Now you can watch the Internet Archive preserve documents in real time

The feed offers a close-up look of how microfiche — the sheets of films that store multiple documents — are digitized and uploaded to the Archive.

If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet Archive uploads all the physical documents on its site, now you can get a behind-the-scenes look at the process. The Internet Archive launched a new YouTube livestream that shows the digitization of microfiche in real time — complete with some relaxing, lo-fi beats.

Microfiche is a sheet of film that contains multiple images of miniaturized documents. It’s an old form of storing newspapers, court documents, government records, and other important documents. The Internet Archive uses these microfiche cards to digitize and upload documents to its online library.

The livestream shows a close-up look at one of the five microfiche digitization stations at the organization’s Richmond, California location, along with a look at the document that it’s working on. App maker Sophia Tung, who created a LoFi music livestream showing Waymo’s robotaxis returning to their parking lot, also set up the microfiche livestream for the Internet Archive.

“Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet,” Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s director of library services, writes in a post on the site. “Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card.”

From there, the Internet Archive processes the pages, makes them text-searchable, and then uploads them to its public collections.

The livestream runs from Monday through Friday from 10:30AM ET to 6:30PM ET. “During the day, you’ll see scanners working on custom machines to digitize all the microfiche in the world,” Tung says. “During the off hours, you can also see everything else that the Archive has to offer, like silent films in the public domain or historical pictures from NASA.”

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