotaku]
With your host BOB SMiTH
AIT, the Agency for Instructional Television (WIKIPEDIA), was one of a number of organizations who made programs that PBS stations would air midday, for teachers to record for later use. One of these was the inexplicable Wordsmith, that explored the roots of words. Host Bob Smith, standing on a gameshow-like set with his 70s attire and mustache, takes foam balls with syllables on them out of a machine, opens them up to show inside is printed their meaning, then puts them back into the machine, which makes a sci-fi noise. Then Sesame Street-like short clips demonstrate its meaning. While it moves slow, it's still kind of interesting! A number of episodes survive, as well as some other programs from AIT, in the Indiana University Moving Image Archive. [more inside]
“Oh God,” she said. “Did you grab it?”
"I peered up the street, toward Lexington Avenue, and saw garbage bags piled in front of each building. It was trash day. All of this would be landfill in a matter of hours. It made it all the way from 1883 to 2021. I shook out my bad shoulder as best I could, sighed, and picked up a box." How Christopher Bonanos rescued the 170-year history of The Church of the New Jerusalem from a New York City curb.
Archiving the Signs of the Times
"The History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive is a free, searchable, online collection of hundreds of ghost signs from across the UK and Ireland." [more inside]
Mark your ballots without change and without any consultation whatsoever
To Tell The Truth is a American panel TV show which has been around since 1956, in which three contestants, two of which are impostors of the third, attempt to convince a panel of judges of their identity.
The archives of the show from 1956 to 1967 are available on YouTube, and provide a interesting and entertaining glimpse into what television game shows were like in the mid-50s.
"Miraculously, all 24 of these continuous volumes survive"
Laurie Shannon for the Anne Lister Society, "Anne Lister's Story": "On 21 March 1817, Anne Lister raised the stakes ... to propose 'from this day to keep an exact journal of my actions and studies' ... Her observations include ... engineering calculations, legal issues ... geology, landscape design, and anatomy ... and practical accounts of summiting two of the highest peaks in the Pyrenees ... Most consequentially ... direct testimony ... 'I love & only love'" women "'& thus beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.'" Early volumes have large PDF transcripts for dates beginning in Aug 1806, Aug 1816, Nov 1816, Mar 1817, Jan 1818, Apr 1819, Nov 1819, Feb 1821 & May 1822 (italics = decoded text). Reference to scans of all volumes, transcripts, edited publications, and the cipher (online encoder/decoder). More info. Gentleman Jack on Fanfare. Yesterday's trailer for Season 2, starting in April.
It happened all over the world
Among the nominees at next month's Grammys for Best Historical Album is Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World's Music (1907-1967). Released by archival label Dust-to-Digital as a digital download only, the album is a collection of 100 songs recorded around the world in the early days of recorded music. The liner notes in the accompanying digital booklet provide great context to the artists, locations and recordings, where each song gets its own short essay. The digital transfers beautifully capture the spirit of each song and the music, beyond being mere curios, is sublime. Excavated Shellac is the nom du blog of Jonathan Ward, an archivist who organized the project, researched and wrote the liner notes, and selected each song from his own personal collection of 78s.
The moment when "human character changed"
The Modernist Journals Project digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s, along with essays and other supplementary materials from the period. [more inside]
"It is a record of my attempt to find out what I could find out."
The original reel-to-reel audio and transcripts of civil rights activists interviewed by Robert Penn Warren for Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) were made available by Vanderbilt University as part of a wider archive of letters, images, and other supporting materials. Hear Robert Moses (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Bayard Rustin (Freedom Rides, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, March on Washington), Septima Poinsette Clark (Highlander Folk School, Citizenship Schools), Malcolm X, Whitney Young (Urban League), students from Jackson State and Tougaloo Colleges, James Baldwin and more on justice, activism, movement-building, revolution, and freedom. [more inside]
A time capsule of a time capsule from the dawn of computer animation
Five years before Toy Story proved to the world that pure CGI -- a field long relegated to the role of special effects -- could be an art form in its own right, Odyssey Productions attempted to do the same on a slightly smaller scale. Drawing on the demo reels, commercials, music videos, and feature films of over 300 digital animators, the studio collated dozens of beautiful* and cutting-edge clips** into an ambitious 40-minute art film called The Mind's Eye. Backed by an eclectic mix of custom-written electronic, classical, oriental, and tribal music, the surreal, dreamlike imagery formed a rough narrative in eight short segments that illustrated the evolution of life, technology, and human society: Creation - Civilization Rising - Heart of the Machine - Technodance - Post Modern - Love Found - Leaving the Bonds of Earth - The Temple - End credits (including names and sources for all clips used). It was the beginning of a groundbreaking and influential audiovisual series -- all of which has been lovingly preserved by digital archivists decades after the fact. [more inside]
"Adams called him a Shadow man"
"wondering what an 18th Century AskMe might have looked like?"
