I with there was a word stronger than love for what I feel about archive.org. It's one of the amazing promises of the Internet come true.
If I have one criticism of archive.org it's that things are impossible to find, even if you know they have them - this redesign doesn't solve this problem.
I think the principle problem is that what should be a meta-layer on the organization, the provenance of a collection of stuff, is often used just as often as an organizational scheme as media and subject type.
And example. I'm looking to see if they have "A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes" by Marion Harris Neil. Where would you suppose this book would be?
If I go to "eBooks and Texts" I'm simply met with a wall of collections, none of which are subject area organized, is it under Microfilm, or Canadian Libraries? Boston Library Consortium? Who knows? I'll never find it by browsing and the way books are collected is pretty much useless. Unless I know there's a copy under "Canadian Libraries" I'll probably not find it.
Sure I can search for it, "A calendar of dinners" gives me 3 results! Turns out it's buried under the following Archives:
"Toronto Public Library", "The Library of Congress", "Cornell University Library". Notice that none of these are the crumbtrail I used to find it the first time on accident (Canadian Libraries)!
How about Omni Magazine? Is it a "Text"? I'm not sure, even today. I do know if I go to texts and search all texts for "Omni" I get it back. But it's part of "The Magazine Rack" and "Additional Collections" which I still have not figured out how to just navigate to.
These are just texts, video, audio and other media types are similarly hard to navigate and find stuff. There's little pleasure in browsing archive because if you find something, it'll be by accident, not because you navigated to some pocket of cool stuff.
Good luck seeing what SF books they have and browsing it. That's actually a collection I'd care about.
I also like old radio shows, and those are scatter shot all over the site. Unless somebody basically just uploaded an entire series at once, good luck piecing it together.
Right now, about the only way I know something is on archive.org is because the person who uploaded the item mentions it on a podcast or something.
I'm almost tempted to just start a meta-website of some sort to start organizing stuff I care about to that other people like me can find it.
It's kind of a mess, and it's given me a lot more respect for what librarians have largely solved in the physical world.
Interestingly enough, at the open house last night they talked about how they want to shift focus a bit and make it easier for people to do exactly that. They've gotten really good at storing things, and at digitizing them, and now they need to be better at letting people curate and organize collections.
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.
> 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.
If I have one criticism of archive.org it's that things are impossible to find, even if you know they have them - this redesign doesn't solve this problem.
I think the principle problem is that what should be a meta-layer on the organization, the provenance of a collection of stuff, is often used just as often as an organizational scheme as media and subject type.
And example. I'm looking to see if they have "A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes" by Marion Harris Neil. Where would you suppose this book would be?
If I go to "eBooks and Texts" I'm simply met with a wall of collections, none of which are subject area organized, is it under Microfilm, or Canadian Libraries? Boston Library Consortium? Who knows? I'll never find it by browsing and the way books are collected is pretty much useless. Unless I know there's a copy under "Canadian Libraries" I'll probably not find it.
Sure I can search for it, "A calendar of dinners" gives me 3 results! Turns out it's buried under the following Archives:
"Toronto Public Library", "The Library of Congress", "Cornell University Library". Notice that none of these are the crumbtrail I used to find it the first time on accident (Canadian Libraries)!
How about Omni Magazine? Is it a "Text"? I'm not sure, even today. I do know if I go to texts and search all texts for "Omni" I get it back. But it's part of "The Magazine Rack" and "Additional Collections" which I still have not figured out how to just navigate to.
These are just texts, video, audio and other media types are similarly hard to navigate and find stuff. There's little pleasure in browsing archive because if you find something, it'll be by accident, not because you navigated to some pocket of cool stuff.
Good luck seeing what SF books they have and browsing it. That's actually a collection I'd care about.
I also like old radio shows, and those are scatter shot all over the site. Unless somebody basically just uploaded an entire series at once, good luck piecing it together.
Right now, about the only way I know something is on archive.org is because the person who uploaded the item mentions it on a podcast or something.
I'm almost tempted to just start a meta-website of some sort to start organizing stuff I care about to that other people like me can find it.
It's kind of a mess, and it's given me a lot more respect for what librarians have largely solved in the physical world.