[bluntfang]

It's good to note that there's a difference between archive and (big A) Archive, as a practice and discipline. As far as I can tell, Archivists (like, people who went to school to be an Archivist), don't really agree with Jason Scott's agenda and approach.

[lidHanteyk]

On one hand, sure, library science and forensic analysis are extremely important, and nothing lasts forever, especially without the care of curators. We aren't dismissing traditional nor classical archival methods, and they already have taught us much about how to do digital archiving. [0]

On the other hand, clearly the Internet Archive is a competent digital archiver, and they've earned the capital-A "Archive". They publish a larger digital commons than anybody else, I think, especially at the low low price of gratis.

It sounds like your entire complaint is in two points. First, that IA doesn't ask (much) permission, which is unsurprising. The history of libraries is not one of asking permission, but of simply doing it. The public has been convinced repeatedly, over the decades, that libraries are good for them, and this public support helps insulate librarians from corporate interests.

Second, that IA doesn't employ enough women. I can't help you with that, but you are free to improve yourself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

[toomuchtodo]

Why is going to school for a subject a proxy for competency? Jason works for the Internet Archive. Perhaps "archivists" might consider more real world experience versus academic exercises?

[bluntfang]

Archives aren't new. It's not like software engineering, where you can cowboy shit and and blaze new trails without giving thought to what others in the past have done.

Not to mention that Archives is historically a female dominated industry. This is a real world example of a loud, boisterous man "disrupting" an industry.

[toomuchtodo]

It is entirely the wild west, where you can "cowboy shit and blaze new trails without giving thought to what others in the past have done" [1]. Anyone can be a digital archivist, anyone can run an archive (object store, metadata management, distribution). If I had to compare it to another industry, it'd be newspapers. Barrier to entry is low now (command line, compute, storage), and anyone can do it. This will continue as storage continues to decline in cost, tools get better (disclaimer: I maintain some tooling in this regard), and software improves for capturing physical materials as digital representations.

If someone thinks they can do better, they are free to try. No one is gatekeeping their attempt. Help yourself to some storage & VMs and write some code. If you do better (regardless of gender), everyone benefits.

[1] It's not bad to be able to wild west it and cowboy shit in non-regulated industries, where someone's life safety, finances, etc aren't at stake. Two cents.

[textfiles]

Yee-haw.

[asimpletune]

Do you know more about what they think?

[bluntfang]

Here are some snippets from Archivists that are actively talking about this:

>1. Archiving isn't just capturing data or downloading it, it's making it available into the future. Without an intense amount of planning around that, the act of capturing is pointless.

>2. We don't need all of Yahoo Groups. We need a subset of Yahoo Groups. Choosing what, exactly, is worth keeping is called appraisal in the archives world - not like monetary appraisal but cultural appraisal.

>3. We also don't need all of Yahoo Groups because hoarding data long-term is terrible for the environment. Digital preservation is also terrible for the environment. So we should be extremely judicious about what digital content we choose to attempt to retain permanently.

>4. It's an incredible violation of privacy and doesn't align with the ethics of the archives profession to collect all that data without permission from the people involved, especially in the case of private groups. People should also have the right to be forgotten.

>It’s also part of a long-term pattern of IA (and this dude in particular) deciding to “archive” things that people have not given consent for—and, in some cases, have explicitly asked not to be preserved. There’s another gendered element here: IA tends to get tons of accolades and funding, and is largely seen as a group of do-gooder dudes just trying to preserve the internet. Meanwhile they routinely ignore or denigrate the work of librarians and archivists trained in digital preservation—professions that are overwhelmingly gendered as female.

>Plus Jason Scott is generally a dick to anyone who brings up any ethical qualms about their work (and he has a stupid hat in his avatar.)