Comment by DANmode
8 days ago
Okay, so why can’t the volunteers scanning for Anna’s Archive perform this again?
Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
8 days ago
Okay, so why can’t the volunteers scanning for Anna’s Archive perform this again?
Why does it need to be technically centralized and politically weak?
Anna's Archive is primarily a meta search engine. I see that they've put out a call for volunteers, but I don't think any significant part of their archive consists of volunteer scans.
As to your 'why' question, we're talking about boring, thankless work that in many cases breaks the law. It's not exactly surprising that we don't see millions of people signing up to do it for free!
I don't understand your second paragraph.
I simply don’t see JSTOR outlasting (as an organization, or a technology/archive) individual contributors and torrent trackers.
Solution which does not require millions of people =]
At present I don’t see individual contributors making any significant contribution towards scanning old academic journals. Why would this change in the future? There was at least a decade where the technology to enable this existed, and where most older issues of most journals were not available online, and yet the army of volunteer scanners failed to materialize. Now that there is already a non-profit doing this archival work at very high quality and with economies of scale, it seems even less likely that such a volunteer effort will materialize. But if you want to prove me wrong, get off HN and go scan some old journal articles!
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