The history of libraries is one of loss. The Library of Alexandria is best known for is disappearance.
Libraries like ours are susceptible to different fault lines:
Earthquakes,
Legal regimes,
Institutional failure.
So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, “lots of copies keep stuff safe.” This project will cost millions. So this is the one time of the year I will ask you: please make a tax-deductible donation to help make sure the Internet Archive lasts forever.
On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change.
For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions.
It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase.
Throughout history, libraries have fought against terrible violations of privacy—where people have been rounded up simply for what they read. At the Internet Archive, we are fighting to protect our readers’ privacy in the digital world.
We can do this because we are independent, thanks to broad support from many of you. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. Our mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs one of the top-250 websites in the world. Reader privacy is very important to us, so we don’t accept ads that track your behavior. We don’t even collect your IP address. But we still need to pay for the increasing costs of servers, staff and rent.
You may not know this, but your support for the Internet Archive makes more than 3 million e-books available for free to millions of Open Library patrons around the world.
Your support has fueled the work of journalists who used our Political TV Ad Archive in their fact-checking of candidates’ claims.
It keeps the Wayback Machine going, saving 300 million Web pages each week, so no one will ever be able to change the past just because there is no digital record of it. The Web needs a memory, the ability to look back.
If you find our work has been useful to you, please take a minute to donate whatever you can afford today. Help ensure the Internet Archive lasts forever. I promise you—It will be money well spent.
Dear archive.org
I have just received your email – probably because I have contributed to your maintenance before. I promptly proceeded to donate – not much but as much as I can afford (I live in Eastern Europe and am a low paid Doctoral Candidate so 1 USD – the amount I wanted to donate – is the cost of food for one day) and I was greeted by a disgusting pop-up implying that my donation was below a minimum amount and that I might be trying to test a stolen card.
Thank you very much for being so nice and considerate towards a person who decided to forgo food for a day to contribute to your cause.
Hey, I am not affiliated with the Internet Archive, and I don’t know the specifics of the implementation they use for donations, but this is a very common practice for organizations that solicit donations. This is for their legal protection, and declining small value transactions is harmful to non-profits, but not as harmful as costly litigation to defend themselves or the risk of losing access to their fundraising platforms due to fraudulent transactions.
I am going to make a contribution to the Internet Archive shortly, and will increase my donation by 10 USD to ensure that your intent was met, and out of appreciation for the effort, even though it didn’t work out for you.
I’m sorry that happened to you, tzigi. You tried to do a very generous thing.
I’m sure this is a situation where a large volume of small fraudulent donations would incur high transaction costs for archive.org.
I’m lucky enough to live in the US and have a high income. I will donate one average day of my food costs, and double it in your honor.
First of all I’m sorry this happened to you. Second, to be fair this *is* a common credit card scam tactic: test if the info you stole works with $1 somewhere it wouldn’t raise eyebrows, like an online donation drive. If so, make a huge purchase.
Tzigi: low donations to non profits is one way criminals verify that stolen cards work, without alerting the owners or banks. It’s sadly a necessary restriction to help prevent card fraud. I’ll donate a dollar for you.
PayPal and other companies that receive money for transactions or donations have a policy of higher amounts than a dollar for what they already told you, that popup doesn’t have anything to do with the internet archive. Theres lots of problems online with fake and stolen cards so try to understand why those companies have policies like that. If you can’t donate don’t worry but don’t make and issue for something that is standard procedure online.
Tzigi,
Please eat. I am worried for your health. That’s more important! I’ll donate that dollar for you.
Hi,
While I’m not affiliated with the Internet Archive, I’m sorry to hear about your experience. You should try bitcoin, which is a peer-to-peer payment system where no payment processors will interfere with and/or take a cut of your transactions. The Internet Archive accepts bitcoin donations.
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@tzigi: I suspect that the Internet Archive values your donation, and it’s a card payment processing company that puts that restriction there. They are often fussy about things. Perhaps?
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Great to see Motherboard picked this up: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-entire-internet-will-be-archived-in-canada-to-protect-it-from-trump
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Why are you building an “Internet Archive Canada” and not, say, an “Internet Archive Switzerland”? Or some other country in Europe? It adds more redundancy but unfortunately it increases travel time between datacenters. Also, it would be nice if you can provide torrents or direct downloads of parts of the Archive (such as an eBooks Torrent, an eBooks A-E Torrent, etc.) so others can help by ensuring that at least this data remains, even though it will not be searchable / queryable via your website.
Hi Manuela,
Great minds think alike! We offer all texts in many formats, including Torrents. So go for it across 9 million texts and 3 million e-books.
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If you registered as a charity in Canada it would be more appealing for us Canadians to donate.
The simplest way to do this, without incorporating in Canada, might be to convince the Government of Canada to donate money (in any amount): http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/chrts/plcy/cgd/cg-023-eng.html
The Archive would then have to show that it “carries on activities in the national interest of Canada” such as “the promotion or protection of Canadian values”. That should be easy enough: they provide various historical government documents for example.
Agreed. Meantime I’m going to make an ‘initial’ donation as an incentive to investigate getting a charitable status in Canada.
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tzigi,
I added a dollar to my donation for you. Please don’t be unhappy with Internet Archive. Credit card vendors get weird.
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What has the new administration proposed they’ll do to the Archive?
Forgive me if the question sounds asinine but I need help understanding what’s going to happen. Saying ‘radical change’ just makes me skeptical.
Thomas, just in case you’ve not heard, the president-elect and his spokespeople are literally every day making statements threatening constitutional rights such as freedom of speech, civil liberties, etc. That is a radical change from previous presidents.
Most likely Trump has never heard of the internet archive, but it is certainly prudent to prepare for the possibility that the new administration will oneday make some “proposal” that would impact on it. Obviously it will be too late to do anything about it after they’ve taken action, if the worst does happen. Hence the analogies to Alexandra etc.
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It’s good that IA is finally getting some redundancy. It’s also kind of funny (and sad), after all the post-election “I’m moving to Canada” jokes that our digital heritage actually does have to move to Canada to protect itself.
You wrote that “It keeps the Wayback Machine going, saving 300 million Web pages each week, so no one will ever be able to change the past just because there is no digital record of it. ” However, doesn’t the Wayback Machine currently apply robots.txt retroactively, meaning that anyone who currently controls a website can make the Internet Archive delete everything about the website from the past? Website domain names tend to change hands over time; how do you prevent digital records from being destroyed this way? Thank you.
Tony,
You’re correct. The current IA policy is to allow the current owner of a domain to use their robots.txt file to remove current AND past archives.
Policy:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/removal-policy.html
Discussion (there have been many):
https://archive.org/post/1019415/retroactive-robotstxt-removal-of-past-crawls-aka-oakland-archive-policy
I agree that this kind of torpedoes their argument that the Wayback Machine ensures “no one will ever be able to change the past.” I don’t know why they continue to maintain this policy, but I suspect that because they get critical funding from some big companies — and big companies are indeed interested in changing, or at least hiding, the past — they’re financially constrained from doing the right thing.
I wish they’d come out and say it, though. I bet the EFF would go to bat for them, and the publicity would certainly generate even more donations.
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This is ridiculous. Canada does not have the First Amendment, and although it has similar protections, they are less extensive and Canada has plenty censorship laws.
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Before going through with this, please seriously consider how Canada’s “hate speech” laws could impact the archive. Canada is generally a great country, but on this particular issue, it is not completely free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada
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Seems like a good idea. If you’re looking for locations consider Manitoba. Cheap land and electricity.
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