Exploring the Richness of Culture and Technology

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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Resurrecting Networks: On Eulogies, Dead Tech, and Fifteen Years of Open Government

/ / Events

On Friday 22 May, Internet Archive Europe’s Amsterdam space hosted two very different events that, in retrospect, belonged together.

A Funeral for the Networks We Lost

The afternoon began with Resurrecting Networks, a workshop led by Sevgi Tan that asked participants to do something rarely granted in tech culture: slow down and grieve.

Tan’s practice draws on media archaeology and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, taking deprecation seriously as an event worth marking. The premise is simple and slightly radical. When a network dies, it doesn’t just disappear. It takes with it communities, habits, ways of communicating, and forms of trust that were specific to it. AOL chat rooms were not just a primitive version of Slack. MSN Messenger was not merely a precursor to WhatsApp. They were particular places, with particular people in them, and when they went, something real was lost.

Participants arrived in funeral attire, as requested. Together, the group built a graveyard: a collective list of dead networks. Then came the eulogies. Some people wrote short paragraphs. Some read poems. Some brought physical objects. Singing was involved. The format was deliberately open, the mood somewhere between solemn and warm.

What made the session land wasn’t nostalgia, exactly. It was the act of paying attention. Tan’s framing insists that slowing down around technological loss is a form of resistance to the consumerist logic that treats obsolescence as natural, inevitable, and not worth mourning. If we want to understand what we’re building now, it helps to understand what we’ve already buried and why.

For an organisation that archives the web, that question is never abstract. What survives depends on choices: what gets collected, what gets preserved, what gets remembered. Resurrecting Networks made those choices visible and personal.

Fifteen Years of Open Government, Celebrated with Cake

The borrel that followed brought a different energy. Together with Open State Foundation, IAE marked fifteen years of the Open Government Partnership as part of Open Government Week, an annual moment when countries and civil society organisations across the world take stock of what transparent, accountable governance actually looks like in practice.

There were drinks, Affligem, Fritz Kola, red velvet cake, and the kind of conversations that don’t fit neatly into a programme. A short presentation anchored the afternoon at 16:00, but the real work of the evening happened in the margins: practitioners, archivists, and open government advocates comparing notes, making connections, and arguing about what progress looks like.

The Open Government Partnership launched in 2011 on the premise that governments perform better when they operate in the open. Fifteen years on, the gaps between commitment and practice remain wide in many places. But the coalition has grown, and the principle has held.

For IAE, open government and digital preservation are not separate issues. Archives are how accountability becomes possible over time. A government that controls what gets preserved controls, in the end, what can be known about it. Open access to public records, open data, and the right of memory institutions to collect and keep digital materials are all parts of the same argument.

The afternoon made that connection visible, without needing to say it out loud.

Both events are over, but the questions they raised aren’t. If your organisation works in this space, we’d love to hear from you.

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The Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (LACA) Joins Our Future Memory

/ / Digital Rights for Libraries

The Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (LACA) has signed the Statement on the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions, adding one of the UK’s most important copyright advocacy bodies to the growing Our Future Memory movement.

LACA is the principal UK organisation lobbying on behalf of the library, information, and archive professions and their users for fair copyright practices. Its membership spans the breadth of the sector: from national libraries and university consortia to archive bodies and professional associations. When LACA speaks on copyright, it speaks for the people who run the institutions that keep public knowledge alive.

Christy Henshaw, Co-Chair of LACA, explained the decision to sign:

“The UK Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance advocates for a fair and balanced copyright framework, one that upholds the rights of copyright holders while equally recognising the essential freedoms of users. By signing this Statement, we affirm our support for Our Future Memory’s call to protect, and indeed strengthen, the vital role of memory institutions as custodians of knowledge in a digital age where access to trusted information is so critical to our society.”

The Movement Expands

LACA’s endorsement is a signal from the UK copyright community that the digital rights of memory institutions are a mainstream concern, not a niche one. Libraries and archives hold knowledge for everyone who needs it, now and in the future. Getting that right in law requires exactly the kind of sustained, expert advocacy LACA brings.

Call to Action

Our Future Memory continues to grow. If your organisation has not yet signed, we encourage you to do so. No institution is too small, and the breadth of the sector matters as much as the weight of its largest members.

🔗 Sign the Statement: https://ourfuturememory.org

📧 Contact the Campaign: campaigns@internetarchive.eu 

Learn More

Previous Informational Webinar

If you missed our recent informational webinar, “Protect Our Future Memory: Join the Call for Library Digital Rights,” you can still watch the session to learn more about the growing international movement to secure the digital rights memory institutions have long held in the physical world.

Podcast: Hear the Voices Behind the Movement

To explore the origins, urgency, and global significance of the Four Digital Rights, we encourage you to listen to the Future Knowledge podcast episode on this campaign. Featuring leaders from across the library, archive, and digital rights communities, the episode offers essential context on why these rights matter—and what’s at stake.

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