The games in this collections span 4 decades! A lot of these have never seen the light of day, but now you can enjoy all of them from the comfort of your browser!

The collection is available at https://archive.org/details/hiddenpalace. So go on and dive into gaming history!

It’s all in the name, fanlore is an extensive lore of derivative works made by fans, an encyclopedia of fan works! Fanfiction, Fanart, Filks you name it! Fanlore is a wiki which operates under the Organization for Transformative Works.

What do they do?

Art History is considered a core discipline in the Humanities. Fanlore takes itself very seriously in that they try to cover what is a very much neglected portion of the History of Modern Art.

Fanlore doesn’t only document online/offline fan works, but also critically analyses these. They build timelines, codify tropes and research bibliographic information on authors or artists who might have been deemed “lacking in notoriety” for an actual encyclopedia.

How do they do it?

Most of this activity takes place on a MediaWiki, namely Fanlore Wiki. They currently sport a whopping 52,017 articles, 940,737 edits.

How do I sign up?

Though fanlore is technically a project under the umbrella of the OTW, OTW membership or a similar position is not necessary to join, anyone who’s willing to edit a wiki is a potential member.

So what are you waiting for? Become a lore keeper today!

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.

What do they do?

First of all IA works to digitize new material, such as books or VHS tapes that probably haven’t made it on the internet yet.

They host a number of collections, which are often curated by libraries or educational institutions such as the New York Public Library and the University of Toronto .

And then there’s the Wayback Machine which started it all! It allows you to capture snapshots of webpages. Hence the name it works like a time machine, allowing you to view past versions of websites or even those which are no longer online.

They also have a whole bunch of other projects, including one which allows users to borrow rare books from libraries and keep a 14-day e-book version. See https://archive.org/projects/ for more information.

How do they do it?
Although it may come as a surprise, the internet archive has a physical location. The physical (books and similar materials) and virtual archives (servers and digitization equipment) are located inside of a former Christian Science church.

Most of their work comes out of here, although they are known to often collaborate with other libraries/archives or acquire collections from different collectors.

How do I sign up?

If you would like to work for the Internet Archive at their physical location you could check out https://archive.org/about/jobs.php.

That being said, anyone can browse the archives* and you can start an account if you’d like to upload items of your own from anywhere in the world**. You heard right! All you have to do to contribute to the Internet Archive is sign up right from the comfort of your home.

So what are you waiting for? Become an Internet Archiver today! https://archive.org/account/signup

*Browsing certain material (generally sensitive or graphic content) might require you to sign in with a registered account.
**Using the WaybackMachine to make captures of websites won’t require a registered account.

Looking to discover other archiving communities? Just follow Data Horde’s Twitter List and check out our other Community Spotlights.