The Presidio Trust is a unique organization. It is a federal agency guiding the transformation of a former military post into a self-sufficient national park. The documents added to the Internet Archive record the steps in this evolution.

The main collection includes documents pertaining to building and landscape rehabilitation, planning, environmental and historic compliance, and efforts to convey the history of the Presidio of San Francisco. Among the reports are guidance documents such as the Presidio Trust Management Plan, the Vegetation Management Plan, and the Presidio Trails and Bikeways Master Plan. Environmental assessments and environmental impact statements are included, as well as year-end reports and financial statements.

The remediation collection documents the environmental cleanup of materials left at the Presidio by the U.S. Army. It includes the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) documents transferred by the U.S. Army to the Presidio Trust in August 1999, as well as reports created since that time.

Learn more by perusing the Presidio Trust collection here.

–Barbara Janis, MLIS
Library and Records Manager
Presidio Trust

If you wander into your local bookstore or library within the next week, it’s likely you will see a shrine of sorts to banned books. Those who ban books work to lock up particular controversial writing from readers, but an equally as strong and passionate force works to keep these books freely available. Enter: Banned Books Week.

Banned Books Week is held during the last week of September in order to bring light to banned and challenged books. This week serves to celebrate the freedom to read what you want and to continue in a forceful march to keep writing available to all of the public. So, from September 26 to October 3, there will be efforts all over the country to bring banned books to the forefront–to showcase them as worthy, safe, and accessible works.

Internet Archive offers a collection of banned books in this collection to get you ready for the week. Some of the most famous banned books are highlighted below:

The Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm
The Jungle
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
O Pioneers!
Black Beauty
The War of the Worlds

Read through these classics and crack your Ginsberg, Rowling, Nabakov, or Steinbeck this week. Celebrate your freedom to read, because unfortunately some of our best writers have been sanctioned to book prison.

–Cara Binder

“To support writers, editors, researchers, and historians during the Great Depression, the United States government created a program called The Federal Writers’ Project as part of the Works Project Administration, under FDR’s New Deal. The most famous works coming out of this project include the state travel guides, which have been archived within the Prelinger Library.”

Thumb through some of these guides to see how much is still relevant, and hit the road with the FWP in your pocket.

Here’s New England: A Guide to Vacationland
New Orleans City Guide
California: A Guide to the Golden State
Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State
A South Dakota Guide
Philiadelphia: A Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace
Mississippi: A guide to the Magnolia State

–Cara Binder

There’s a chance that in the 1990s, you were more familiar with neighborhoods on GeoCities than with the neighborhoods in your own town. As one of the most popular and oldest (nearly 15 years running) sites for self expression on the web, GeoCities paved the way for other sites which would offer a sense of community and networking capabilities. Because it was one of the first ways for people to freely and openly become engaged with the internet, GeoCities will always be an important part of web history.

Yahoo! announced that it will close the site on October 26, 2009, steering users towards their paid service instead. We have been archiving GeoCities sites for years in our crawls, but, as goes with the territory of being web archivists, we want to make sure to gather as many of the pages as possible before the looming end of an era, 10-26-2009. If you have a page with GeoCities or are a fan of a particular page, please use our special collections page to ensure its preservation. Additionally, please refer to another independent project, the Archive Team, who is working to save cultural information that may be lost with the site closing. Yahoo! is also offering valuable advice at their help center.

–Cara Binder

These days, a good drive-in theater is a relatively rare gem to find. Although many have recently been resurrected and a DIY drive-in movement has even occurred, a drive-in is still often seen through nostalgic eyes rather than considered to be an everyday venue for movie screening. The collection of Drive-In movie ads that is on Internet Archive can bring you back to a time when you could watch a movie from the comfort of your car, visit the snack stand at intermission, and hang speakers from your car window.

Take a peek at some of the films shown during intermission:

Now go get yourself a snack, refrain from PDA, and visit your place of worship on Sunday.

–Cara Binder

It’s likely you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), that time in November when it’s starting to get cold and hundreds of people make a pact together to write a novel in the period of one month. Many fail, some succeed, some get published, and some of the work is actually really good (which begs the question, “Did you really write this in one month, or have you been cheating all year?”).

Well, it was news to me that there is now NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). As November seems like the ideal month to cuddle up by the fire and furiously write a novel in a month, July seems just as fit to grab your laptop, go to an outdoor cafe and write a blog. The deal is you have to blog once a day for a month, but just as not everyone finishes their novel by December 1, not everyone who celebrates NaBloPoMo will blog each day in July. You’re still allowed to celebrate all things blog. And (technically speaking) this runs all year long, so have fun with it!

Here’s a round up of some of our favorite library blogs to keep you satiated during the last couple weeks of NaBloPoMo:

For a very extensive collection of library blogs, check out the blogging libraries wiki.

Happy blogging!

–Cara Binder

Seems as though everyone is on Twitter these days. We’ve been testing it out since about February and are finding it to be a fun way to connect with our users–to share particularly exciting items on the Archive, update you about current changes in our organization, and share articles and media pieces that we think may be of interest to our audience.

So hop on the Twitter board. What used to be seen as a a medium for people with too much time on their hands has proved itself to be a powerful way to interact. Of course, we have to practice expressing all of our thoughts in 140 characters or less.

Follow us! Internet Archive’s Homepage

–Cara Binder

We now support the new [[video]] HTML tag when viewing movies from our site.

You’ll need Firefox v3.5+ (full or beta release) or Safari v4+ for us to show you a “try the new [[video]] tag” section under the “click to play” video area.

You can even persist a choice to always use it on our site (by us setting a cookie for you) (and you can change your mind and go back to the normal flash plugin based option).

-Tracey Jaquith

We are now rolling out a “beta” feature where users can click on the thumbnails for a given video (to see the still frames) and now click on a thumbnail to jump right into that scene of the video!

-Tracey Jaquith

Our flash-based player will now allow for folks to click anywhere on the timeline to have it quickly seek the film to the indicated position (previously users would have to wait for the video to download/pre-buffer up to that point first).

–Tracey Jaquith