The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove (abc.net.au) 87
Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: A digital archive and research tool developed by the Australian National Archives may be the victim of upcoming budget cuts. Used by an estimated 70,000 users per day, the system may be eliminated thanks to a $20 Million (AUD) budget cut to the agency's budget. Since its 2009 launch, Trove has grown to house four million digitised items, including books, images, music, historic newspapers and maps. Critics of the cuts say that such systems should be considered national infrastructure because there's literally no replacement service.
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I like the cow guy better. The moo'ing makes me feel more optimistic about how the day will go.
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And now I want a milkshake...
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National Library of Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Trove is a National Library of Australia project, not the National Archives of Australia.
Anti intellectual government. (Score:5, Insightful)
This should be no surprise to anyone watching the current conservative governments attack on research and academia in australia.
The world renowned CSIRO has been gutted with climate research all but abandoned along with oceanographic research, which is a *big problem* when your an island nation entrusted to the care of the dying barrier reef. The government has stripped funding out of education and universities, removed scientific advisors from all levels of government, and often replaced them with spiral eyed religious idiots who see more value in quoting the bible than quoting peer reviewed research.
And now they are going after the history archives.
Standard bureaucrat protection technique. (Score:5, Insightful)
Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.
That is how these things usually go. Publicly funded hospitals always cut patient services before anything else, Schools increase staff/child ratios, Transport cuts services at peak times, etc.
The only thing worse is unionised public servants, who really are on the double-take, since there is little downside to their bosses paying them more as it is 'free' money, and they get the double whammy of working for a votes government, AND having union muscle.
Welcome to another facet of the bleeding dry of the working middle class.
Um, what else do you cut? (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst words I've ever heard are "I'm from the gov't and I'm hear to help". It wasn't a man from the gov't saying those (one of those paid my friends insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes), it was a right wing politician looking to cut some billionare's taxes and pushing more bullshit austerity for everyone but themselves.
Re:Um, what else do you cut? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Um, what else do you cut? (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's a massive amount of waste on the private sector too. I see it every day in all jobs but my own. The reason is that I only see the surface of those other jobs from the outside. Every single time I've tried to do one, I've found out that there simply isn't any better way to do it - any possible speedup requires taking risks or shortcuts which will come back to bite you.
It is ironic that the push for efficiency can lead to the opposite result. But the solution is not to push harder, but lighter. Let the department carry over their unused budget to the next fiscal year, and now they have an actual motive to save money because it's now "their" money - and it also means they can build up savings to use for emergencies and larger projects.
Re: Um, what else do you cut? (Score:2)
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Budget burning as it is called is still wasteful if they keep the funds rather than send it back. For instance if your department has a 1 million surplus, that million can be used more effective either doing something else government should be doing or staying in the hands of taxpayers who will increase economic activity and thereby increase future revenue. But if it sits in an account because you didn't need it, neither will happen and your department will simply be over funded yet again the next year maki
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No, because money is not a limited resource. Having 1 million dollars sitting in your account means you have authorization to spend actual, limited reso
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Government waste is only exceeded by waste in successful corporations. Sure, little scrappy companies are fast, lean and efficient, but when a corporation reaches 10K employees and years of consecutive growth, take a look on the inside and see how many "Wally"s the place has, how much structural BS exists for no particular reason other than "that's how it's done here."
Government waste is continually scrutinized by the taxpayers, but when a corporation has been "exceeding shareholder expectations" for a dec
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Government waste is only exceeded by waste in successful corporations. Sure, little scrappy companies are fast, lean and efficient, but when a corporation reaches 10K employees and years of consecutive growth, take a look on the inside and see how many "Wally"s the place has, how much structural BS exists for no particular reason other than "that's how it's done here."
Government waste is continually scrutinized by the taxpayers, but when a corporation has been "exceeding shareholder expectations" for a decade or more - you'd be amazed at the colossal waste that goes on inside.
BS, I work for one of those massive corporations and I am usually contracted into various government agencies. I am very familiar with the waste and inefficiencies in BOTH sectors. corporate waste doesn't come even close to what is wasted in government and most companies have regular Targeted crackdowns on waste and inefficiencies, though they will always have some, highly successful fast growing companies tend to have a lot more waste as they can get away with it while on that trajectory but as soon as gro
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The major difference for me between government and corporate inefficiency is that we _usually_ have to option to not deal with an inefficient corporation. Of course, government has told me several times "if you can't get a job here, move", so I suppose we also have the option of changing countries if we can find one with a government we like better? /sarc
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The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.