The National Archives 'Founders List'
Comment inspired Here.
double/double [more inside]
Artifacts from the Future (from the past)
Starting twenty years ago this month, Wired magazine tapped a bevy of designers and artists in the tech field to craft detailed satirical visions of futuristic objects for a monthly showcase at the close of each issue. Following a brief hiatus in 2008, the exercise returned in crowdsourced form, asking readers to submit their ideas for a given theme and incorporating the best ones into the following month's edition. After disappearing five years later, a 2020 redesign evolved the concept once more, asking readers to share six-word headlines, Hemingway-style (or not), on an evocative near-future story. While the new-new FOUND doesn't appear to be going anywhere, why not take some time to enjoy the history of this whimsical feature than by taking a look back at the "compleat" archived run of the series courtesy of Stuart Candy, who personally scanned the gamut of it to make a thorough retrospective for his excellent blog The Sceptical Futuryst: 2002 - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010 - Candy tells his FOUND story. More: "FOUND: The Future of..." and FOUND Photoshop Contests (2008-2013) - Six-Word Stories archive (2020-present) - a direct-link index to more and better futures inside. [more inside]
Black Film Archive
Black Film Archive celebrates the rich, abundant history of Black cinema. We are an evolving archive dedicated to making historically and culturally significant films made from 1915 to 1979 about Black people accessible through a streaming guide with cultural context.
"archival practices have not changed much in over 4,000 years"
Ebla, the Official Site of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Syria gives details about the excavation of Ebla, the capital of a bronze age empire in what is now northern Syria which flourished in the third millennium BCE. Archaeologist Paolo Matthiae first explored the Tell Mardikh mound in 1963, but the site didn't receive global attention until 1975, when the discovery of Ebla's state archives was announced, an ancient library with over seventeen thousand clay tablets, casting light on life in Ebla. Outside the Ebla website, besides Wikipedia, there is historian Trevor Bryce's short overview of the history of Ebla, an interview with Matthiae from 1978 by Tor Eigeland, and archivist Greg Bradsher's essay about the Ebla archive and how it compares to modern archives.
Image of water, deodorant, air freshener, cereal, crisps, shortbread…
UK grocer Sainsbury’s have digitized and uploaded their entire collection of store-brand packaging materials, mostly dating from the 1950s-1980s. [via @mathowie] [more inside]
Summer of Soul
In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns [ungated link] - "Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove." (via) [1,2,3; fanfare] [more inside]
It’s Time to Knock the Toilet Off Its Pedestal
The flush toilet may be the world’s gold standard for sanitation, but the sewer infrastructure it demands is inefficient, costly and outdated. [more inside]
You can still askme
Today is the last day to ask or answer a question on Yahoo! Answers. Tomorrow (April 20), it will be in read-only mode, and on May 4 it will be shut down by its parent company Verizon. Users will have until June 30 to request access to copies of their data. [more inside]
Preserving Cinematic History
Driven to create amidst war and chaos, Afghan filmmakers gave birth to an extraordinary national cinema. Driven to destroy, Taliban extremists set out to torch that legacy. Using newly restored images from the Afghan Films Archive, Afghan-Canadian director Ariel Nasr tells the story of Afghanistan's fearless and visionary filmmakers including "Engineer" Latif Ahmadi and Siddiq Barmak.
-Youtube, TVO Website.
If you are not able to watch yet due to region-restrictions, this WP podcast tells a moving aspect of this story. [more inside]
A Demoparty in a Browser
In 2016, the internet archive added a repository of console demos, which today has almost 600 entries.
Demos involve bare metal hardware hackery to get the bestest graphics and music out of a machine. These ones are all made for extinct consoles, but can now run in your browser thanks to the magic of Mame. Jason Scott tells the tale.
LEGENDARY
30 Years of Philly Ballroom documentary and Philadelphia Inquirer feature article. In the article, legendary voguer Madelyn recalls being schooled by "Mother Hands" Dee Dee who sat down in a chair near the judges, crossed one leg over the other, and battled Madelyn with one hand: "She ate me to smithereens, I'd never seen somebody make so many shapes and movements and in one hand ever in my life. I was more in awe than I was devastated.”
a single disk labeled "NINTENDO: HOT ROD TAXI, FINAL."
