The Case for Crowdfunding at Scale: How Donors are Fundraising With Us and Creating a Path to Lasting Preservation

Name: Book Talk: LD: Heavy Water with Neal Stephenson (IN-PERSON)
Start: 2026-10-15T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-10-15T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Internet Archive

Posted on July 30, 2026 by Joy Chesbrough

Preserving humanity’s memory isn’t cheap. Servers need power, storage needs upgrading, and physical collections need scanning teams working around the clock. Leading a philanthropy department and building a high-performing team to fund these projects and meet that challenge is no small task. Since leading this department, we have grown our fundraising by 350%, guided by a commitment to nonprofit best practices and sustainable, donor-centered growth. Over time, that discipline has paid off: a loyal community of supporters emerged, expanding our fundraising base to hundreds of thousands of donors worldwide. That growth prompted the launch of a new fundraising strategy in partnership with GoFundMe, one designed to leverage crowdfunding fundraising tools and build a community of supporters who could engage firsthand with our work and see, up close, how our programs come to life. In 2025, that strategy took shape as a full-scale platform launch that has become a strategic funding and effective tool for turning individual passion into institutional impact.

The 2025 Launch: A New Way to Give

Rather than betting on a single approach, there has been a focus in philanthropy to diversify fundraising, and it’s resulted in establishing nine funding channels, including estate planning, workplace and monthly giving, institutional and transformational giving and crowdfunding. The GoFundMe Pro crowdfunding rollout was created to increase engagement, loyalty and long-term impact. Embedded with a/b testing and key peer-to-peer strategies, it resulted in prompting people to give. Traditional, centralized fundraising ran alongside peer-to-peer (P2P) campaigns, where individual supporters created their own fundraising pages to rally friends, family, and online communities around what they cared about. It became a grassroots effort where supporters could create personalized campaigns to raise funds for Archive projects that mattered most to them.

The centerpiece of last year’s fundraising effort was an event celebration on October 22, 2025. The Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone of reaching one trillion web pages preserved and accessible on the Wayback Machine. This prompted the creation of a cross-departmental collaboration to launch a GoFundMe campaign with our community and celebrate the achievement. It was evident that the fundraising campaign would be a huge success due to all the great work that went into engaging our loyal funders and the work of the teams who captured and preserved one trillion web pages. The Web We Built campaign was paired directly with a P2P fundraising push, inviting supporters to help preserve the next one trillion web pages.

To sweeten the deal, a generous foundation was asked to layer in $1 million in matching funds to stretch every dollar further. Through the campaign window, every dollar raised through The Web We’ve Built P2P campaign was matched 2:1, tripling the impact of each donation, and supporters had until the end of 2025 to help the campaign reach its $1 million match goal. For a $500 donor, that meant their gift effectively became $1500 for the Archive’s ongoing work. This was a simple, tangible incentive that turned casual supporters into active fundraisers running their own campaigns on our behalf.

The result was hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through a combination of milestone storytelling, grassroots P2P energy, and matched giving, all proof that the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform could do more than collect donations. It could turn a technical achievement (one trillion archived pages) into a shared community celebration people wanted to be part of.

2026: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures

Building on that momentum, 2026 brought a sharper, more emotional focus: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures, a campaign built around four collections that would have been lost forever without the efforts of the Internet Archive’s scanning teams. Where the 2025 campaign celebrated scale, this one told stories about specific communities, specific histories, and the very real risk of culture and its stories and artifacts disappearing without a trace.

The campaign echoes a broader concern the Internet Archive has been raising through its Vanishing Culture initiative, one that corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyberattacks are increasingly threatening public access to shared cultural history. Because web pages are ephemeral and link-rot is so prevalent, it means that information online can disappear at any time. This highlights the importance of how fragile digital culture can be when it isn’t actively preserved. It’s also important to note that the four collections featured in this year’s GoFundMe campaign were chosen because each one represents a story of culture nearly lost, and a team that refused to let that happen. The four featured collections in the 2026 campaign gave donors a concrete way to fight back against that fragility and capture the spirit of the effort, while supporting its achievements.

