Brizuela and his six-person team are currently digitizing U.S. Supreme Court case documents and government records from Canada dating back to the 1930s. , a flat, film-based format commonly used from the mid-20th century for preserving and accessing paper records, which requires a specialized reader for viewing—making the information contained on the cards difficult to access.
“It’s useful for law students or
anybody – and it’s free to use without borders,” he said. “Also, it’s valuable for the sake of archiving so information doesn’t get lost.” Next, Brizuela said he’s looking Telemarketing Data forward to receiving a donated collection of microfiche with images of Sanskrit Buddhist tablets.
Anyone can watch the crew in action
on a livestream of the microfiche scanning operation Mellow lo-fi music plays in the background during working hours and continues with various video and still images from the Internet Archive’s collections rotating on the feed when the digitization center is closed.
During the livestream, one camera
is focused on an operator feeding microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera; another other provides a close-up view of the material. Each page is processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections. Researchers and readers can easily access and download the documents freely through Democracy’s Library.
Brizuela said the staff has embraced
the public window on their work. He joined the Internet Archive in February and hired people who were willing to be on camera and understood the potential benefit of the exposure. “It’s not like ‘Oh, Big Brother is watching’,” he said, noting the employees have fun with the situation. “We’re not robots. We do show our characters. We’re human.”