ARCHIVE.ORG GLOBAL MIRRORS

I'm guessing that readers of this will be aware of the Internet
Archive, and their wonderful Wayback Machine service providing
access to web content archived since 1996. It's wonderful because
so much information is lost from the web due to lack of funds,
interest, or even hardware failures and major oops moments at the
keyboard. Some might notice though that the archived data itself
actually has few protections should the worst happen and the
Internet Archive itslef fail to sustain their collected data.

There is apparantly a mirror of the Wayback Machine archive in
Egypt:
http://www.bibalex.org/en/project/details?documentid=283

And a mirror of something is claimed to live in Amsterdam, though I
can't find an official webpage about it.

Back in 2016 they made some big ripples in the media by announcing
plans for a Canadian mirror, said to be motivated significantly by
the election of Donald Trump and foreseen internet freedom
armageddon.
https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive-free-accessible-and-private/

Nothing seems to have happened with that, but nor does Trump seem
to have taken much interest in internet censorship, so it looks
like that was just hot air coming from both sides:
https://blog.archive.org/?s=canada

But while the Internet Archive's data rests mainly on crossed
fingers, terabytes are being sucked constantly into other archives,
many run by government programmes for preserving data only
generated within their own borders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives
gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/List%20of%20Web%20archiving%20initiatives
- The tables don't really work on Gopherpedia though.

The same organisations might also hold media such as texts, images,
and films, that are not available freely online (I'm looking mainly
at the Australian ones here) except as library catalog entries.
Here in Australia, as in many other countries, the copyright on
items has expired before it will in the USA. Lots of material might
be removed from the Internet Archive in the US due to a breach of
copyright, even if in other countries this copyright has expired.
Here in Aus this applies to many items published before 1954, as
well as some other content such as television broadcast more than
sixty years ago.

Presumably all of these individual archiving projects cost
governments a significant amount to run, and are unlikely to be as
accurate and reliable as the Wayback Machine archive. I think it
would make more sense to concentrate these funds towards keeping
complete mirrors of the Internet Archive around the globe, with
local operators also ensuring that any local content being
overlooked by IA is included, and that content not able to be
legally hosted in the USA can be available to a local audience
where it is out of copyright.

Project Gutenburg Australia is an example of making
out-of-copyright texts available within Australa:
http://gutenberg.net.au/

Now the technology allows for images and films to be practically
accessed over the web. Where is the equivalent project for these
mediums? At the same time the PANDORA archive has been keeping hold
of Australian web pages for as long as the internet archive (argh,
and now moved over to a site that won't work without Javascript it
seems! The future will get you one way or other):
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

Surely this archive could be merged with the Wayback Machine and
instead of the efforts put into a secondary archiving effort, work
could be put into expanding the storage to allow the complete
Internet Archive content to be mirrored, along with Project
Gutenburg Australia and new projects for images, sound, and video.

Granted it might not be practical, or wise, to fund this entirely
from the government. However combined with private donations it
might be feasible. It should get decent exposure here in Aus if it
is possible for content to be streamed similarly to existing
services (including the government-funded ABC iView), because a
huge number of old movies are out of copyright here but currently
can't be downloaded except via services set up for video piracy.
Hopefully the advantage to keeping global mirrors would encourage
donations from foreign shores as well.

Ideally a single fund for worldwide Internet Archive mirrors could
be distributed to operations in different countries around the
globe. Internet Archive Australia, Internet Archive Europe,
Internet Archive Japan. etc. The funds just need to be redirected
from these assorted independent archiving projects to create
something more useful to both a local and a global audience.

- The Free Thinker, 2020.

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