Backing Up an Entire Island: Colección Aruba

Of the four collections featured in the Saving Our Vanishing Cultures GoFundMe campaign, the partnership with Aruba stood out as the campaign’s heart. In 2024, the Internet Archive officially partnered with the country of Aruba to digitize and preserve the nation’s complete history, working alongside Aruban officials, the National Library, and the National Archive. The effort, launched as Colección Aruba, digitized roughly 100,000 items of the island nation’s cultural heritage and made them freely available to the public, an achievement that brought together unified support from Aruba’s Prime Minister, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Education, a level of governmental buy-in we had rarely seen.

Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten (left), signs the Four Rights, alongside National Archivist, Raymond Hernandez (middle), and Brewster Kahle (right), Internet Archive founder and digital librarian.

The moment captured in that photo says as much as any statistic could. This wasn’t a quiet backend migration, but it was a public, ceremonial commitment from a nation’s top cultural stewards, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Archive to put preservation principles into writing.

The partnership was significant enough that Aruba received the Internet Archive’s Hero Award, an honor given annually to individuals, organizations, or nations that show exceptional leadership in expanding access to knowledge and supporting digital preservation, joining past honorees like the Biodiversity Heritage Library and public access advocate Carl Malamud.

The collection’s impact has only grown since. Materials documenting the history of slavery in Aruba have since been designated part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register, which is a global recognition that these records now stand alongside some of humanity’s most significant documentary heritage. It’s a powerful reminder of why digitization matters: these documents aren’t just preserved, they’re now protected on the world stage, ensuring future generations can learn from them regardless of what happens to the physical originals.

Aruba also made history in another way by becoming the first country to formally sign onto the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions:

The right to collect
The right to preserve
The right to provide access
The right to interlibrary collaboration

These four rights have since become a rallying point for libraries and archives worldwide, and Aruba’s early commitment gave the framework real-world legitimacy right out of the gate. You can explore the full collection yourself at archive.org/details/aruba.

Why GoFundMe, and Why It Worked

It’s worth pausing on why the platform choice mattered. GoFundMe Pro brought the philanthropy department access to a giving community of people worldwide, along with donor protections like the GoFundMe Giving Guarantee and dedicated customer support infrastructure most nonprofits can’t build on their own. Through GoFundMe Pro, our team also gained fundraising software built specifically for nonprofit scale, rather than adapting consumer tools to institutional needs.

The goal leading philanthropy was never just to raise money faster, but to give supporters a real seat at the table, where they could see exactly how their generosity turned Archive projects into preserved history.

Infrastructure alone doesn’t raise money, but championing the stories of our loyal supporters does. The most successful campaigns, from the one trillion web pages milestone to the vanishing culture collections worked because they gave donors something they could connect with emotionally: a scanning team racing against time, a nation’s slavery records finally getting global recognition, a culture’s historical record that almost vanished but didn’t. That’s the throughline connecting both campaigns. Numbers get attention, but stories and impact get donations.

What’s Next

Between the 2025 one trillion web pages milestone celebration and the 2026 Vanishing Culture campaign, we’ve proven that fundraising strategy can evolve without losing sight of mission. Crowdfunding campaigns turn supporters into advocates. Matching funds make small gifts feel bigger. Focused storytelling, like Colección Aruba, transforms an abstract preservation mission into something people can see, touch, and champion.

Philanthropy is more than a revenue stream. It is the clearest signal that our mission resonates, and it is what allows us to grow our base of support even as needs evolve. Every gift represents someone choosing to believe in the work of preserving culture and knowledge for future generations. Cultivating that belief, and giving it new ways to express itself, is core to sustaining and growing support over time.

Digital donor engagement should be a fixture of every philanthropy team’s playbook, not a periodic experiment. Donor expectations are shifting quickly, and organizations that keep innovating in how they connect, involve, and steward supporters will be the ones that earn lasting loyalty.

