Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Leigh Blackall <leighblackall AT gmail.com>]

back in 2006, when I was doing foundational work for the effort to get Otago Polytechnic into open educational practices, I interviewed Stewart Cheifet from the Internet Archive about his offer to digitise and store Otago Polytechnic content.

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/interview-stewart-cheifet-archiveorg-director-of-collections/

OP had films, slides, manuscripts, as well as out-of-copyright works, that needed to be digitised and put online, at a time when negotiations with the University's take over of the Polytechnic's library was not going well. Archive was willing to scan it all and put it online for free! Furthermore, if we set up a server, we could use Archive.org's CMS on it, so the files would remain in NZ but show up on Archive.org search.

This offer was beyond comprehension for our little kiwis and wasn't investigated further, nor by Otago University. It was simply ignored, and they went ahead and spent 100s of thousands on their own repository system, and the old artifacts remain unscanned (lost I suspect).

Today I work at La Trobe University, and still today most librarians are unaware of initiatives like Archive.org. talking with someone who attended a national conference on library repositories in Australia last week, such work is completely absent from their programs and discussions. I asked if the State Library of Queensland's decision to put all their out-of-copyright photographic collection onto Wikimedia Commons last year even got a mention - not even a whisper.

I think this, and many other things worth mentioning, is evidence of a serious problem in our institutions. NZ may have come along way since 2006, I don't know, but here in Australia ignorance, group think and parochialism seems as prevalent as always.

On Nov 29, 2012 7:20 PM, "Sutherland, Paul" <Paul.Sutherland AT ccc.govt.nz> wrote:

Hi

It is hard to know what is being asked here because the correspondent did not seem to do a basic google search to examine the landscape of the topic  being addressed before the rant.

a search such as "web archive new zealand"  http://goo.gl/Um4oD would bring up some key starting points
Wikipedia article List of Web archiving initiatives gives a rough global overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives>

New Zealand web archive
http://natlib.govt.nz/collections/a-z/new-zealand-web-archive <http://natlib.govt.nz/collections/a-z/new-zealand-web-archive>

Web harvesting
http://natlib.govt.nz/publishers-and-authors/web-harvesting <http://natlib.govt.nz/publishers-and-authors/web-harvesting>

It is worth noting
The Internet Archive is a key player in the global internet archiving area and other tools have been developed for selective harvesting., The National Library of New Zealand is a global leader in this field, along with national libraries around the world

Regardless of what you think of any aspect of the Kim Dotcom saga you must remeber copyright is a legal instrument to protect the owners of intellectual property who have chosen to use this tool for whatever reason.  MegaUpload facilitated the illegal duplication and sharing of copyright material.

To enable the NLNZ to legally collect websites etc the New Zealand legislation needed to be changed to enable this.

This enabled a programme and the creation of the National Digital Heriatge Archive.

You tax dollars working for you

I hope that helps to answer some of your questions

/paul





________________________________

From: cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Danyl Strype
Sent: Thu 29/11/2012 8:14 p.m.
To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion
Subject: [Cc-nz] Archiving the web for posterity



Kia ora koutou

Most of you will have heard of Archive.org (Internet Archive) and its
"Wayback Machine", which takes snapshots of websites and stores them,
like an archive storing issues of a newspaper on microfiche (I
remember learning to use a microfiche reader at school, and wondering
why anyone would store information in a way which was so ludicrously
difficult to access when it could be stored using computers - I didn't
know the half of it ;) This allows researchers, historians and other
interested people to look back for evidence in the published record,
without having to find a paper version in a physical archive, without
knowing in advance that they will need it (if you think you might want
a snapshot of a website for an academic citation, you can use
www.WebCitation.org).

The problem with the Wayback Machine though, is that it works pretty
much at random. Every now and then its 'robots' crawl your website,
making copies of the pages they can see.
Back in Web 1.0 prehistory, when websites consisted of an index of
flat HTML pages, which didn't change too often, this was fine. On a
web where some sites can change every second, and most sites are
actually complex server-side applications like G-Everything,
iEverything (patent pending), and MS Everything (look but don't
touch), using scripting languages like _javascript_, PHP, Python etc),
the Wayback Machine can only collect fragments and samples.

The Archive.org have attempted to solve this problem by offering a
site-specific archiving service for pages which are publicly
displayed. Archive-It allows webmasters to host their own archiving
robots, controlling what they can archive, and feeding the copies into
Archive.org:
http://www.archive-it.org/

Like Wikipedia, Archive.org is a USA-based, publicly-funded,
non-profit organisation. We can probably trust their motives, but we
certainly can't trust the neutrality of their government and its
enforcement machine, as the DotCom raids, and various other
copyright-based extradition attempts have shown (not to mention the
systematic attacks on WikiLeaks which US government "cyber-security"
agencies have either failed to investigate, or participated in). It
occurs to wonder if we have a publicly-funded digital archive doing
the same job for kiwi webpages that Archive.org does for those in the
US, using NZ-based servers which are "mirrored and striped" (across
multiple storage drives in multiple datacentres)? ArchivesNZ? National
Library? Digital NZ? Whose job is this, and is it getting done?

Hei kona
Strypey

--
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407
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