> Of course, as it stands anyone can make a website of their own that links to and/or embeds anything stored in the archive, but I gather that hasn't happened often.
Yeah, and I've even debated it enough to think about doing it myself. For me at least, it feels kind of wrong to just put up a site that curates and organizes somebody else's collection. I'd also be worried about going through the effort and then having archive.org change the link-to urls or rules or whatever (even though they're a benevolent organization) and then have to go through all the effort again.
It really is a lot of work to find stuff on archive, even when you know it's there.
And again I attribute that to too much effort to keep track and give credit for the provenance of an item rather than organizing it in a reasonable way. As much as I'm glad that the Universal Library (Million Books Project) donated their work, it doesn't do anything for me as a user when I'm trying to find the Collected Stories of William Faulkner.
I think a better way would be to categorize the archive like any other library, and then for each individual work, provide alternative scans/recordings/transcriptions, etc. and a link to the donating organization that goes to a page that then gives you links to everything they donated.
But honestly, it's a fairly mild inconvenience. Most of the stuff they host is fairly long-dwell. Once I find a book or whatever, I'll be tied up with it for quite a few days and don't need to be bouncing all over their site several times an hour.
Yes, probably they need to simply talk about this possibility more, or more prominently.
If you already know what you're looking for, then feel free to simply search for it; you don't have to browse through the categories it might be in, or the subjects it ought to be listed in, or any of that. Likely the only reason why it isn't in the places you looked is just that nobody has gotten around to applying the right metadata to it. This is simply a fact of life; there are millions (or billions, if you squint a little) of items in the archive, and most of them don't have all the metadata that they ought to have.
I wouldn't worry about stepping on their toes by organizing things better. It's not actually a collection until someone organizes and curates it; until that happens it's just a pile of stuff. IA has always operated on the assumption that it's ok to just have a pile of stuff if the alternative is to have nothing at all. Given the size of the pile there's no way they could ever organize everything themselves, even assuming that there's one obvious right way to organize things.
Yeah, and I've even debated it enough to think about doing it myself. For me at least, it feels kind of wrong to just put up a site that curates and organizes somebody else's collection. I'd also be worried about going through the effort and then having archive.org change the link-to urls or rules or whatever (even though they're a benevolent organization) and then have to go through all the effort again.
It really is a lot of work to find stuff on archive, even when you know it's there.
And again I attribute that to too much effort to keep track and give credit for the provenance of an item rather than organizing it in a reasonable way. As much as I'm glad that the Universal Library (Million Books Project) donated their work, it doesn't do anything for me as a user when I'm trying to find the Collected Stories of William Faulkner.
I think a better way would be to categorize the archive like any other library, and then for each individual work, provide alternative scans/recordings/transcriptions, etc. and a link to the donating organization that goes to a page that then gives you links to everything they donated.
But honestly, it's a fairly mild inconvenience. Most of the stuff they host is fairly long-dwell. Once I find a book or whatever, I'll be tied up with it for quite a few days and don't need to be bouncing all over their site several times an hour.