Looking ahead, I’m focused on the next chapter, one that builds on this same foundation: meeting donors where they are, and giving them real ownership over the projects they want to help digitize and preserve. That means continuing to think outside the box, finding new digital channels and storytelling formats to bring our work to life, and building genuine communities around it. Bringing supporters inside the Internet Archive to experience our projects firsthand, and see their impact directly, will be central to how we grow support going forward.

If the last two years are any indication, our next fundraising campaign won’t just ask for donations. It will ask people to help save something that matters to them specifically, and give them the tools to bring others along.

Joy Chesbrough, Chief Philanthropy Officer at Internet Archive

Joy leads the Internet Archive’s philanthropy department and philanthropy team.She has been managing the department and its fundraising strategy for the past seven years. If you would like to reach out to Joy, please email her at joy@archive.org.

Vanishing Culture Episode #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter Scholing

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Chris Freeland

Languages can vanish just as easily as books, websites, or archives—and when they do, entire ways of understanding the world can disappear with them. In the fifth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Peter Scholing of Biblioteca Nacional Aruba and the Coleccion Aruba digital heritage platform about the importance of preserving Papiamento, Aruba’s creole language, and the cultural heritage it carries.

Peter shares the story of how Aruba’s libraries, archives, and cultural institutions came together to build a digital collection that now preserves hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, newspapers, recordings, and books. The conversation explores the unique preservation challenges facing island communities, from geographic isolation and climate risks to the legacy of colonialism, which has scattered much of Aruba’s historical record across multiple countries and languages. Peter explains why expanding access to materials in Papiamento is essential for education, cultural identity, and historical understanding, and how digitization is helping unlock previously inaccessible collections. Looking ahead, he discusses the opportunities new technologies offer for smaller languages and why ensuring a vibrant digital future for Papiamento is a crucial part of preserving Aruba’s culture for generations to come.

Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.

The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.

Author Simone O. Elias Bypasses Traditional Publishing with Open Access Release

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Caralee Adams

Sixteen-year-old Simone O. Elias has a lot to say about her generation and the way it is perceived by society.

Rather than wait for a traditional publisher, the Berkeley, California, teen says she felt an urgency to get her message out and reach as many people as possible. On July 24, she released her second book, Porcelain Rage: A Manifesto for the Gen Z Woman, online at the Internet Archive.

In her new book, Elias reflects on cultural trends impacting young women and the challenges that come with the digital age. It explains the good, the bad, and the complexity of the moment, weaving in philosophy and history. The chapters include critiques of the Barbie movie, “sad girl” pop music, pilates, and podcasts.

She analyzes the pressures facing her generation and says Gen Z women are reclaiming femininity in a new way.

“This decade, we’ve decided to burn the playbook and make our own,” Elias writes in the forward to the book. “We can hold two truths simultaneously: the porcelain-perfect, pink image of the women of the past and the rageful, angry, sad, feral versions of ourselves. The contradiction is the point. It is our reality.”

Porcelain Rage is her second book.

At age 13, she landed a contract from McFarland, an academic press, to write Old Films, Young Eyes: A Teenage Take on Hollywood’s Golden Age, which was published in 2024.

Her new book also has a chapter about her struggle with mental health and chronicles the mistreatment of girls who have been institutionalized, in a parallel to Nellie Bly’s 19th-century expose Ten Days in a Madhouse. Through her writing, Elias says she wants to humanize a generation that she claims is often misunderstood.

“It’s about balancing the expectations of perfection in the modern age and the rage and mental illness that we are experiencing at catastrophic levels these days,” Elias says.

Register for a book talk with Elias and writer Sonia Mansfield on August 4.

Elias comes from a family of writers (her mother, Jessica Carew Kraft, author of Why We Need to Be Wild; her grandfather, Thomas Elias, Pulitzer-nominated columnist for California Focus; and her grandmother, Marilyn Elias, a journalist for USA Today). Her father, Jordan Elias, is a plaintiffs’ class-action lawyer who helped spearhead a case against Google for monopolizing digital advertising and advocates for the public’s right to access judicial records and histories to protect against sealing by corporations.

Simone grew up in San Francisco and attended preschool across the street from the Internet Archive at Congregation Beth Sholom. Since she was 13, she has been involved with the Internet Archive, conducting a series of podcast interviews, judging film contests, and helping with public-domain movie nights.

