On 2015-Aug-18, at 6:58 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
On 8/18/15 6:35 PM, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
IA
saturates the channel. Jason and IA are deliberately working to redirect all search
traffic to IA from the original mirrors by constantly creating useless 'new'
content that
Google thinks is real.
I have watched over time as the volume of Google top search hits have migrated to IA
hosted
content from the mirrors.
I have occasionally stumbled into the bitsavers stuff on
IA and was just confused and perplexed about what the IA guys are trying to do. Bitsavers
has a perfectly obvious and navigable layout; IA makes no sense at all.
I just went to IA to see what all of the fuss was about.
I can sum up what I saw in one word. Yech!
I agree with Tim, what IA is doing makes no sense.
...
Similarly, having gone and looked at IA, I can understand why Al is peeved.
While the IA pages do mention and give some attribution to bitsavers it none-the-less
comes across as a Jason Scott / IA effort.
The documents are prominently labeled as "uploaded by Jason Scott". Yes,
it's good in an archive to document who did what when, but "uploaded" ? . .
No. They were copied from bitsavers by Jason Scott. It's not the same thing.
On the IA web pages and in JS's blog, one is left with the impression that while
bitsavers has been doing the scanning, these documents are generously being made available
to you the net user thanks to the efforts of Jason Scott / IA. In reality, all JS/IA are
doing is presenting an alternative interface to a copy of a pre-existing and
already-net-accessible archive (and apparently without the consent of the people who went
to the effort of creating that archive).
As I see it, JS/IA are absconding with someone else's efforts.
In regards to someone else's message on this topic, the 'copies' that JS/IA
are making by copying over the net are not comparable to the 'copies' that AK/CHM
are making in collecting, scanning paper documents, and doing media recovery of old
digital media.
Perhaps a second form of interface to bitsavers is something to be considered, however
from a functional perspective at this time, I'll be sticking with the bitsavers
interface.
If JS wishes to proceed with this, and is sincere in his open message on the list to Al,
he should take the IA interface down and get Al's consent and agreement as to
attribution and presentation before putting anything back up. If he doesn't get that
consent, too bad - there are plenty of other backup/mirror archives of bitsavers, the
material is not in danger of being lost.