On 2015-Aug-18, at 6:58 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote: 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.

On Aug 18, 2015 11:54 PM, "Brent Hilpert" <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote: redirect all search useless 'new' content that migrated to IA hosted 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. peeved. none-the-less comes across as a Jason Scott / IA effort. 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. 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). 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. considered, however from a functional perspective at this time, I'll be sticking with the bitsavers interface. 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. I'll respond in a high level to your points. Before January of this year, the Internet Archive had a completely different user interface. Redesigning its back end from the ground up, this interface went live in January and has been continually updated based on feedback and improvements. Some of the aspects you mention, such as the uploader's name being incredibly prominent, and the issues in determining the provenance of the scanning of the documents, definitely changed under the new interface. That said, many of the issues were extant when the Internet Archive bitsavers mirror was first being worked on, back in 2011, four years ago. I don't know where you're getting the impression that on my blog I claim any sort of major hand in bitsavers. I talk about the bitsavers collective and the incredible work they've done. Again, three or four years ago I was given the impression that Al didn't want his name quite as prominent in copying documents. I'm happy to go review the mail conversations, if it comes to that. My main point of my response stands, however. None of these are insurmountable problems. It has been literally years that they have been up. In working to host things at the archive, many other people have sent requests for changes in verbiage, attribution, licensing, linking, and everything else. I've been involved in hundreds of projects, everything handed Betamax tapes and asked to turn them into viewable versions online. Nobody has had trouble communicating with me or working with me to have the attribution, impression, or presentation tweaked. I had to hear that there was any sort of problem by a particularly over active person forwarding a general insult about me from the chat box. It then took until now to find the source of the insult, months after I wrote to Al. This is silly. I reiterate what I said in my message on here: I'm available anytime to talk with Al and Jay about what they want to do.

There is currently a design and programming team looking to improve and redo the search interface. I've been seeing their design approaches go by on the internal channels as they revise it. I'm not sure when it all goes live, but an improved and more directed search is absolutely in the plans. On Aug 18, 2015 11:28 PM, "Jay Jaeger" <cube1 at charter.net> wrote: