So, after really getting into the lowdown of archiving, I’m thinking. I need to find a really good community that is focused on that more general subject, archiving. 68kMLA, they’re a pretty good community but they’re focused on Macintoshes in general, and the historic world is bigger than just the Macintosh, we know. So, I’ve felt that the Internet Archive got pretty good momentum behind it in building such an digital archival community of the future that I’ve been looking for, and they have some sort of connection with the broader community when it comes to the process for uploading digitized books. So, surely, they have a plenty good forum around there for me to go looking.
Okay, so I’ve found something. Alas, my feeling, upon entering… this is a forum inundated by “noobs”! This is all about basic customer support questions, I can’t get this book to work, why do I see this issue when visiting this URL, there’s a bug here and there. Yeah, sure, we absolutely need a good discussion place for that kind of interaction. But, again, this goes back to teamwork versus group-work, this is clearly an area that hyper-manifests the individualized mode of working together, ultimately the primary reason why most people come is to solve some kind of personal problem.
20200704/DuckDuckGo internet archive community forum
20200704/https://archive.org/iathreads/forums.php
20200704/https://archive.org/post/1108514/welcome-to-us-petabox
20200704/https://web.archive.org/web/20130813145128/http://searchfun.in/
What I’m looking for is something where the community is trying to achieve something bigger, like build a globe-spanning shared base of technologies.
Nevertheless, on some areas of the forum, you see pockets of really helpful and valuate individuals, like here the example.
20200704/https://archive.org/post/428113/found-on-community
But, along the way, I did find this interesting information about how the Internet Archive Wayback Machine costs to run, purportedly about a million dollars a month.
20200704/https://archive.org/post/1084803/how-much-archiveorg-monthly-operating-cost
20200704/https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767
Okay, looking a little deeper on their website, maybe forum isn’t the place to look, how about volunteering? Okay, now we’re making progress. Here they have a GitHub repository for their online digital library, Open Library, yeah that’s better, but looking around first thing, I see the development experience is troubled. You have to access a centralized dev-uat server for testing that has quirks? Oh, come on, can they somehow make it like a Docker container of a sort, in any way?
20200704/https://archive.org/about/volunteerpositions.php
20200704/https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
The Internet Archive Emergency Lending Library? That was taken down after big publishers banded together and filed a class action lawsuit. The problem was the switch-over compared to their original configuration, to open it up to the whole public, rather than invite-only registered members, and allow downloads to an unlimited number of devices, rather than to a limited number of devices.
20200704/https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/topic/22753-activists-rally-to-save-internet-archive-as-lawsuit-threatens-site/
20200704/https://onehack.us/t/internet-archive-kills-its-free-digital-library-over-copyright-concerns/91667
Yeah, there’s also a flip-side to the community uploads feature of the Internet Archive. Here, the problem is that there are a few bad actors here and there that are uploading illegal copies of modern copyrighted works disguised as music that ceded into the public domain. Be careful.
20200704/https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/internet_archive_downloads_legal