30 years later, a lost Days of Thunder NES game has been recovered from 21 floppy disks [Ars Technica] “In one of the most unreal data-recovery projects we've ever heard of, a seemingly lost NES game has been unearthed—as archived on a single hard drive backup, spread across 21 5.25-inch floppy disks. A joint effort led in part by the Video Game History Foundation began earlier this year with a pile of leftover CD-Rs, floppies, computers, and other errata donated by the family of late programmer/designer Chris Oberth. The results, thus far, are one fully functioning game whose code had to be recovered, then compiled, to run on original NES hardware.” [Days of Thunder NES Gameplay]
tools for remembrance, but also for amnesia, for erasures
Novelist Maaza Mengiste speaks to Africa is a Country about photography as a weapon, her novel The Shadow King and Project 3541: a photographic archive of the 1935-1941 Italo-Ethiopian war. [more inside]
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic.
A public historical archive documenting how the extreme new conditions are changing the routines, expectations, and dreams of people from all walks of life, nationalities, communities, genders, and aged groups across the globe. Archives have to be made.
A doctoral student from Colombo, Sri Lanka. A winemaker in Denman, Australia. An ultra-marathoner from Piracicaba, Brazil. A retired special ed. administrator from Normal, IL.
Go ahead and Share your Story.
A public historical archive documenting how the extreme new conditions are changing the routines, expectations, and dreams of people from all walks of life, nationalities, communities, genders, and aged groups across the globe. Archives have to be made.
A doctoral student from Colombo, Sri Lanka. A winemaker in Denman, Australia. An ultra-marathoner from Piracicaba, Brazil. A retired special ed. administrator from Normal, IL.
Go ahead and Share your Story.
The Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain
The new digital collection includes two- and three-dimensional images from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo. Everything is released under a Creative Commons Zero license. Jump down the rabbit hole at the Smithsonian Open Access portal.
a spring with voices
Mairi McFayden, an ethnologist and writer in the Highlands, writes about ecological crisis through the lens of the birds of the Scottish highlands, while digging into Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches, archives of Gaelic and Scots recordings from the 1930s onwards. “I’ll tell ye a thing, that I would never like tae let a spring pass withoot hearin the dawn chorus, because onybody that’s never heard that, they dinna ken whit they’re missin. Fir, it’s life tae me…” John’s words are simple, yet profound: birdsong is an unselfconscious and effortless celebration of affirming presence, of life, of aliveness. [more inside]
Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage...
Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) and his poems Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The definitive online edition of this masterpiece of French literature, Fleursdumal.org contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, together with multiple English translations.
Was it a virtual AOL or was it a Tuna Colada
Verizon announced (previously) that December 14 is the deadline to archive all Yahoo Groups content, and is actively preventing archival efforts. Verizon has blocked semi-automated scripts, disabled the PGOlffine backup tool, and banned the email addresses of volunteer archivists. The Archive Team estimates that will result in an 80% loss of the total Yahoo! Groups they where attempting to rescue. Once again, Yahoo! has found a way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse. [more inside]
💾🕹️
2500 Classic MS-DOS Games Are Now Free To Play [Internet Archive] “The Internet Archive has been building a growing collection of old PC games over the years, with a batch of DOS games added in 2015, and Windows 3.1 games in 2016—all of them playable in your browser. This month another update has hit the collection, and now 2,500 more games (often with their manuals) have been preserved for the ages. Highlights of the latest set include Street Fighter 2, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, Loom, The Lost Vikings, Magic Carpet Plus, Robotron 2084, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Queen of Krynn, King's Quest 1 and 2, The Lords of Midnight, The Incredible Machine and its sequel, the first three Bard's Tale games, and plenty more.” [via: PC Gamer]
“I still know their addresses."
The Partition Archive has been preserving oral histories of the 1947 Partition since 2010 through crowdsourcing and through collection by scholars. Over 7,500 oral histories have been preserved on digital video. Many are available on the Partition Archive's Youtube channel or through the archive's partnership with Stanford University. The generation that still remembers the birth of modern India and Pakistan are now elderly men and women, and it's a race against time to record as many stories as possible. “That segment of the population is disappearing really, really fast,” said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, the Berkeley, Calif.-based executive director and driving force of the archive, speaking by telephone. “Within the next five years the vast majority of what's remaining is going to be gone." [more inside]