June 2026

When Archives Speak Back: IAE Hosts Data CARE Festival Fellows in Amsterdam

/ / Events

More than 30 public AI researchers from around the world gathered at the Internet Archive Europe Amsterdam headquarters on June 9 to open the Data Care Festival organized by the Inclusive AI Lab, and to discuss the role of archives in supporting culture and society.

The discussion almost didn’t happen as planned. On 9 June, Internet Archive Europe (IAE) opened its Amsterdam space for the Fellows Soirée of the Data CARE Festival, a four-day gathering organised by the Inclusive AI Lab. The listed moderator, Kirthi Jayakumar, was not able to travel to the Netherlands because of a technical error in the passport. One of the listed panelists, Franklin Ozekhome, pop culture architect and founder of Pop Culture Varsity travelling from Nigeria, also encountered entry barriers and couldn’t make it that evening. Inclusive AI Lab founder Prof. Payal Arora, stepping in to moderate, named it plainly: a visceral reminder of who gets to speak, and what kind of passport shapes access to the very conversations about power and knowledge that the evening was there to have. 

The Data CARE Festival

The festival’s theme, “Reclaiming Techno-Optimism: Building for Context. Culture. Community,” reflects the core work of the Inclusive AI Lab, founded by Prof. Arora at Utrecht University. The lab incubates researchers, practitioners, and civic leaders from across the Global South and North, working on the concrete conditions under which AI can serve communities rather than extract from them. 

When Archives Speak Back

The evening panel, titled “When Archives Speak Back: Power, Data, and AI Storytelling,” brought together IAE Programme Manager Beatrice Murch; Dr. Jaswina Elahi, assistant professor at Utrecht University and principal investigator on heritage-building among postcolonial migrant communities in the Netherlands; Vincenzo Scagliarini, head of research at Logotel and editor of the collaborative economy project Weconomy (Italy); and Chux Daniels, who leads transformative innovation programmes across Africa. Rana Kuseyri, responsible AI researcher at the Inclusive AI Lab, had opened the evening by framing the festival’s core commitment: not optimism as a mood, but hope as a moral imperative.

The conversation that followed was grounded in lives, not abstractions. Elahi, whose research traces the heritage of postcolonial migrant communities in the Netherlands, pushed expanded the definition of what counts as culture. Growing up Surinamese-Hindustani in the Netherlands, she described a childhood shaped by Bollywood films, Surinamese Hindustani radio, and a recurring question: but where are you really from? Her doctoral work examined how digital platforms were allowing Hindustani communities in the Netherlands to construct and transmit cultural identity — research met, early on, with the assumption that young ethnic minority internet users must be at risk of radicalisation. The actual finding was that they were using the internet to feel connected to their communities, their home countries, and their culture.

That distinction matters for what archives do and don’t capture. Elahi was precise about it: heritage is not a building or a monument. It is a song that only exists in relation to another person. It is the way a grandmother cooks that her grandchildren can attempt to learn, but will always make it differently. The body carries heritage and passes it on. The recipes communities are writing down now, the YouTube searches for ingredients that are no longer available, the heritage books being compiled: these are not the heritage itself, but they are activating something that might otherwise be lost. Data alone is not heritage. But in the right hands, it can give communities a voice they were never offered elsewhere.

Scagliarini brought a different example: a team of five engineers from different countries, working for Cisco on a creative project that eventually made it to the Venice Biennale. The team included a designer who couldn’t code. From a conventional business perspective, that was a problem. What actually happened was that she and the engineers spent a month in conversation before the first GitHub push, and she came out of it having learned a new language, not to replace her own practice, but to build shared knowledge. Data, Scagliarini argued, is something living: it can always be broken apart, rearranged, and re-interrogated, even across centuries. The responsibility is to keep rewriting it, not to take any version of the record as fixed.

Daniels traced this across a different scale. The growing global presence of Afrobeats, with the nice touch of Nigerian music playing through Schiphol airport on his last arrival, is one signal of a cultural confidence that statistics about tech governance don’t yet reflect. Eighty-five percent of the world’s population lives in contexts where the biggest tech decisions get made without them. The UK Prime Minister meeting with Apple and Google to shape AI governance is not the same as the communities in Kenya, one of the world’s biggest social media user bases, having any say in how those systems work. The same asymmetry applies to knowledge-making more broadly: innovation in agriculture, finance, and mobility is being led in the Global South by people working without the infrastructure constraints that lock the Global North into old models. M-PESA exists because banks wouldn’t go to rural areas. The most interesting AI work may be happening in places the dominant platforms aren’t looking.

