Brewster isn't considered forward thinking because he's from San Francisco and worked on a startup. He's considered forward thinking because he's selflessly and tirelessly spent an enormous amount of time and money working to prevent a Lost Decade for human knowledge, while the rest of us (including me) were sitting around letting it erode away. I've met web researchers that have told me they sometimes spend 80% of their time on the Internet Archive. That's how bad the problem is, and how important it is that Brewster has worked to address it.
The Library of Congress, like every library in the world, needs to not only get serious about digitization of content and archival of web content, but also about providing access to that information for the public.
This not only requires the right kind of technology for data archiving (which the Internet Archive has developed and used successfully), but it also requires a step forward for the nature of things like HTTP, and how we federate and distribute data. With the right technology, we absolutely can and should archive as much information as we can to preserve our true history for future generations, not just the "New Books" section of Barnes and Noble.
I've been doing some work on that front, and Brewster was right there advocating for it (http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-...). When it comes to getting things done, I bias towards the people that show up to do the work. Brewster showed up, but I haven't seen any "digital library world" people around lately, except for when they tried to lock up Aaron Swartz for opening up JSTOR, a company making a profit off the public funding of research by locking the public out of the information it paid for. That's not the future of information, and that's not how things are going to be. All that is is a data cartel that's run out of ideas working to push out competition.
I think the only relevant question here is "does Brewster actually want the job?", but I think he's perfectly qualified for it, and there is not a single person on the planet that is better qualified for it.
Instead of content-free sarcasm, contribute constructively to the discussion by telling us what these organizations do, and what parts you think they do better or worse than IA.
Comments
Brewster isn't considered forward thinking because he's from San Francisco and worked on a startup. He's considered forward thinking because he's selflessly and tirelessly spent an enormous amount of time and money working to prevent a Lost Decade for human knowledge, while the rest of us (including me) were sitting around letting it erode away. I've met web researchers that have told me they sometimes spend 80% of their time on the Internet Archive. That's how bad the problem is, and how important it is that Brewster has worked to address it.
The Library of Congress, like every library in the world, needs to not only get serious about digitization of content and archival of web content, but also about providing access to that information for the public.
This not only requires the right kind of technology for data archiving (which the Internet Archive has developed and used successfully), but it also requires a step forward for the nature of things like HTTP, and how we federate and distribute data. With the right technology, we absolutely can and should archive as much information as we can to preserve our true history for future generations, not just the "New Books" section of Barnes and Noble.
I've been doing some work on that front, and Brewster was right there advocating for it (http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-...). When it comes to getting things done, I bias towards the people that show up to do the work. Brewster showed up, but I haven't seen any "digital library world" people around lately, except for when they tried to lock up Aaron Swartz for opening up JSTOR, a company making a profit off the public funding of research by locking the public out of the information it paid for. That's not the future of information, and that's not how things are going to be. All that is is a data cartel that's run out of ideas working to push out competition.
I think the only relevant question here is "does Brewster actually want the job?", but I think he's perfectly qualified for it, and there is not a single person on the planet that is better qualified for it.
So... CDL doesn't exist. LOCKSS doesn't exist. DPLA doesn't exist. HathiTrust doesn't exist. DuraSpace doesn't exist. Well, interesting.
Instead of content-free sarcasm, contribute constructively to the discussion by telling us what these organizations do, and what parts you think they do better or worse than IA.
As far as I can tell, from personal observations at conferences, IA is well aware of these other organizations, and is friendly with them.