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by insom 36 days ago
That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)

This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.

Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.

IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.

I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
2 comments
Intralexical 36 days ago
Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.
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insom 36 days ago
Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.

For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.

For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.

On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.

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crossroadsguy 36 days ago
They use Slack? I am kind of surprised. But I am sure on the plus side, that would also mean having to worry about one less uptime.
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insom 36 days ago
Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!

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