Beatrice connected this to the practical stakes of what IAE and the Internet Archive exist to do. Truth, she said, is fracturing. The archive’s job, namely establishing what was said and what happened at a given point in time, matters more when that fragmentation accelerates. Democracy’s Library, the Internet Archive’s project to gather government-funded public information and make it freely accessible, is one concrete response. Beyond that, the work comes down to choices made under constraint: you cannot archive everything. The guiding principle is not to let perfect be the enemy of done, and to be honest about the challenges, which are real: lawsuits, the rising cost of storage, legal frameworks that differ across EU member states, and journalistic organisations restricting Wayback Machine access. Thirty years in, the Internet Archive is still here, and still going.

Why IAE Supports the Inclusive AI Lab

IAE is a partner of the Data CARE Festival because the questions it poses are ones we share. Who controls the record? What gets preserved, and what gets lost? When AI trains on cultural heritage, whose heritage counts? These questions shape what libraries, archives, and memory institutions can do, and what communities can access and build on. The panel on 9 June was, among other things, a demonstration that these questions are not rhetorical. Two of the people who were supposed to be in the room didn’t make it, because of where they hold citizenship. That is the context in which memory institutions operate, and the context in which inclusive AI must be built. And this is what shapes what our understanding of the past will be in the future.

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Most of the Renaissance Has Never Been Translated. Source Library Is Opening It.

/ / Public AI

Ninety percent of Renaissance Latin has never been translated into a modern language. More Latin was written after 1500 than survives from all of ancient Rome, and almost none of it has been read outside a specialist library. At the current pace of human scholarship, completing that translation work would take approximately 12,000 years.

On 4 June, Internet Archive Europe attended the Source Library BETA Launch at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. It was a milestone worth marking.

What Source Library Is

Source Library is the world’s largest freely available collection of translated historical primary sources from the Renaissance. At launch, it holds more than 15,000 books across 55 languages, including 6,000 first-ever English translations and roughly seven billion words of original text and translation, comparable in scale to the entire English Wikipedia. Works previously readable only by Latin scholars or locked behind expensive academic editions are now open to anyone.

The project is hosted at the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, the UNESCO Memory of the World-recognised collection at the Embassy of the Free Mind: more than 25,000 volumes on alchemy, Hermetica, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and the roots of modern science. Many of these books were banned at various points in history. Now they are open.

The launch carries particular meaning in light of what followed. Joost Ritman, the Amsterdam businessman who founded the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica and built it into one of the world’s great collections of philosophical, religious, and esoteric knowledge, died on 5 June 2026, the day after Source Library launched in the institution he founded . He had spent sixty years guided by a conviction he traced to the Florentine Medici: that those in a position of privilege carry an obligation to culture. In 2017, he donated the library, its research institute, and the House with the Heads Monument to a cultural non-profit foundation, publicly known as the Embassy of the Free mind. This was a gift to Amsterdam and the world: he made permanent what he had spent his life assembling, and he made it public. 

AI as Accessibility, Not Replacement

Source Library places AI-powered translations directly alongside images of the original source pages, so anyone can consult the original at any point. The goal, as project creator Dr. Derek Lomas of Delft University of Technology made clear at the launch, is not to replace scholarship but to make a vast body of untranslated material discoverable for the first time. Dr. Lomas is a cognitive scientist and human-computer interaction researcher, currently a professor of Human Centred Design at Delft University of Technology, who arrived at Renaissance philosophy through a long personal engagement with the Neoplatonic tradition. That combination gives Source Library a design sensibility that most digital archive projects lack: the design starts from how people actually discover and engage with material, not from how institutions prefer to organise it. 

Dr. Lomas and the team also maintain careful transparency about data sources throughout: content drawn from the library’s own catalogue is clearly distinguished from AI-generated material, and all translations record the model, date, and prompt used to produce them. That distinction matters. The AI output is treated as useful but revisable. The primary sources are  treated as the foundation it is, complimented by academic curatorial work.

