Slashdot Mirror
Internet Archive Needs Donations, Has Matching Donor
The Internet Archive curates an astounding collection (actually, a collection of collections) of online resources, from historically significant to modern but obscure. Storing, serving and organizing more than 10 petabytes isn't cheap, despite their ongoing efforts to innovate on that front. An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous donor is matching $3 for every $1 given (up to $450,000) until December 31. One petabyte has been paid for so far and the archive is looking at getting three more. 'These massive servers are the backbone of the Archive, and critical to our continued growth. To all of you who've contributed to our fundraising drive, thanks from all of us here at the Internet Archive. '"
Here's the link to donate just in case the editor's oversite would be enough to disuade you.
Should we support them despite their unwillingness to keep records for websites which later-on put a robots.txt on their domain?
I can understand recently archived material being removed, but when someone buys a domain down the line and puts a robots.txt on their new site, it removes ALL OF THE PAST MATERIAL! And it seems that Archive.org tends to ignore the problem.
I wonder where the national support is. They're basically doing the job of the Library of Congress, the British Library etc., in terms of being a record keeper of published material. You'd think those organisations (and there must be dozens and dozens of them throughout the world; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit) could each chip in a few thousand dollars a year, wouldn't you?
And they accept Bitcoin ( http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#311 ). They've received 686btc so far( http://blockchain.info/address/17gN64BPHtxi4mEM3qWrxdwhieUvRq8R2r ). Not bad.
I was recently involved in producing a feature length creative commons film. we wanted to make it available as a http download (as well as bittorrent and streaming via youtube). we used internet archive. its been downloaded over 25k times from them. finding a commercial host that could manage that would have cost a fair bit of money (which we don't have). so thanks archive.org, hope my donation helps.