The Plan

This is a preliminary version of an archive to hold hundreds of thousands of advertisements, with metadata from the first thirty years of personal computing.

Sources

All scans are permanently held at the Internet Archive; the advertising archive is a repository for metadata that describes individual ads.

We only ingest advertisements from magazines that have scanned by archive.org.

Help from people and machines

No crowdsourcing effort will be able to segment out the immense number of ads in the Internet Archive. Instead, we plan to bootstrap our way towards text and image classifiers using crowdsourced classifications.

If you want to help, you can:

  • Participate in one of our crowdsourcing tasks: currently, by helping find ads.
  • Contribute new scans to the Internet Archive or improve the date metadata for computer magazines there.

Technology

I'm using a tech stack build around the IIIF Image standard to serve images directly from the Internet Archive. Images are displayed using Annotorious, and OpenSeadragon. Image annotations are stored in Google Firestore.