I post scans sometimes on here cuz I know they’ll be stored on archive.org’s servers, which lets me sleep at night knowing there’s a power higher than me putting in the effort to preserve them after I’m dead. Upon going to the actual archive.org website, though, I can’t find the pages for the albums by searching. What am I doing wrong? Certainly the answer is simple and I’m just overlooking it, but after an hour trying to figure it out by combing these forums, my irritable curiosity has superseded any potential embarrassment.
Example: I uploaded these scans, and the archive.org page is viewable, but searching the band name (same as the album name, as it’s self-titled) doesn’t pull the archive entry in results, despite having that exact title and artist attribution.
That’s how I got the link in the first place, I guess I just figured that if the point was to store long-term, you’d be able to find them on the internet archive long after musicbrainz is gone. How would we browse album art on the archive.org database a hundred years from now?
“We’ve been digitizing CDs lately and we’re finding people somewhat
confused by whether they’re going to get an image or an actual CD
when looking at search results.”
That’s absurd, one would have an audio tag and the other would have an image tag. That’s why there are filters and filetype tags/icons on entries. Kind of shocked IA would do something so hasty and thoughtless.
If MusicBrainz goes good-bye (why it would do this before the IA is for a different discussion), I don’t see why archive.org couldn’t easily change how they manage these files.
So I wouldn’t worry about this meaning the files will be lost, just that for now the IA sees MB as the best index for these
More people probably know what archive.org is than know what MB is, so if they’re searching there and don’t find it they may just give up, not knowing about the connection. Just feels strange not to have it browsable in both places for that reason, I guess; if the point is to make information/data easily available, it seems backwards for it not to be available in the place people would generally think to look.
Also, just from my own standpoint, is there a better way to browse MB for artwork than having to click through several pages from search results to the actual image file? I’ve always wondered about that…if it’s supposed to be the main channel for browsing cover art, you’d think it would require less hoops to jump through.
Fair enough, and good point about it being positive for the connection to be from both sides.
I suspect that the case here is that the IA likes what MeB does (we are friends!), and sees archiving these images as a shared mission overall. But that at the end of the day they think of this as a MeB project, and have their hands full with their own.
You could nudge them to see if they want to add some kind of browsing from their end?
Hmm, MB isn’t primarily a image browsing site (not saying that’s not a possibility), so I can only offer this useful script:
This will display thumbnails next to releases on an artist page, as well as in a release group. Clicking the cover image takes you straight to the images.
I’ve also mocked up a large cover art grid display for an eventual Artist Page redesign, which you can see in the figma project. (this redesign would also integrate the Funkey Illustrated Records script functionality, as well as being able to expand release groups without leaving the artist page)
@Intergalactic.fm also left some suggestions heading in this direction in the Release Page Redesign thread, which I thought cluttered the display too much. You may have good ideas for this could be integrated in a way that works for you, without distracting from the other information?
p.s. this seems like yet another opportunity to bump the event art archive ticket, which the IA did their end of back in 2016
No, unfortunately not. Neither is it possible to specifically search for releases with (or without) cover art nor is there a fine-grained edit search yet.
There are only two cover art related reports:
The fresh releases feature of ListenBrainz comes close to browsing but just new stuff.
It might come as a surprise but the IA has done other “shocking” things, like excluding sites from the Wayback Machine. (Quite ironic that one of those sites happens to be kind of an archive itself…)
This is pretty helpful actually, thank you! As for nudging them…if I knew how, I would. My voice also probably doesn’t have that much power, but more people could help with it as a collective nudge!
I’m just wondering:
Does anyone know what criterias they use?
I mean, why should they exclude a water filter system like “Brita” in many different countries?
Or even a Swiss Bank (shkb.ch)?
If you don’t say anything, then your website can be archived (either by a webcrawler or someone submitting your website for manual capture); but if you don’t want them to archive anything, then you have to raise a request with them and they then “darken” any content they have for you and will refuse to take any further snapshots of your domain (either automatically or if requested manually)