The project carries an AGPL-3 licence, the same open source licence used by the Internet Archive. It draws on open digital image standards that allow libraries and archives to share their collections freely, and it acknowledges the institutions whose digitised holdings made the work possible.

Why This Matters

The question Source Library poses is one we encounter constantly: who gets to access knowledge, and on what terms?

For centuries, the thought documented during the Renaissance has been available only to those who read Latin, have access to specialist collections, or can afford expensive critical editions. Source Library removes those barriers. It doesn’t replace careful scholarship. It makes a vast body of human thought discoverable for the first time.

This is open access made concrete: 6,000 first translations, 55 languages, no paywalls. It also matters for AI. The training data available to language models shapes what they know and how they reason. A Renaissance that remains untranslated is a Renaissance that AI cannot draw on. Source Library is building the corpus that public-interest AI will need.

Explore Source Library at sourcelibrary.org.

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Blue Sky Thinking, European Infrastructure: Internet Archive Europe Has Moved to Eurosky

/ / General

We’ve moved our Bluesky presence. Our account looks the same. Our data now lives somewhere different, on European infrastructure, under European law. Here’s why we made that choice.

What changed and what didn’t

When you use Bluesky, your posts, followers, and interactions live on a server. By default, that server belongs to Bluesky. Moving to a Personal Data Server (PDS) changes the arrangement: you choose where your data is stored, by whom, and under which rules.

Eurosky is a European PDS provider. It operates within EU law, with stronger privacy protections and no commercial model built around exploiting what users share. We now host our Bluesky presence there via their EU-Haul migration service, which took less than an hour. Our content is still visible on Bluesky. Our data is no longer on Bluesky’s servers.

Part of something bigger

This isn’t a standalone technical decision. Internet Archive Europe and the Internet Archive have long been committed to building and supporting decentralised digital infrastructure: the kind that is resilient, publicly accountable, and not dependent on the choices of a small number of private companies.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has made this point clearly and consistently. At the Facebook Museum opening in Eindhoven this April, he described the stakes directly. If Europe doesn’t build its own public digital infrastructure, the choice will narrow to American or Chinese models. “That is not good enough,” he said, “and we have the technologies to do something about it.”

Moving our data to a European server is one small expression of that conviction. Choosing infrastructure that operates by European values, that we can migrate away from freely, and that doesn’t anchor our digital presence to a single company’s decisions is consistent with what we advocate for in policy and in practice.

DWeb Camp: Root Systems

That same conviction is why we’re co-presenting DWeb Camp this summer, as the gathering comes to Europe for the first time, at Alte Hölle in Germany.

DWeb Camp 2026: Root Systems brings together builders, researchers, artists, activists, and policymakers at Alte Hölle, an ancient forest one hour southwest of Berlin, from 8 to 12 July. Internet Archive Europe co-presents the event alongside the Internet Archive and the Department of Decentralization.

The theme captures something real. Like forest ecosystems, decentralised networks derive their strength from what lies beneath the surface: distributed connections that share resources without hierarchy and keep functioning even when individual nodes go down. DWeb Camp exists to build those root systems in practice, not just to talk about decentralisation, but to make it.

Brewster Kahle originated the DWeb project in 2016. In the decade since, it has grown into a global network of builders and dreamers united by shared principles: trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. This July, that community gathers in Europe for the first time. We’re proud to help bring it here.

If you build decentralised tools, research digital infrastructure, or simply believe that the web should be resilient and publicly accountable, this is the gathering to be part of. Tickets and details at dwebcamp.org.

You can do this too

If your organisation is on Bluesky, migrating your data to a PDS takes under an hour. Eurosky’s EU-Haul service handles it. Your content stays visible to everyone on the network. You gain more control over your own data. That is a reasonable trade.

Find us on Bluesky at @internetarchive.eu. 

Learn more and migrate your own account at eurosky.tech.

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The Wayback Machine holds 30 years of the web. News publishers are blocking it.

/ / Public Domain

International Archives Day falls today, Tuesday 9 June. The theme for this year’s International Archives Week is #ArchivesForJustice: Rights, Memory, and Futures. The timing is pointed.

As reported by Nieman Lab and WIRED, a growing number of publishers have moved to block the Internet Archive’s web crawlers from preserving their content. For a full account of what that blocking involves and what it means, see the Internet Archive’s own FAQ on the issue. 

