The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove (abc.net.au)

Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: A digital archive and research tool developed by the Australian National Archives may be the victim of upcoming budget cuts. Used by an estimated 70,000 users per day, the system may be eliminated thanks to a $20 Million (AUD) budget cut to the agency's budget. Since its 2009 launch, Trove has grown to house four million digitised items, including books, images, music, historic newspapers and maps. Critics of the cuts say that such systems should be considered national infrastructure because there's literally no replacement service.

Comments

National Library of Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Trove is a National Library of Australia project, not the National Archives of Australia.

Anti intellectual government.

[sg_oneill]

This should be no surprise to anyone watching the current conservative governments attack on research and academia in australia.

The world renowned CSIRO has been gutted with climate research all but abandoned along with oceanographic research, which is a *big problem* when your an island nation entrusted to the care of the dying barrier reef. The government has stripped funding out of education and universities, removed scientific advisors from all levels of government, and often replaced them with spiral eyed religious idiots who see more value in quoting the bible than quoting peer reviewed research.

And now they are going after the history archives.

Standard bureaucrat protection technique.

[thesupraman]

Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.

That is how these things usually go. Publicly funded hospitals always cut patient services before anything else, Schools increase staff/child ratios, Transport cuts services at peak times, etc.

The only thing worse is unionised public servants, who really are on the double-take, since there is little downside to their bosses paying them more as it is 'free' money, and they get the double whammy of working for a votes government, AND having union muscle.

Welcome to another facet of the bleeding dry of the working middle class.

Re:Standard bureaucrat protection technique.

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.

Disclaimer - I work in the Australian Public Service

As I understand it the prototype and early work on TROVE were funded from the NLA's own budget not as an NPP (New Policy Proposal).

TROVE has become part of the NLA's strategy (https://www.nla.gov.au/corporate-documents/annual-report/2014-2015/strategic-direction-two-make-the-librarys-collections-and-services-accessible-to-all), however the government have never decided to directly funded it and it doesn't appear Government feels it's an explicit part of the NLA's core mandate (the latest NLA KPI's I could find are here https://www.nla.gov.au/corporate-documents/annual-report/2014-2015/cross-agency-key-performance-indicators).

I personally find TROVE to be a valuable tool and feel that disbanding the group who update it's data is a poor decision. However, rightly or wrongly if you are cutting services as part of your Efficiency Dividend the projects that have a large cost and are not directly connected to a core KPI would have to be your first option, even if it does interfere with your current strategic plan.

Um, what else do you cut?

[rsilvergun]

Man am I sick of the myth of bureaucratic waste. Did it ever cross your mind that the reason cuts start in those places is that there were most of the cost is? There's this belief (instilled by right wing think tanks looking to gut the commons for their own profit) that there's this magic "waste" that can be cut without impacting the quality of service and life.

The worst words I've ever heard are "I'm from the gov't and I'm hear to help". It wasn't a man from the gov't saying those (one of those paid my friends insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes), it was a right wing politician looking to cut some billionare's taxes and pushing more bullshit austerity for everyone but themselves.

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[bloodhawk]

There is a massive amount of government waste, I see it everyday while working within various government departments. The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus. You have government employees with "safe" comfortable positions that don't mandate performance and have no consequences for lack of performance as they are heavily union protected, Their is massive Machinery of Government spending purely to reward ministers with bigger portfolios to match ego's (some of this spending is absolutely insane and how the fuck it is ever justified to spend X million just to make a ministers portfolio bigger is beyond me).

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[ultranova]

There is a massive amount of government waste, I see it everyday while working within various government departments.

And there's a massive amount of waste on the private sector too. I see it every day in all jobs but my own. The reason is that I only see the surface of those other jobs from the outside. Every single time I've tried to do one, I've found out that there simply isn't any better way to do it - any possible speedup requires taking risks or shortcuts which will come back to bite you.

The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.

It is ironic that the push for efficiency can lead to the opposite result. But the solution is not to push harder, but lighter. Let the department carry over their unused budget to the next fiscal year, and now they have an actual motive to save money because it's now "their" money - and it also means they can build up savings to use for emergencies and larger projects.

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[JoeMerchant]

Government waste is only exceeded by waste in successful corporations. Sure, little scrappy companies are fast, lean and efficient, but when a corporation reaches 10K employees and years of consecutive growth, take a look on the inside and see how many "Wally"s the place has, how much structural BS exists for no particular reason other than "that's how it's done here."

Government waste is continually scrutinized by the taxpayers, but when a corporation has been "exceeding shareholder expectations" for a decade or more - you'd be amazed at the colossal waste that goes on inside.

Re:Um, what else do you cut?

[Kjella]

The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.

A lot of it is dysfunction to combat dysfunction because if any process is delayed you can't say the $100k we budgeted for servers this year we'll need in February next year. Those money will go away and because you overbudgeted last year, we'll actually not just cut the $100k but we'll give you $150k less and you'll be stuck with extra old out of support servers because there was a delay in procurement. Sure, every company has to replan their portfolio and cancel projects sometimes. But they don't go nuclear every year and make every project and every department start over the allocation process.

The theory is of course that all the money will go back in a big pool and be spent where they're most needed. The reality is that when you've finally got approval to do something in one budget process, then no matter what you'd rather spend it than taking that fight all over again. I actually think you'd see much less waste in practice if you could get a spillover-account where you could have at most 10% of the budget but it's still "yours", sure more money would be stuck down in the system but it wouldn't accumulate and you could flex schedules more. It's the "use it or lose it" process that is the real problem.

Re: Happy Birthday to The United States of America

[Mostly a lurker]

How democratic the US may be in practice is a complex question. The biggest problem (greater than voter apathy) is the way the electorate is misinformed and manipulated.

When people face a hefty fine for not voting, as in Australia, it is not surprising that voter turnout is high,

Re:You are stupid, potch

[davester666]

I like the cow guy better. The moo'ing makes me feel more optimistic about how the day will go.

I'll host it for free

[h33t l4x0r]

If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M. And yes I realize we're talking about AUD.

Re:I'll host it for free

[AthanasiusKircher]

If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M.

Obviously you didn't read TFA. And I'm not sure the submitter who wrote the "summary" understood what it said either. A couple clarifications:

(1) The $20 million refers to budget cuts to a number of cultural institutions, which include the library. The library cuts are only one portion of this $20 million, and I'm assuming that this Trove thing is only a small portion of the total library cuts. The real problem, as explained in TFA, is that the library is cutting 22 staff positions.

(2) Now, you might say, "but why do they need 22 staff positions to maintain an online archive?" They don't. And that's the second misleading thing here: No one appears to be talking about eliminating the online archive completely. TFA explicitly explains that all they will do is cease to add new materials. Basically, the library has to eliminate staff due to budget cuts, so they can't afford to keep the people that ADD new stuff to this archive and update it:

Although Trove, which was launched in late 2009, is funded by the library's budget, without government funding the library will not be able to update the material in the database.

So there's no need (at least at this point) for people to go around offering to host or creating torrents or whatever.

TL;DR -- TFS is BS. NOBODY is talking about elimination of material already in the archive. Budget cuts may just prevent adding future materials.

Re: Happy Birthday to The United States of America

[ultranova]

How democratic the US may be in practice is a complex question. The biggest problem (greater than voter apathy) is the way the electorate is misinformed and manipulated.

This is the Age of the Internet. If the electorate is misinformed, it's because they choose to be. They aren't helpless victims but active participants in and consumers of deception. Voting based on fantasies or party identity is probably not going to end well, but the cause is lack of sanity, not lack of democracy.