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RE: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/116015180016712361
I have been thinking for quite some time that we need a decentralized network for preserving public domain works. The #InternetArchive is important, but they are one single American organization and thus vulnerable (and the fact that they are playing fast and loose with copyright sometimes doesn't help). We need to spread those works out more.
@juergen_hubert i fear that decentralisation might work poorly in this case - long term preservation of curated accessible data needs effort and money. You'll need to store each item on many nodes - and this will need some orchestration and management. And global search should be possible, which is an issue.
Well, #Fediverse systems like #BookWyrm and #NeoDB already allow for global search of media metadata.
I realize that storing actual PDFs and the like on such servers will require a lot more server capacity, but is the principle really all that different?
And there are plenty of independent digital libraries hosted by universities and research institutes, such as the MDZ (which I use a lot). But they use different software and generally only allow local search.
I feel that if there was a Fediverse approach to hosting and searching for such documents - one which private users could also host - then it would be a huge step forward for preserving our cultural heritage.
@juergen_hubert I'm thinking along similar lines, but so far I've only downloaded an offline version of wikpedia Project Gutenberg. Not really what we need, but better than nothing.
@juergen_hubert, they have a subsidiary in Europe, but that does not fully address the problem.
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