Watch 'the unsung work of preserving the public record' in what one viewer calls 'the best livestream on YouTube'

Want to “watch democracy get scanned”?

As part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project to make government materials from around the world accessible online, the Archive is livestreaming daily from its scanning center in San Francisco, California, where its specialists scan, upload, and process all kinds of documents for public use — U.S. court documents, Canadian government documents, United Nations publications, and more.

The scanning operators are specifically working with documents on microfiche, “a flat sheet of film that holds dozens — sometimes hundreds — of miniaturized document images,” per the Internet Archive. “It’s been a common format for archiving newspapers, court documents, government records, and more since the 20th century.”

On the stream, an operator can be seen placing microfiche cards under a special camera that captures the details of each sheet on the card. The Internet Archive uses software to stitch the pages together, they’re formatted, and then they’re processed to become fully readable and searchable. Recently processed pages are shown on the left side of the screen and are immediately available in Democracy’s Library.

You can watch the archiving process — with a soothing “lofi archive radio” soundtrack — on the Internet Archive’s YouTube channel. (“This’ll make great background while I work on organizing my own media digitizations,” one viewer wrote. Another: “The best livestream on YouTube.”)