A lot of it is dysfunction to combat dysfunction because if any process is delayed you can't say the $100k we budgeted for servers this year we'll need in February next year. Those money will go away and because you overbudgeted last year, we'll actually not just cut the $100k but we'll give you $150k less and you'll be stuck with extra old out of support servers because there was a delay in procurement. Sure, every company has to replan their portfolio and cancel projects sometimes. But they don't go nucle
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The problem is the cuts are usually generic and don't target the real waste and simply usually say, here take a 2%, 5%, 10% cut across the board while wasteful practices aren't targeted or touched. e.g. spending surplus budget before EOFY as they know if they don't they might get less the next FY, I see this every year, sometimes the waste is in the millions where they will buy services, hardware and software that never get used or touched just to ensure they don't have surplus.
A lot of it is dysfunction to combat dysfunction because if any process is delayed you can't say the $100k we budgeted for servers this year we'll need in February next year. Those money will go away and because you overbudgeted last year, we'll actually not just cut the $100k but we'll give you $150k less and you'll be stuck with extra old out of support servers because there was a delay in procurement. Sure, every company has to replan their portfolio and cancel projects sometimes. But they don't go nuclear every year and make every project and every department start over the allocation process.
The theory is of course that all the money will go back in a big pool and be spent where they're most needed. The reality is that when you've finally got approval to do something in one budget process, then no matter what you'd rather spend it than taking that fight all over again. I actually think you'd see much less waste in practice if you could get a spillover-account where you could have at most 10% of the budget but it's still "yours", sure more money would be stuck down in the system but it wouldn't accumulate and you could flex schedules more. It's the "use it or lose it" process that is the real problem.
well aware of why it happens and the mentality behind it. It doesn't make it less appalling watching a department deliberately flush millions down the toilet just to ensure it doesn't affect how much they get the following year. I have even been the beneficiary of this broken system in past years where they prepaid my contract for a year in advance just to help empty their budget and I am still completely against it as they are just gaming a broken system which is especially bad when the country is in debt
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That is how these things usually go.
In America, it is called the Washington Monument Syndrome [wikipedia.org].
Schools increase staff/child ratios
In my school district, the first thing they cut was the school buses. The result was maximum inconvenience for parents, and congested roads for commuters even without school aged kids.
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Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.
Disclaimer - I work in the Australian Public Service
As I understand it the prototype and early work on TROVE were funded from the NLA's own budget not as an NPP (New Policy Proposal).
TROVE has become part of the NLA's strategy (https://www.nla.gov.au/corporate-documents/annual-report/2014-2015/strategic-direction-two-make-the-librarys-collections-and-services-accessible-to-all), however the government have never decided to directly funded it and it doesn't appear Government feels it's an explicit part of th
Civil service pensions aligned with inflation (Score:2)
The decision of the UK parliament on a quiet day in the late 60s to index civil service pensions to inflation is believed to be the most expensive decision ever made by the government. It also removed the incentive for civil servants to encourage policies that limited inflation.
Announce the death of animals at a zoo (Score:2)
In the early days of the Thatcher cuts of the 1980s, London Zoo announced that due to government cuts they would have to cull many of their animals.
They got the money....
The name for this in the bureaucratic game is 'bleeding stumps'; you announce cuts that will upset people to force the government to spend more. Just occasionally it can go wrong, when the government toughs it out and you have to go ahead, though this is unlikely as an alternative plan can usually be found.
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which is a *big problem* when your an island nation entrusted to the care of the dying barrier reef.
Not to worry, it'll stop being a problem in another few years. Of course the fictional "climate change" Hippy Illuminati conspiracy won't be to blame, it'll be some other thing that doesn't offend Slashdotters.
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Nice way to engage in a political diatribe, but it is the liberals who are cutting the funding and stopping more content coming online.
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Trove looks similar to the U.S. repository at www.archive.org which is administered by the Smithsonian Institution.
I wonder if Trove could get funding as Archive.org does with a mix of public monies from a few branches and private funds like the Prelinger Grant for their digitized film library?
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If all of that is so important to you, donate money to the organization.
Otherwise, you are just bitching about how other people's money is being spent.
All Just Hype (Score:1)
There are no quotes from anyone with authority to back this claim. No Government representatives, no links to authoritative sources, no media quotes - absolutely nothing.
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I cannot help wondering if your post is a clever troll. Universal suffrage (in my view a condition for true democracy) in the US dates back to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you take a more narrow view of a "democracy" as allowing all males meeting certain property requirements to vote, then the US was not the first.
Whether the US is celebrating another well-run year is open to debate. It is possible to argue for or against that proposition.
