archive.org link collection
The Internet Archive is a whole universe with its Petabytes of data. They not only archive „the internet“ (!!), but also have dedicated collections of digitized public domain1) books, audio, video, and imagery.
Because of the sheer size of its databases, simply navigating those treasure troves can become difficult at times. To remind myself of „gold pots“ for a later return (and as a soft recommendation), I archive some good search queries and entry points into this part of the „deep web“.2)
Audio
- Netlabels is the index of netlabels who put their catalogue on the Internet Archive. I currently (loosely) monitor the RSS feed to this feed for review candidates. And for a browsable, chunked way to access this collection, why not start all releases from year 2020, sorted by popularity? Since 2004 there have been 1000 to 3000 (peak in 2013) releases per year.
- Phase Flow Podcast links over 50 episodes of excellent mixes for contemporary electronic dance music.
- Mighty Duggs over a dozen of DJ mixes
- LibriVox if you want another way of browsing the official LibriVox portal.
- reviews by @matthew_boardman, over 100 reviews to selected releases. Might show me places.
- Eclanage Preservation Society specialises in digitising old vinyl records. Licensing status questionable, though…
- shandb archives over 100 episodes of radio show Groove Therapy, a two-hour funk & soul broadcast with exceptional content. Again, no CC license though
- Vericuetos Podcast, maintained by pedalmen is worth a visit if you seek so-called „eclectic“ music. It contains a backlog of over 300 radio show episodes, one hour each, with Spanish moderation in between songs. CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 licensed!
- And finally, a complex query for diving through the whole Audio subsection of the Internet Archive. Change the
subjectandyearparameter to browse for genre and date. The collection exclusions remove cruft from busy archivists featuring mostly 30 second long samples.
Form
Links
Image
- NASA Images. Because SCIENCE!
Text
- Project Gutenberg. Perhaps helpful if the original repository is geoblocked in your country
Video
- Silent Films contains plenty of Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès (Voyage dans la Lune!), Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (linked because of better version)
- Speed Runs for archived videos of historic speed run attempts.3)
Software
- Software Library: MS-DOS Games contains over 7000 archived software gems. Thanks to the emulator DOSbox being ported to JS, many games, demos and shareware software can be tried out which would otherwise be forgotten by now.
1)
Public domain: works whose copyright protection has expired automatically become accessible to anyone [except for nationally diverging laws, but this footnote is not the place for a lecture].
2)
wiki/Deep web: actually I am misusing the term here, as the Internet Archive is heavily indexed by most search engines. But advertisers pay better and do more SEO to land on page 1, so…
3)
For all current viewing interests, better have a look at Speedrun.com directly. For some significant titles, Youtuber Summoning Salt even has created 10-20 minute long documentaries of how each game's world record time has evolved during the last 10 years.