> “...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.
I 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.
3.2km 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.
About 3 200 000 cm... That is actually surprisingly large number if you assign any number of centimetres for each.
You are of by a factor of 10.
You are off by one f.
There needs to be a global effort to backup the Internet Archive at this point.
Just need to find someone with ~220pb of storage and the ability to increase that by approximately 50% annually forever more.
Whenever 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.
I 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-donat...
[1] https://blog.archive.org/2019/12/10/preserving-the-legacy-of...
Tangential: 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!"
Wow, I'm seeing that as well.
Earlier today, I was seeing reports on Bluesky that it was down for a lot of people.
Possible 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=fet...
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?
I mean that gives nothing away, if someone compromised Ubuntu the OS they have a lot more targets than IA here.
I believe there was pressure on IA so that bigger corporate players of data hoarding could monopolize access.
The interesting question is why they aren’t expanding their archival storage space. What’s higher priority for any university archives than keeping dissertations?
These 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.
Wonder 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.
Presumably most of the dissertations produced at reputable universities would be valuable enough to keep at least 2 copies in storage.
When IPO?
off topic, b