The Library of Alexandria, Never Again

I know this is a tiny blog on some obscure corner of the internet, and very few people will likely ever read this. Reaching out feels almost pointless, yet I wish to try anyways.

Without going into the politics, right now the US is deleting massive amounts of datasets and resources critical for academic research and for historical safekeeping. Data about COVID, the climate, childhood obesity rates, crime rates, etc etc. This data is critical for academics and researches to have on hand to keep a historical note of what has happened and to understand trends.

Instead of simply being defeated, I have seen some users try downloading this data themselves to their own computers. That's great, and a worthy cause, but simply downloading data to your own PC isn't super helpful in these contexts.

The difference between hoarding and archiving is ensuring the data becomes accessible afterwards.

While there are some ways to do this (namely hunting down datasets yourself and uploading them to Internet Archive, like this user did), there is a better more automated solution.

Introducing the Archive Team Warrior, an automated appliance that can add your computer (and internet connection) to a swarm of machines working on archiving various tasks.

You can find some general instructions here (I myself run it as a docker, others may run it as a VM using the instructions in the previous link or a more up to guide here).

Honestly, find a setup that works for you, configure which project you wish to help with (in this case the US-Government but you can pick and choose) and just let it do its thing. The Internet Archive hands out tasks to warrior appliances, each warrior appliance downloads the specific site resource from their own internet connection, compresses it, and then sends it to the Internet Archive for all before waiting for the next tasks. Its set and forget and you really can make a difference with this. Far more difference than one can sobbing on social media.

In terms of other things you can do, donating a bit to the internet archive to help keep their extremely expensive server costs going, is another way to help out.

That's it for this short post. I am between projects and will update this blog soon with something more fun. However, I wanted to put in text I can link to this resource to help other people contribute to never letting our internet, our modern Library of Alexandria, be burned down ever again.