Seeking to make more visible the often invisibilized labor of the workers who scan the books that make up the Internet Archive.

 Seeking to make more visible the often invisibilized labor of the workers who scan the books that make up the Internet Archive.

From the results of gathering workers’ stories we can see a trend of dissatisfaction, underwhelming compensation, and pain among workers. It is important to note that while most of the scans are happening in Asia, of the stories we’ve been able to gather, none of them specifically name working at any of the Asian sites.

About 'Scanning Labor in the Internet Archive: Erasure in Metadata and Digital Products'

Our project is called: “Scanning Labor in the Internet Archive: Erasure in Metadata and Digital Products." * In it, we are seeking to make more visible the often invisibilized labor of the workers who scan the books that make up the Internet Archive. To do this, we’ve mined the Internet Archive API to scrape metadata records associated with the scanning process. We have used these records to create a map that visualizes the spatial patterns of digitization of the archive over time. We wanted to ground this spatial-data history in the experiences of Internet Archive workers, so we sought to conduct oral histories with the workers. We wanted to embed these stories in the map as pop-ups that would link out to narratives, quotes, or media. Ultimately, due to the quick turn over rate of workers at Internet Archive and the relatively high threshold and time commitments for an interview, we have not yet been able to connect with a scanning worker to conduct live oral histories. Pivoting our approach, we decided to send out a survey en masse to the emails found in the scrapped metadata.

In conjunction with information gathered through our survey, zoom chats with the Internet Archive's managment, we've found details about the scanning sites through Internet Archive's own collection, ProPublica, and GlassDoor. In conjunction to creating this website and map, we've created profiles on each scanning center to detail our findings.

Report is HERE: Home (scanninglabor.github.io)

*our names are Eleanor, David, Lucian, and Elizabeth, and we are students in the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.