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How democratic the US may be in practice is a complex question. The biggest problem (greater than voter apathy) is the way the electorate is misinformed and manipulated.
When people face a hefty fine for not voting, as in Australia, it is not surprising that voter turnout is high,
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Yeah but then they put in votes for House Party, Techno Party, Dress-up Party, and After Party [nzherald.co.nz]
Forcing people to 'vote' is pointless. If they're that disenfranchised that they wouldn't be arsed to turn up to the polling booth without threat of a fine, then they're going to express their frustration on the ballot.
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If you don't want to vote, you may be saying there's no decent candidate who has a chance. Or you may not care. Those are very different statements, with the same exterior symptoms.
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$20 is not exactly hefty but is annoying:
http://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/voting_australia.htm
Look for "What happens if I do not vote?" - if you choose not to pay it can cost a lot more once you're taken to court.
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This is the Age of the Internet. If the electorate is misinformed, it's because they choose to be. They aren't helpless victims but active participants in and consumers of deception. Voting based on fantasies or party identity is probably not going to end well, but the cause is lack of sanity, not lack of democracy.
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As a person from the US, I use BBC, as I know their bias will have nothing to do with the GOP or Democratic Party.
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Well, that may be an explanation for Trump, I haven't checked, but have you investigated how Hillary became the Democratic candidate? When Sanders started his campaign Hillary already had a large lead in committed delegates, and not a single primary had been held. It's my opinion he was selected by the party as the "designated loser" to provide the illusion of a popular contest, and he was willing because he wanted to promote his position, and for the outside chance that he might win anyway.
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The Democratic party has something called Super Delegates which are decided by the party elite as to how they want them to vote. Bernie actually did amazingly well considering he had to fight for every delegate, unlike Hillary who was given all those votes off the bat.
The GOP is actually far more "Democratic" than the DNC in how they choose their candidate, and so it is much more influenced by popularity. Unfortunately, the popular vote doesn't mean the best candidate, as neither party has a particularly
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It's not so much that Gore had more votes, as that he apparently actually won the election, if you discount fraudulent results. One can't tell, of course. The Florida results have been legally sealed, e.g., and in most cases there wasn't even a challenge.
This is not to assert that the Democrats don't also rig elections. While the Republicans have been more blatant about it (can you say "Dibold"?), the Democrats also do it. Neither side has been willing to fix the electronic voting machines. (Well, you
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Except that he didn't win the election, and research and recounting after the Supreme Court made the final determination found that Bush had a lead.
Keep railing at poor Gore's loss to Bush though, I am sure it will help your party out.
This 'story' is from March (Score:1)
Fuck me, this so called 'story' is from March.
Just a few things have changed since then, like the double dissolution and re-election of the entire house of representatives and Senate.
Maybe EditorDavid should lookup what SandBagger means before posting her shit as news?
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Wages, electricity, power, perhaps rent for the office area, server maintenance, pensions, health insurance ...
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not in Australia...
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Got public health insurance in Australia, or does no employer want to get the bill for the insurance?
The point of my list wasn't accuracy anyway, but pointing out that each employee wasn't getting nearly a million AUD per year.
#fundTrove (Score:1)
Check out #fundTrove on Twitter and the FB page https://www.facebook.com/fundtrove/ for more information about the campaign to save Trove.
400,000,000 (Score:1)
Not 4 million objects, 500 million objects - "Find and get over 499,794,678 Australian and online resources:
books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more"
I'll host it for free (Score:3)
Re:I'll host it for free (Score:4, Informative)
If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M.
Obviously you didn't read TFA. And I'm not sure the submitter who wrote the "summary" understood what it said either. A couple clarifications:
(1) The $20 million refers to budget cuts to a number of cultural institutions, which include the library. The library cuts are only one portion of this $20 million, and I'm assuming that this Trove thing is only a small portion of the total library cuts. The real problem, as explained in TFA, is that the library is cutting 22 staff positions.
(2) Now, you might say, "but why do they need 22 staff positions to maintain an online archive?" They don't. And that's the second misleading thing here: No one appears to be talking about eliminating the online archive completely. TFA explicitly explains that all they will do is cease to add new materials. Basically, the library has to eliminate staff due to budget cuts, so they can't afford to keep the people that ADD new stuff to this archive and update it:
Although Trove, which was launched in late 2009, is funded by the library's budget, without government funding the library will not be able to update the material in the database.
So there's no need (at least at this point) for people to go around offering to host or creating torrents or whatever.
TL;DR -- TFS is BS. NOBODY is talking about elimination of material already in the archive. Budget cuts may just prevent adding future materials.
perfectly in line (Score:1)
National Treasures (Score:2)