Happy Days – Week FortyFive
Week 45: Major Internet Archive Europe events, symbolic rainbows, board games, brunch meetups and green energy sights!
Week forty-five in mid September was the culmination of months of work with three large events for Internet Archive Europe.
September 15 – Day 310
Internet Archive Europe sponsored a workshop with the Institute for Information Law (IViR) from the University of Amsterdam and we had an interesting meeting of the mind of Cultural Heritage organizations throughout Europe and lawyers to talk about copyright and text and data mining WRT Article III of the 2019 Copyright Act of the EU. That evening we had a delicious dinner at Capital Kitchen a nearby hip restaurant with surreal artwork. The artwork below is by Mette Sterre and entitled: “Seapussy Power Galore Abscession (If you don't know, you don't grow)”, 2021.
September 16 – Day 311
Went up to Amsterdam for work and this was the view for a brief moment in time - a vivid double rainbow. The weather was temperamental all week long - mostly rainy.
September 17 – Day 312
Wednesday was our big demo launch day at the Dutch National Library - the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB). We wrote a big post over on our site about the work. We have been working on an interactive display of web archives to show the rich cultural history over time.
More than just a tool, this machine embodies the possibility of placing our collective memory directly at each individual’s fingertips. It demonstrates how digital preservation is not about storing data in the abstract, but about making the richness of the past immediately usable, searchable, and alive for today’s citizens.
This event was a culmination of months of work by the incredible team at the Archive, lead by the developer Kai Jauslin from Switzerland and many of the developers of the Wayback team.
We were incredibly fortunate that Sebastiaan ter Burg documented the event with gorgeous photos and shared them to flickr.
September 18 – Day 313
Thursday evening we had a family board game evening after dinner to spend some quality time together as Mom had been working long hours and wanted to re—connect. We played the board game “El Dorado” and two of us made it to the end at the same time.
September 19 – Day 314
The heaven’s cleared on Friday and the skies cleared up. It was definitely a lucky sign as more than 100 people came to our event to celebrate the opening of the canal house at Oudeschans in downtown Amsterdam as the new headquarters of Internet Archive Europe.
Last week, the new headquarters of Internet Archive Europe at Oudeschans came alive with voices, laughter, ideas, and shared commitment. What had been a milestone in planning and construction became, for a few hours, something far more alive—an affirmation of what it means to protect, to remember, to build for the future.
On Friday, in a narrow, cream-painted 17th-century row house facing a wide canal bathed in golden light, the Internet Archive Europe celebrated the opening of its new headquarters in Amsterdam. Around 100 guests milled around, snacking on hors d’oeuvres and drinks and sharing their inspiringly ambitious goals for the future of the internet.
Sebastiaan ter Burg once again took amazing photos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/albums/72177720329142407/
September 20 – Day 315
Mik was visiting Europe and finding time to connect was a bit like threading a needle, but we managed on Saturday morning to meet up for brunch and it was lovely to reconnect.
September 21 – Day 316
Sunday, I travelled to a privacy retreat outside of Berlin and on the ride from the airport, we saw loads of solar fields like this one, complete with windmills in the background. Seeing these on scale like this is super impressive and gives hope we can move away from fossil fuels at scale.
In the office in Amsterdam, we have been listening to the 78 RPMs in the collections at the Archive. There is a lot to peruse through - this is an old classic song: Blue Moon. Enjoy the rabbit hole and have a fun time exploring the different collections.