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The Internet Archive takes over foreign dissertations from Leiden University
- varenc 2y ago> “...it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions” Am I reading this correctly and they have 3.2 kilometers of dissertations? What an interesting unit of paper archive size, though it makes sense.
- StrangeDoctor 2y agoI think linear bookshelf distance is a normal unit for talking about collections. At least as informative as number of books. Guessing 15 meters per bookshelf from photos, 214 bookshelves? doesn't sound as cool to me.
- Jtsummers 2y ago3.2km of linear storage space makes sense for books. You aren't just piling them up in stacks, where volume might be a useful measure, and you aren't putting them arbitrarily deep on the same row because that prevents access. You'll usually store things like this one book deep. If you have a 4-row shelf where you could have an 8-row shelf with the same width, each row 1m wide, you have 4m vs 8m of linear storage space.
- Ekaros 2y agoAbout 3 200 000 cm... That is actually surprisingly large number if you assign any number of centimetres for each.
- netrus 2y agoYou are of by a factor of 10.
- bedatadriven 2y agoYou are off by one f.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ratedgene 2y agoI believe there was pressure on IA so that bigger corporate players of data hoarding could monopolize access.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoThe interesting question is why they aren’t expanding their archival storage space. What’s higher priority for any university archives than keeping dissertations?
- eesmith 2y agoThese are dissertations from other universities, where the originating university still has a copy. > The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. ... The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy.
- hyperbrainer 2y agoWonder when the day will arrive when universities decide to offload all archives to online media only, just keeping the most important books and maybe unique manuscripts in libraries.
- slavik81 2y agoThat will be a sad day. One of the best books I checked out of the library during my graduate studies was a copy of "Wind Waves" from 1965 with handwritten corrections written in pen by some former student.
- sexysenpai69420 2y agotheir generation and propagation on the ocean surface?
- slavik81 2y agoYes, by Blair Kinsman. There are a few errors in the equations of the first edition. Minus signs that should be plus signs and things like that. My copy was stamped "University of Alberta" as the University of Calgary only became an independent institution in 1967. If you're interested in this topic, my second-favourite was Biology and the Mechanics of the Wave-Swept Environment by Mark W. Denny. The books are both good overviews of the subject of ocean waves and they have a folky charm that makes them quite enjoyable.
- sharpshadow 2y agoThere needs to be a global effort to backup the Internet Archive at this point.
- esskay 2y agoJust need to find someone with ~220pb of storage and the ability to increase that by approximately 50% annually forever more.
- sidewndr46 2y agoWhenever you have that much data stored how do you actually know the data is still there and can be retrieved? Even if you have absolutely insane connectivity to it at some point don't you run out of time to check it? Apparent 200 PiB at 1 GiB per second would take about 58254 hours to retrieve.
- danielheath 2y agoIt's not like it's all coming from one disk, or going to one single CPU. 20TB drives with 500mb/s sequential read are available today. Reading the whole disk takes about half a day. If your storage pod has 12 of those, even a $50 n100 CPU can run xxHash at 6gb / s (could probably even manage MurmurHash).
- tap-snap-or-nap 2y agoI won't even pretend to know how to begin with this type of project.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoCrawlers with jobs, building searchable indexes? Similar to youtube. Down at the source its blobs, but above it all floats a layers of tags, metrics and searchable text. That is what the searches run against and the preferences algo builds its lineup against?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jampekka 2y agoTangential: Archive.org is giving alert popup "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!"
- consumer451 2y agoWow, I'm seeing that as well. Earlier today, I was seeing reports on Bluesky that it was down for a lot of people.
- stebalien 2y agoPossible supply-chain "attack" (or demonstration, from what I can tell) on wherever they get their polyfill library? It's coming from: https://polyfill.archive.org/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=fetch%2CIntersectionObserver%2CResizeObserver%2CglobalThis%2CElement.prototype.getAttributeNames%2CString.prototype.startsWith%2CArray.prototype.flat%2CURL%2CURLSearchParams https://polyfill.archive.org/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=fet...
- TZubiri 2y agoPossibly unrelated. How can they elevate from a script injected in the frontend to the database of all users? Also, the vulnerability seems to be a domain overtake. But Archive is self hosting a static version of the dependency?
