More on manuals plus rescue

[Jason Scott]

On Aug 18, 2015 11:54 PM, "Brent Hilpert" <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

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
from collections of sermons and digitization of cassette tapes, to being
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.