With everything that’s happening there, I was wondering if it was possible. Obviously their size is massive, but I’m sure there’s a ton of duplicated stuff. Also some things are more important to preserve than others, and some things are preserved elsewhere (Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Z-Lib come to mind that could preserve books if the IA disappeared).
But how could things get archived from the IA (assuming it’s possible) on both a personal level (aka I want to grab a copy of that wayback snapshot) and on a more wide scale community level? Are there people already working on it? If not, what would be the best theoretical way to get started?
And what are the most important things in your opinion that should be prioritized if the IA was about to disappear and we only had so much time and storage to utilize?
Imo it’s probably not a good idea for another single entity to hold a copy of IA’s corpus. IA already operates on a shoestring but it still is expensive and labor intensive to operate, which requires an endowment or constant source of funding, both of which come with political entanglements. I just don’t think one org can be indefinite custodians of something so valuable.
A distributed technical solution may eventually be developed which enabled regular people to participate in storing and maintaining the corpus. I think IPFS was supposed to be this kind of solution but seems like the tech isn’t capable or mature enough (Anna’s archive abandoned IPFS for technical reasons and that’s a far smaller corpus). BTW IA has engagement with the dweb community and are interested in finding distributed solutions for storage of IA’s corpus.