From Permanent.org to the Internet Archive in Just One Click

At Permanent, we enjoy making it easy for you to share your archives.  Sometimes that sharing is private.  It might mean making sure everybody in your family can enjoy the mementos of a journey across generations.  At other times, we want to help you submit your media more widely— to research efforts and public collections like the Internet Archive, for example.  To help with that, we have made some improvements to Permanent that let you send files to the Internet Archive with just one click.

What is the Internet Archive you ask? It is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Their mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. A pretty lofty goal! To achieve this goal they are building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Basically, they are one of our biggest inspirations. The goal of Permanent is to help expand this effort of Universal Access to include the individual, personal archives of All People.

Because the Internet Archive is public domain first and Permanent is private first, public second, we’ve added an option to the publishing workflow. This helps to prevent accidental publication of private records in your archive. You won’t see it if you’re not trying to publish a file. However, when you hit the “Publish” button from the publish menu, you’ll see a new option that lets you send a copy of your published file to the Internet Archive.

And if your file is already located in the Public workspace of your archive, click “Get Link” to you see a button that lets you tell the Internet Archive about your public file.

A lot of Permanent users are committed to the mission of public digital preservation that the Internet Archive represents.  This new feature will let Permanent users make selected materials available to the largest public archive in the world.

Big thanks to the Internet Archive for closely collaborating with us on building this out!

We’re not stopping here.  We want to integrate Permanent storage and archiving into more services and more workflows.  If you are part of a community that could use more Permanence, come talk to us about our ongoing technical collaboration work (APIs and an SDK) to make Permanent’s features available for use in third-party applications.