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Targeting a nation's own web presence cannot capture as complete picture as IA. For example, discussions about minor languages that are vanishing are often Engl

by Xen9 2y ago

Targeting a nation's own web presence cannot capture as complete picture as IA. For example, discussions about minor languages that are vanishing are often English. In addition, IA does not only do archiving of the inernet; it's rather an archive ON the internet that scans, digitalizes & organizes tons of material. Now, notice that the budget of many of these projects are X billions: https://www.ne-mo.org/cooperation-funding/funding-opportunities https://www.ne-mo.org/cooperation-funding/funding-opportunit... Putting a 100 million EUR into an European IA backup would be more cost effective than any of these projects. Alternatively or additionally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis... Wikipedia could actually also probably – being dependent on IA – invest 50M into the project. In fact, this would probably do more what the donations were meant to do than anything else they could do with the ("excess") funds. Truth to be spoken, NSA probably has an IA backup. But it still sort of drives me insane to know that political change or natural catastrophes could lead to loss of public access to the IA. No one seems to care about IA enough except IA itself.

deleted 2y ago
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mellosouls 2y ago
I would agree that additional funds to initiatives like the IA and local equivalents targeted at resilience would be welcome, but: Current digital preservation projects are likely a tiny fraction of that 100 million on national levels and will include additional activities like those you ascribe to the IA, but carefully attuned to each nation's priorities while collaborating internationally with each other including organisations in the USA like the IA. Importantly, they will also be operating strictly according to national and intra-national legislation (which IA has gotten into severe trouble within the USA). In the context of a complicated international environment with many different local political, cultural, commercial and other factors, it's difficult to see how your proposal to replace local projects with an IA backup would be either more cost effective or legally practical. The Internet Archive is inspirational and does a terrific job, but canning the many disparate entities that do national equivalents on much more limited budgets in favour of moving those funds to the IA (or any other global corporation or organisation) would risk invoking the classic problems of centralisation with associated detrimental effects on local requirements.
- Xen9 2y ago
  I agree that politics complicate things, though at some point it becomes a question of courage and not legislative-political succintiveness. I am not sure if you opened the link I gave. It seems the budget in EU is particularly high. I don't believe the optimal solution would be to move anything to IA: in fact, a separate legal entity would be much better option due to decreased legal risks. This only needs to be updated perhaps once or twice a decade, or even less.

by Xen9 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 2y ago

I would agree that additional funds to initiatives like the IA and local equivalents targeted at resilience would be welcome, but: Current digital preservation projects are likely a tiny fraction of that 100 million on national levels and will include additional activities like those you ascribe to the IA, but carefully attuned to each nation's priorities while collaborating internationally with each other including organisations in the USA like the IA. Importantly, they will also be operating strictly according to national and intra-national legislation (which IA has gotten into severe trouble within the USA). In the context of a complicated international environment with many different local political, cultural, commercial and other factors, it's difficult to see how your proposal to replace local projects with an IA backup would be either more cost effective or legally practical. The Internet Archive is inspirational and does a terrific job, but canning the many disparate entities that do national equivalents on much more limited budgets in favour of moving those funds to the IA (or any other global corporation or organisation) would risk invoking the classic problems of centralisation with associated detrimental effects on local requirements.

Xen9 2y ago
I agree that politics complicate things, though at some point it becomes a question of courage and not legislative-political succintiveness. I am not sure if you opened the link I gave. It seems the budget in EU is particularly high. I don't believe the optimal solution would be to move anything to IA: in fact, a separate legal entity would be much better option due to decreased legal risks. This only needs to be updated perhaps once or twice a decade, or even less.