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I would agree that additional funds to initiatives like the IA and local equivalents targeted at resilience would be welcome, but: Current digital preservation
by 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 agoI 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.