I think linear bookshelf distance is a normal unit for talking about collections. At least as informative as number of books. Guessing 15 meters per bookshelf from photos, 214 bookshelves? doesn't sound as cool to me.
3.2km of linear storage space makes sense for books. You aren't just piling them up in stacks, where volume might be a useful measure, and you aren't putting them arbitrarily deep on the same row because that prevents access. You'll usually store things like this one book deep. If you have a 4-row shelf where you could have an 8-row shelf with the same width, each row 1m wide, you have 4m vs 8m of linear storage space.
My dad's PhD is listed on Google scholar, but not digitalized. Although I never read it (I don't understand it) I would like it to get preserved. All universities should provide digital copies of their students bachelor's and masters thesis as well as PhDs. Data storage is so cheap these days
>> All universities should provide digital copies of their students bachelor's and masters thesis as well as PhDs
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.
Or we could try to accept that everyone makes mistakes and that's fine. Scientific advancement is basically making slightly fewer mistakes.
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.
Ha My university (University of Florida) doesn't even keep it's graduation records. They have an error in my 30 year old graduation records but it has been impossible to fix because they don't maintain the records anymore, at some point they outsourced it to a 3rd party who is almost impossible to contact.
logging into a long dormant account to say i went to uf and there were hard copies of masters theses sitting on a shelf in the corner of one of my classrooms dated to the 70s. sounds about right for them to mess up.
While PhD theses are typically quite straight forward, i.e. at many (most) universities a PhD needs to be a proper publication often with an associated IBAN and with a copyright licence assigned to the University (or at least a number of hard copies given to the University library), masters and bachelor theses differ considerably. Often the copyright fully belongs to the students, they are not required to be published (often even are not supposed to be, as they were done at some industry partner, or results have not been published in journals yet due to time constraints...). So it's legally not that easy for universities to publish or even archive them especially in retrospect.
I'm guessing most recent dissertations have been digitized, but this is probably the norm only in the last 10-15 years? Most universities likely have never given thought to digitize anything from before then due to the extra costs that would be involved in digitizing those physical copies. I am curious how much such an effort would cost though.
Whenever you have that much data stored how do you actually know the data is still there and can be retrieved? Even if you have absolutely insane connectivity to it at some point don't you run out of time to check it? Apparent 200 PiB at 1 GiB per second would take about 58254 hours to retrieve.
I wonder if this is a large enough catalog for IA to fly out to the Netherlands to ship these in as they do with entire libraries:
>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]
The British Library which is responsible for hosting our PhD's has been offline for a year following a cyber attack. It's really frustrating how long it is taking them to bring it back, and would really value IA having an archive.
The interesting question is why they aren’t expanding their archival storage space. What’s higher priority for any university archives than keeping dissertations?
These are dissertations from other universities, where the originating university still has a copy.
> 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.
Wonder when the day will arrive when universities decide to offload all archives to online media only, just keeping the most important books and maybe unique manuscripts in libraries.
Tangential: Archive.org is giving alert popup "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!"
https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/04/thank-you-ubuntu-and-lin...
They openly show a possible vector. "The Internet Archive is wholly dependent on Ubuntu and the Linux communities that create a reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech), rapidly evolving operating system. It is hard to overestimate how important that is to creating services such as the Internet Archive." Maybe CUPS?
Readit News
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.
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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.
https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in:8443/jspui/browse?type=ti...
https://annas-archive.org/torrents
>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.
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...
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