“When I was looking for a place to house a book that is so firmly rooted in public utility and using information for the improvement of people, it was obvious to go with [the Internet Archive],” Elias says.

Choosing the open-access route and bypassing a publisher, she says she was able to be authentic in her analysis. Her hope is that removing any barriers means a broad audience will read the book.

“The book was not so much an end to a conversation, but a start. The ultimate goal is to have young women talking about this with each other instead of holding it in,” Elias says. “It’s supposed to function as a manifesto, a survival guide, a definitive blueprint of what we’re dealing with in America as women today through our culture.”

In an introductory note about the publishing model for Porcelain Rage, Elias says her choice to post her book on archive.org may seem jarring or unprecedented. Yet she argues this avenue allows her freedom to tell her story unfiltered.

“I’m sick of how the industry puts women into neat little saleable categories,” Elias writes of traditional publishers in the book. “We don’t need more palatable stories in an unpalatable world. This book is free, uncensored, and completely yours. That’s how it should be.”

BOOK TALK
Internet Archive will host a book talk with Elias and author Sonia Mansfield on August 4th at the Internet Archive. Registration is free. If you can’t make it in person, the discussion will be livestreamed.
– Register for the in-person gathering at the Internet Archive.
– Watch the livestream.

Bringing Forgotten Music Back to Life with Optical Music Recognition

Posted on July 22, 2026 by Caralee Adams

Just as printed letters can be scanned and converted into digital text, emerging technology can transform sheet music into sound.

A new effort is underway to use optical music recognition (OMR) to bring to life music in the public domain for all to listen and access through the Internet Archive.

Nearly 200 public domain songs have been uploaded to the Internet Jukebox—from John Philip Sousa marches to children’s folk songs and piano concertos by Frederic Chopin—and the collection is growing.

Marty Lucas and Carl Malamud spearheaded the project through the nonprofit organization Public Resource, with funding from Arcadia, a UK charitable fund. The two were college roommates at Indiana University in the 1970s and have been long-time work collaborators who shared a love of music.

This undertaking began about three years ago when Lucas, an attorney with an expertise in sound engineering and a fellow with Public Resource, discovered old sheet music in his farmhouse in Indiana. He suggested it could be scanned and preserved. Malamud introduced him to the OMR engine developed by Soundslice, a music instruction site, and the project took off.

Lucas converted printed sheet music to a digital format typically using MIDI software for playback and Music XML, a mark-up language for page layout. Then, he exported it into a digital audio workstation that allowed him to assign performances to particular instruments and mix. He started with sheet music he owned, digitizing and converting others in the public domain he found through libraries and online.

While a musical genius may be able to look at a page of sheet music and hear it in his or her head, Lucas said, the technology makes it easier for someone to actually listen to how it was originally intended to be played.

“It’s really exciting because it opens up the door to lots of different kinds of music—providing a new kind of access, very inexpensively,” Lucas said.

Sample some of the greatest hits in the collection:

SILENT FILM THEATER ORCHESTRA
– Heavy Tension (Leo Kempinski)
– The Vampire (Sol P. Levy)
– Uneasiness (Gaston Borch)

VINTAGE POP
– It’s A Long, Long Way to Tipperary (ft. John Kennedy Jr.)
– Dance of the Daisies (LaFarge)
– Alice Blue Gown (ft. Corinne)

SOUSA
– The Gladiator (JP Sousa)
– The Pathfinder of Panama (JP Sousa)

FOLK
– The Harp that Once Thro’ Tara’s Halls (Thomas Moore)
– How Should I Your True Love Know? (Anonymous)

CLASSICAL
Passepied (From the Fifth English Suite) (JS Bach)
Lieder ohne Worte Opus 30, No. 5 in D Major (Mendelssohn)

Many pieces in the collection were played by pit orchestras during the early days of silent films (called photoplays at the time) from about 1910 to 1923.