The stated reason is artificial intelligence. Publishers are worried that content preserved by the Wayback Machine can be accessed by AI companies looking for training data. That concern is understandable. The response is not.

Blocking the Archive is not the same as blocking AI

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library. It is not building commercial AI systems. It is preserving a record of history. Its Wayback Machine holds more than one trillion archived web pages and is used every day by journalists, historians, researchers, and courts.

Archived pages are often the only reliable record of how a story appeared when it was first published. Articles get edited, changed, or removed, sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Wayback Machine often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When publishers block it, they limit not just the Archive’s ability to preserve material, but anyone’s ability to access, verify, and study journalistic and historical records in the future. 

Over 250 journalists have signed the open letter

Fight for the Future has launched an open letter thanking the Internet Archive for its preservation work and calling on news organisations to reconsider. More than 250 journalists have signed.

As the letter puts it: “The freedom of journalists isn’t only the freedom to write, it’s also the freedom to have your work read and remembered for generations to come.”

The signatories include Rachel Maddow, who described the Archive as a national treasure she uses daily and cannot imagine working without. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, described using it to examine the Trump administration’s false claims about USAID after the agency’s website was taken offline. Reuters journalist Bozorgmehr Sharafedin used it to uncover a covert CIA communication system, work that won the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award.

The Wayback Machine preserves permanent citations for nearly 5 million news articles referenced on Wikipedia. That is not a technical footnote. That is the record of public knowledge.

What #ArchivesForJustice means in practice

This year’s International Archives Week centres on accountability, memory, and the right to access the past. Archives for accountability. Archives for memory. Archives for future justice. The Wayback Machine is one of the clearest examples of those principles anywhere. It holds the web as it actually was, not as institutions later chose to present it. When publishers block it, they limit not just the Archive’s ability to preserve material, but anyone’s ability to access quality journalistic and historical records, as pointed out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The Internet Archive has long worked collaboratively with publishers and respects their requests around access and preservation. What it asks is that publishers work with it, rather than against it, to ensure that the journalism being produced today remains accessible to historians, researchers, educators, and future generations.

Internet Archive Europe adds its voice to that call. The historical record belongs to everyone.Read the letter and add your voice at savethearchive.com/NewsLeaders.

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Maps Are Infrastructure Too

/ / Public AI

Not all infrastructure looks like a server room. Some of it looks like a map.

On 19 May, Internet Archive Europe hosted a workshop at our Amsterdam space with Bart Louwers, one of the core maintainers of MapLibre, and Tommi Marmo, OpenStreetMap contributor. The conversation moved between the technical and the political in a way that felt familiar: who builds the tools, who controls them, and what happens to the communities that depend on them when that control is concentrated in too few hands.

Two projects, one principle

OpenStreetMap is sometimes referred to as “Wikipedia for maps”. Anyone can contribute to it, anyone can use it, and no single company owns it. It does not just show you where things are. It is a database that anyone can build on, and it maps things that proprietary providers choose not to, from water fountains to informal settlements. 

MapLibre began in 2020 as a fork of a proprietary mapping tool. By 2022, it had its own sponsors, board, and charter. Today it is the rendering engine behind navigation apps, drone software, Wikimedia’s Android app, and products from companies including AWS, Microsoft, and Meta. The code is open source. The community governs the roadmap.

What makes MapLibre technically distinctive is its vector-based approach. Rather than downloading pre-rendered image tiles and stitching them together, the client receives descriptions of polygons, lines, and points and draws the map itself, in real time. The result is continuous zoom, styles that can change on the fly, and a format that is far more efficient. The entire planet fits in 136GB. You can host your own archive of it.

Why this matters beyond mapping

The question Tommi and Bart kept returning to is one we ask every day in a different context: who decides what is visible, what is preserved, and what disappears? Platforms rise and are acquired. Services shut down without notice. The communities built on them, and the data they generated, often go with them.

Open infrastructure is not a technical preference; it is the condition under which genuine public access becomes possible at all.

OpenStreetMap runs on community input. For example, StreetComplete, a map editing Android app, turns local surveying into something close to a game, sending contributors out to fill in what commercial map providers overlook. Another illustration is the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team project, which mobilises contributors after disasters, updating maps in real time so that aid reaches the right places. Corporations depend on OpenStreetMap as a crowdsourced map dataset, with TomTom even acknowledging this fact with their slogan “It takes the world to map the world”.

