Ceramic Archivists by sculptor Nuala Creed at the Internet Archive building (photo: Jason Scott)

‘Tis the season for end-of-year charity drives, and I’m sure almost everyone reading this has already done their share of donating to worthy causes. But if you love poetry film, please try to find it in your hearts and wallets to donate to the one and only Internet Archive, home of the invaluable Prelinger Archives and many other collections of free-to-use film materials. By now, I’d say many hundreds of videopoems and poetry films have been made with footage from the Internet Archive; I’ve probably featured at least a hundred here at Moving Poems. In fact, without the easy availability of public-domain films at the Internet Archive, I’m not sure we be in the midst of a videopoetry renaissance right now. And for people just getting into digital video remixing, it’s always the best place to start looking for evocative material.

Which is not to downplay the sheer educational and entertainment value of the massive website’s many offerings, from independent radio shows to vlogs, digitized books and other texts, live music, and the NASA Images Archive. And let’s not forget the Wayback Machine, which, with more than 150 billion web captures, truly is an archive of the internet.

As an idealistic nonprofit, the Internet Archive’s mission to preserve and share knowledge should arouse little of the unease that Google’s similar (and vastly better funded) efforts tend to provoke. Its servers house more than 10 petabytes of data, it employs 200 people, and its annual budget tops $10 million, with a significant portion coming from donations by users. It has hosted the Prelinger Archives since 1999 — the first expansion of its collections beyond the core web archive.

So my advice is to give till it hurts. (Or, if you’re a masochist, give till it feels great!) The payment options include Amazon, Paypal and Bitcoin. Visit any page at the Internet Archive to make a donation. Let me just paste in the current text of their appeal:

Dear Internet Archivists, We are a non-profit with a huge mission: to give everyone free access to all knowledge—the books, web pages, audio, tv and software of our shared human culture. Forever. Together we are building the digital library of the future. A place we can go to learn and explore. The key is to keep improving—and to keep it free. That’s where you can help us. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library. We don’t run ads, but we still need to pay for servers, staff and bandwidth. Right now, a Philadelphia supporter will match your donations for 72 hours—dollar for dollar—so your impact will be doubled. Help us meet this challenge! If you find the Archive useful, we hope you’ll give what you can now. Thank you.

For background, see the relevant Wikipedia article. Among other nuggets of information, I was especially charmed to learn that the Internet Archive also archives itself, in an artistic way (whence the above photo):

The Great Room of the Internet Archive features a collection of over 200 ceramic figures by Nuala Creed representing employees of the Internet Archive. This collection, commissioned by Brewster Kahle and sculpted by Nuala Creed, is ongoing.