“During this heyday period, people went to the movies to hear the orchestra because they didn’t have to dress up fancy. They could pay 50 cents and hear this beautiful music,” Lucas said, noting the music blossomed then withered away once theaters shifted to using organs. “There aren’t many recordings of these pieces and they’re really worthy of hearing. These are by some of the best composers of the day. It was neat to bring back pieces of quality music that hadn’t been heard in a century.”

The Internet Jukebox can serve as an educational tool for individuals teaching themselves or band directors working with students section by section about the sound of a piece. The collection could also be useful to people with videos looking to put a score with their content or musicians looking to recreate and remix.

“We’re hoping the creatives of the world who write songs and do music videos will figure out how it works,” Malamud said. “It has amazing potential. The key is to make this available and then see what kind of magic happens.”

To inspire the public to add to the collection as citizen archivists, Lucas and Malamud recently released a series of instructional videos explaining how the OMR process works.

Vanishing Culture Episode #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura Gibbs

Posted on July 22, 2026 by Chris Freeland

Folktales are more than stories—they are living records of culture, identity, and collective memory. In the fourth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer and researcher Helen Nde, founder of Mythological Africans, and folklorist Laura Gibbs about the importance of preserving African folklore in the digital age. Together, they explore how stories help communities understand themselves, pass down knowledge across generations, and make sense of a changing world.

MORE INFO: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/vanishing-culture-4-keeping-african-folktales-alive-with-helen-nde-laura-gibbs

The conversation examines the challenges of preserving oral traditions, from the distortions introduced by colonial collectors to the loss of context when dynamic storytelling practices are reduced to written records. Helen and Laura discuss how digitization can help make folklore more accessible and discoverable, while also opening new possibilities for communities to share and reinterpret their stories online. They also reflect on the importance of trustworthy archives in an era when myths and historical narratives are increasingly used to shape political and cultural identities. Ultimately, the episode asks what it will take to ensure that these rich storytelling traditions remain available—not as relics of the past, but as living resources for future generations.

The Hidden Political Costs of Vanishing Culture

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Chris Freeland

In a new article, “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory,” Michael Menna and Lila Bailey argue that the shift from buying physical media to licensing digital content has created a first-order political crisis. The piece builds on the groundwork laid in Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, tracing the problem across five arenas—educational resources, journalism, civic and movement archives, religious study, and environmental science—to show how digital ephemerality is already undermining people’s ability to learn, organize, and hold power accountable.

The article’s second half revisits the four digital rights at the heart of the Our Future Memory movement: the rights to collect, preserve, provide access to, and collaborate around digital materials—the same things memory institutions have always done with physical collections. It walks through why each right matters on its own terms, from the Wiley e-book withdrawal that blindsided George Washington University to the federal government’s removal of climate data and environmental justice tools like EJScreen. The throughline is simple: none of this is inevitable. Vanishing culture is a policy choice, and it’s one we can still reverse if libraries, archives, and museums make the case together instead of absorbing these losses one at a time.

This piece is a call to action as much as an analysis. If you work at or care about a library, archive, or museum, we hope you’ll read the full article over at The Political Librarian, and consider signing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online at ourfuturememory.org. The more institutions that add their names, the harder it becomes for publishers and platforms to treat our shared cultural memory as disposable.

Vanishing Culture Episode #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke Palmieri

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Chris Freeland

Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.

MORE INFO: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/vanishing-culture-3-saving-queer-memory-with-brooke-palmieri

The conversation traces how queer communities have built their own archives in response to historical exclusion from mainstream institutions, creating spaces where stories of love, activism, creativity, and survival can be preserved and shared. Brooke reflects on the power of community-led archiving, the opportunities digital platforms create for expanding access to queer history, and the challenges posed by disappearing information, online misinformation, and unequal access to cultural heritage. Together, Vida and Brooke explore how preserving queer archives helps ensure that marginalized histories remain visible, accessible, and available to future generations.

Google Summer of Code Contributors Improve Open Library’s Patron Experience

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Chris Freeland

This year, as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), the Internet Archive is collaborating with two outstanding contributors to make it easier for patrons to find relevant books on Open Library.