- jszymborski 2y agoOne way would might be to capture credentials for admin accounts if they have a "god mode".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 2y agoRelated DDoS at the moment as well https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844133492453671192 https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844133492453671192
- m3kw9 2y agoWhen IPO?
- fngjdflmdflg 2y agoI wonder if this is a large enough catalog for IA to fly out to the Netherlands to ship these in as they do with entire libraries: >We will be very accepting of materials that you will pack, ship and de-dupe, and we are more selective when we have to pay and coordinate. But we can do this and we have done so for many many collections of items we do not have. For full libraries our Away Team will travel to your location to pack and ship.[0] See also "Preserving the legacy of a library when a college closes."[1] [0] https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-internet-archive/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat... [1] https://blog.archive.org/2019/12/10/preserving-the-legacy-of-a-library-when-a-college-closes/ https://blog.archive.org/2019/12/10/preserving-the-legacy-of...
- Fraterkes 2y agooff topic, b
- n3uman 2y agohttps://blog.archive.org/2021/02/04/thank-you-ubuntu-and-linux-communities/ https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/04/thank-you-ubuntu-and-lin... They openly show a possible vector. "The Internet Archive is wholly dependent on Ubuntu and the Linux communities that create a reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech), rapidly evolving operating system. It is hard to overestimate how important that is to creating services such as the Internet Archive." Maybe CUPS?
- asynchronous 2y agoI mean that gives nothing away, if someone compromised Ubuntu the OS they have a lot more targets than IA here.
- pentamassiv 2y agoMy dad's PhD is listed on Google scholar, but not digitalized. Although I never read it (I don't understand it) I would like it to get preserved. All universities should provide digital copies of their students bachelor's and masters thesis as well as PhDs. Data storage is so cheap these days
- samspenc 2y agoI'm guessing most recent dissertations have been digitized, but this is probably the norm only in the last 10-15 years? Most universities likely have never given thought to digitize anything from before then due to the extra costs that would be involved in digitizing those physical copies. I am curious how much such an effort would cost though.
- not2b 2y agoEverything was digital at UC Berkeley back in the early 1990s and before.
- Cheer2171 2y ago> Everything was digital at UC Berkeley back in the early 1990s and before. I can't believe I have to say this, but not every university is UC-Berkeley. Digitization isn't free and requires specialized labor and technology. And are you really saying that in the late 1980s, all dissertations were submitted digitally? In what format?
- not2b 2y agoI should have qualified this with "the engineering departments at UC Berkeley". Everything we put out (papers, technical reports, open source software) was on the Internet. Formats were varied; LaTeX and Postscript were commonly used. PDF a bit later.
- cycomanic 2y agoWhile PhD theses are typically quite straight forward, i.e. at many (most) universities a PhD needs to be a proper publication often with an associated IBAN and with a copyright licence assigned to the University (or at least a number of hard copies given to the University library), masters and bachelor theses differ considerably. Often the copyright fully belongs to the students, they are not required to be published (often even are not supposed to be, as they were done at some industry partner, or results have not been published in journals yet due to time constraints...). So it's legally not that easy for universities to publish or even archive them especially in retrospect.
- ysofunny 2y agosomebody really wants to cause digital scarcity in direct opposition to digital abundance my guess is they are people who mistake the fact that scarcity amplifies value with the idiot idea that scarcity creates value and also these are entities holding on to a way to do business, publishing, and media that made sense back when the internet wasn't around
- Daviey 2y agoThe British Library which is responsible for hosting our PhD's has been offline for a year following a cyber attack. It's really frustrating how long it is taking them to bring it back, and would really value IA having an archive.
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoThat long is a indicator of permanent damage? aka they had one copy and its encrypted and they hope to keep it lowkey..
- jll29 2y agoThis is an amazing trove of human knowledge - if made digitally accessible, the titles should be on a Web page and the references crawled by Google Scholar. We should eventuall OCR all that stuff to use it to train LLMs. Seen from that commodity perspective, it has financial value. Unfortunately, human species is pretty bad at long-term archiving of digital assets. Good luck to the Internet Archive - they have had their share of recent troubles, and I hope their continuation is secure. Imagine the struggle, sweat and suffering that went into these 3.2 kilometers of shelf space; actually, only someone who has done a Ph.D. can probably appreciate that.