I joined this session wearing a second hat, beside my usual Internet Archive Europe one. The European Public Domain Day Working Group has been building a map on pdday.org, which tracks where public domain celebrations are taking place across Europe. That proprietary map has recently been updated and replaced with an open source version, and the community is actively looking for contributors to help keep it current. If you know of celebrations happening in your region, we would welcome your input.

Start exploring

For anyone curious about these tools: maplibre.org is the starting point. Maputnik at maputnik.github.io is a visual style editor for MapLibre maps, whose styles are in JSON rather than CSS. There are many hosted basemaps available, including non-commercial ones such as OpenFreeMap which has a quick-start guide for publishing your own maps. PMTiles lets you create and serve a permanent, self-contained archive of map data.

MapLibre’s Technical Steering Committee meets every second Wednesday of the month. Details and a community invite link are at maplibre.org/community.

The tools that remember where things are matter. So does who builds them.

We are grateful for the time and expertise that Bart and Tommi both shared with us, and the intimate group of participants who came to learn, explore, and build together.

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“Let Libraries be Libraries”: Knowledge Rights 21 Joins the Our Future Memory Movement

/ / Digital Rights for Libraries

Internet Archive Europe (IAE) is pleased to welcome Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) as the latest signatory to the Our Future Memory Statement on the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions.

KR21 is a pan-European advocacy coalition working to ensure that copyright and information law serves the public interest. Their signature adds one of the most evidence-driven voices in European library policy to a movement that now includes the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the International Council on Archives (ICA), the Wikimedia Foundation, and hundreds of libraries, archives, and museums across six continents.

KR21 Co-Founder Ben White welcomed the signing:

“Knowledge Rights 21 is delighted to sign the Our Future Memory Statement. Intersecting with our own work, the call to ensure that laws adequately support the ability of libraries and archives to preserve and give access to their collections in digital form could not be more urgent. Many of our institutions transitioned to a hybrid analogue and digital working environment in the 1990s. Nevertheless, nearly three decades later the law has not caught up. As memory institutions that preserve the cultural and scientific heritage of mankind, we need policymakers to act now before it is too late.”

Let Libraries be Libraries

KR21’s commitment to the Our Future Memory Statement sits alongside an active programme of advocacy work. The KR21 Library Action Plan, “Safeguard Access, Empower Europe,” sets out nine concrete steps the EU and national governments should take to ensure libraries can function in the digital age as they do in the physical one.

The plan addresses a structural problem. When libraries buy physical books, they own them. When they license digital content, the terms are set entirely by publishers. Publishers can refuse to license to libraries at all, withdraw titles without notice, and impose unlimited liability on libraries for what their users do with AI tools. That last clause has become a dealbreaker: libraries that cannot accept unlimited liability simply cannot sign the contract, and the content disappears from their collections.

The consequences are not abstract. In 2022, Wiley removed over 1,300 e-books from Irish library collections without warning, after reading lists had already been agreed with faculty for the academic year. Students lost access to confirmed course materials at the start of term. Libraries inherited the fallout with no recourse and no time.

Copyright law has not kept pace either. A decade after the Court of Justice of the European Union established a legal basis for e-lending, no member state has meaningfully implemented the ruling. Remote access to digital collections remains legally uncertain. Libraries mandated by governments to support lifelong learning cannot use the same digital education tools as schools and universities. The gap between what libraries are asked to do and what the law allows them to do keeps widening.

KR21’s nine-point action plan is specific about what needs to change: guaranteed access to digital materials on reasonable terms, contract protections that publishers cannot override, a workable framework for out-of-commerce works that are sitting inaccessible on library servers across Europe, and education exceptions that extend to the institutions governments have charged with supporting learning.

A Growing Movement – Time for Your Organisation to Join

The Our Future Memory Statement calls on policymakers to ensure that memory institutions retain online the same rights they have always held offline: the right to collect, to preserve, to provide access, and to cooperate across borders. KR21’s signature strengthens the case that these are not niche technical concerns. They are conditions for libraries to function as public institutions.

IAE encourages every organisation that supports open access to knowledge to add its name. No institution is too small, and the breadth of the sector is as important as the weight of its largest members.Sign the Statement at ourfuturememory.org.

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