Tanishq Sangwan, a 19-year-old from Gurugram, India, and Chisom Nnamani of Lagos, Nigeria, are two of 1,141 software developers from around the world who have been selected through GSoC to hone their engineering capabilities with open-source organizations.

“The Internet Archive’s focus for 2026 is: tools for participation. Participation must be earned by building an experience patrons want to return to.” said Mek, program lead for Open Library. “The work that both Chisom and Tanishq are doing is central to creating a more reliable Open Library experience, where readers can repeatedly discover, access, and enjoy books.”

Sangwan, who just completed his second year of college studying artificial intelligence, is focusing on the journey of patrons who join Open Library and use it once, but do not return. His objective is to understand where patrons encounter barriers and identify opportunities to create a more useful, lasting experience.

Sangwan comes into the project with two years of experience from ZNotes, an educational organization that provides free notes and videos from students around the world.

“I built this passion and got this amazing feeling when my work was making an impact on people and they were receiving some value,” he said. “Now, Google Summer of Code is a wonderful opportunity to connect with open-source organizations and Open Library where its work directly impacts people’s lives.”

“This year’s collaboration is important because lots of patrons discover Open Library, but too often don’t always find the books they want,” Mek said.

The work begins when a patron lands on a book that is unavailable for reading. Soon, instead of reaching a dead end, patrons will be presented with nearby books on the same shelf that are available now.

When patrons find a relevant, available book, a simpler registration process will help them get started with fewer steps and return to the book they found. Furthermore, Sangwan is helping patrons connect with new book recommendations on an ongoing basis by introducing an activity feed to the account page.

“I like to hear about the patron psychology, how they’re interacting with the platform, and what’s going in their mind from the first moment to the very last,” he said. “We’ll be researching and conducting interviews with lost patrons so we can connect this bridge between patrons and the millions of books in our catalog.”

Nnamani, who already has certifications in Data Analytics and Data Engineering, just completed her sophomore year pursuing a second degree in Computer Science. At Open Library, Nnamani is leading a major cleanup effort to add structured tag data to books so they can be searched by genre and subgenre. Her work is paving the way for the addition of a wide variety of new searchable tags, including: moods, fiction and non-fiction, content warnings, and literary formats, such as memoirs, biographies, and more. By cleaning up messy data and enabling better genre and subject browsing, Chisom is helping remove barriers preventing patrons from discovering books they love.

“Today, many of our subject pages feel computer generated and can’t compare to the beautiful, curated experiences you find at small book stores,” says Mek. “The work Chisom is leading to map the messy subject tags we have to clear genres and subgenres will help us offer patrons a more useful and satisfying browsing experience.”

“I really care about books being accessible to people,” Nnamani said. “In Nigeria, we have limited access to physical libraries, so Open Library is something that matters. It gives everyone the opportunity to come and read any kind of book and gain insights.”

“This project is inspiring to me,” Nnamani said. “I like to work on projects where I can connect the data and infrastructure in ways that contribute to the organization’s goals. I enjoy helping to solve complex problems at the intersection of systems and data.”

Open Library Fellows work remotely, but meet regularly online with Internet Archive staff and mentors. At the end of the summer, each contributor will publish a blog post explaining their technical journey and experience gained.

Since 2005, Google’s Summer of Code has supported more than 23,000 students from 123 countries with stipends to receive mentorship and contribute 48 million lines of code to over 1,000 open source organizations worldwide.

Vanishing Culture Episode #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Chris Freeland

Food is having a cultural moment. As America marks its 250th anniversary, new cookbooks celebrate endangered culinary traditions, UNESCO calls recipes “living heritage,” and chefs are rediscovering centuries-old techniques. But preserving food culture takes more than cooking—it takes preserving the books, handwritten recipes, community cookbooks, and stories that carry this knowledge from one generation to the next. That’s the focus of this week’s Future Knowledge episode with Katie Livingston.

MORE INFO: https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/vanishing-culture-2-the-stories-hidden-in-cookbooks-with-katie-livingston

Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.

From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.

Internet Archive Blogs

Updates from the Internet Archive