> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
What I don't understand is after all why know about Whiteness and Eurocentrism that people would still willingly create and fund projects like this. The public might actually make sense, but B2B/B2G makes none beyond these orgs having the power to prevent others from doing 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?
The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!
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.
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
If tpb dot org can still exist ...
At least these people tried. We need a p2p archive solution ASAP. Before our history is entirely re-written.
No one has cracked this one yet.
The internet itself is the thing we want.
We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.
The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.
It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.
I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.
The easiest way to see the dots is to:
1. Stop trying to make money
2. Tally the things that cost money
3. Amortize the upkeep over time
E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.
Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.
https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/
https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports
Third-party attempt:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.