https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in:8443/jspui/browse?type=ti...
I can't believe I have to say this, but not every university is UC-Berkeley. Digitization isn't free and requires specialized labor and technology.
And are you really saying that in the late 1980s, all dissertations were submitted digitally? In what format?
I'm not sure that is healthy, not for undergraduates. I'm all for open access to knowledge, but I question how much knowledge is actually in the average undergraduate thesis. I think a greater danger exists in people being held to things they said while an undergraduate student.
Famously, some of the stuff written by president Obama while he was a law student at Harvard has not been released, nor should it be. We shouldn't hold people for a lifetime to the incorrect, dangerous, or just outright silly stuff they might have said in a papers when they are new to a subject. Putting undergrad work into a perpetual public archive would also have a chilling effect amongst young students who should be enjoying academic freedom. I cannot remember 99% of the stuff I wrote as an undergraduate, but I know that somewhere in there is something horrible that I am glad to have forgotten.
My bachelor's thesis was pretty terrible and there probably is not much to learn from it for an expert. It would have been helpful to me to read other peoples thesis when I was a student though and maybe that would have led to a better outcome.
At least here in Germany, a lot of the funding to do the research comes from the government. As a tax payer, I'd like to be able to know the outcome of the research. I am sure there are some real gems in there too.
If a student has reasonable concerns, I would be fine with it not getting published. I believe that the default should be that it gets published.
Am I reading this correctly and they have 3.2 kilometers of dissertations? What an interesting unit of paper archive size, though it makes sense.
Yeah, pretty affordable.
I think it would be best to put it on AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive for about 2.5 million dollar per year.
20TB drives with 500mb/s sequential read are available today. Reading the whole disk takes about half a day.
If your storage pod has 12 of those, even a $50 n100 CPU can run xxHash at 6gb / s (could probably even manage MurmurHash).
>We will be very accepting of materials that you will pack, ship and de-dupe, and we are more selective when we have to pay and coordinate. But we can do this and we have done so for many many collections of items we do not have. For full libraries our Away Team will travel to your location to pack and ship.[0]
See also "Preserving the legacy of a library when a college closes."[1]
[0] https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
[1] https://blog.archive.org/2019/12/10/preserving-the-legacy-of...
> The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. ... The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy.
I think people underestimate just how much it takes to archive everything that is released in the information age.
> Libraries began using microfilm in the mid-20th century as a preservation strategy for deteriorating newspaper collections. Books and newspapers that were deemed in danger of decay could be preserved on film and thus access and use could be increased. Microfilming was also a space-saving measure. In his 1945 book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, Fremont Rider calculated that research libraries were doubling in space every sixteen years. His suggested solution was microfilming, specifically with his invention, the microcard. Once items were put onto film, they could be removed from circulation and additional shelf space would be made available for rapidly expanding collections. The microcard was superseded by microfiche. By the 1960s, microfilming had become standard policy.
and
> Harvard University Library was the first major institution to realize the potential of microfilm to preserve broadsheets printed on high-acid newsprint and it launched its "Foreign Newspaper Project" to preserve such ephemeral publications in 1938
If you're interested in this topic, my second-favourite was Biology and the Mechanics of the Wave-Swept Environment by Mark W. Denny. The books are both good overviews of the subject of ocean waves and they have a folky charm that makes them quite enjoyable.
Earlier today, I was seeing reports on Bluesky that it was down for a lot of people.
https://polyfill.archive.org/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=fet...
Also, the vulnerability seems to be a domain overtake. But Archive is self hosting a static version of the dependency?
my guess is they are people who mistake the fact that scarcity amplifies value with the idiot idea that scarcity creates value
and also these are entities holding on to a way to do business, publishing, and media that made sense back when the internet wasn't around
We should eventuall OCR all that stuff to use it to train LLMs. Seen from that commodity perspective, it has financial value.
Unfortunately, human species is pretty bad at long-term archiving of digital assets. Good luck to the Internet Archive - they have had their share of recent troubles, and I hope their continuation is secure.
Imagine the struggle, sweat and suffering that went into these 3.2 kilometers of shelf space; actually, only someone who has done a Ph.D. can probably appreciate that.