The DLARC project is looking for contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections.
I think they have more material than probably anyone else in the world, but much of it is "offline" (partly digitized but not web accessible).
Another huge collection of historic QSL cards, bios of deceased radio amateurs and other stuff: http://hamgallery.com/
Amatuer radio seems full of little software tools to do calculations that are closed source. I hope the authors can be encouraged to publish source, or it will die with them.
This is a wonderful partnership to learn about. I hope that Internet Archive is successful here.
[1] https://lms.onnocenter.or.id/wiki/index.php?search=Amatir&ti...
https://worldradiohistory.com/
I would assume archive.org would just ask permission to hoover (mirror) it.
And many hundreds of books.
One day I was checking some manga books by ISBN on IA just out of curiosity. And for some reason, it put the ISBNs for all the volumes of a manga into one single entry (https://archive.org/details/isbn_1919979003907, check "ISBN" metadata section) and unsurprisingly, the actual content is only one volume, vol.43 (not even vol.1!). I have a feeling other volumes may exist somewhere there, but there is no way to search for them.
This isn't a one-off occurrence either, it reflects my experience for trying to find specific item there well, especially for non-English books.
Wikidata has a property for Internet Archive ID, so it wouldn't be conceptually hard to construct a parallel metadata store there, but it would involve hundreds of millions of triples so it's definitely "hard" in other senses.
I suggest that you check their RSS feeds to see how staggeringly high the rate of uploads is. That uploading is "frenetic" (in a good way of course) reveals where the focus is. For re-assessing and fixing the records a parallel team would probably be needed.
I would gladly help towards that: I never checked but maybe one can volunteer.
- History of W9YB http://c2.com/w4/yb/ (Purdue Amateur Radio Club)
Some quality stuff there.
However you can download the broken file, (eg "lpl.ra")
open it with a text editor, and extract the URL (eg http://home.att.net/~philys.la/lpl.ra)
And put that into the Internet Archive.
Woukd be a cool time capsule.
I found: (1) they recently removed KiwiFarms; (2) in 2020, they began labeling certain pages with "fact checks"; (3) they remove content by request of the site owner or by copyright complaint.
Of those, (2) seems the most political, but it's not removing content. Was there something else you had in mind?
I think that puritanism and archivism are not compatible.
They also removed ISIS stuff https://archive.org/post/1033012/constant-removal-of-isis-vi...
Removing evidence of war-crimes and disallowing future historians from accessing such content in the future is not a policy that I would expect from an archive.
An archive should have everything of what is being archived, legalese notwithstanding: The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, everything. E v e r y t h i n g . If it doesn't have everything, it's not an archive.
Will they reply to my emails? They will not. I'm so frustrated, they just IGNORE emails.
Don't support these clowns.
I have hints that they may be understaffed. If you had a little spare time, you could lend a hand to their legendary effort, and maybe contribute in fixing a few things such as your issue.
