I am also, as part of my job there, one of the largest individual uploaders of data to archive.org - I've added hundreds of thousands of individual items (texts, movies, music, websites) since I started working there in 2011.
So, moving on.
Welcome to the new user interface beta. I'm glad to see people toying with it, and the commentary and complaints are very, very welcome. As a smallish organization with a lot going on, the responses from people really digging down in the beta are very appreciated.
First, I'll say that the Beta interface is a "true" beta - it's the result of a lot of internal work, arguments, and discussions, but nothing is 100% set in stone. This isn't a beta like Gmail or a FPS trying to determine the rate of firing of the chaingun weapon: this is a lot of best-approach attempts at a whole range of goals. There's bound to be lots of responses from a lot of camps that are now coming forward. (For example, the new site has accessibility issues that need to be addressed.) If the term "beta" has been wrecked, stick with "prototype".
The internal name was V2, so I tend to keep calling it that.
V2 is the first major redesign of the main archive.org site in over a decade. And part of the conditions of this project (done by a handful of people) were to keep the old site (retroactively called V1) running, and mostly unchanged. That was a whole bucket of headache that isn't even obvious when you come into the site. (Anyone who has done this knows how it can be). With over 20 petabytes of data on the site, and millions of items and objects, spanning the whole environment without downtime is a feat in itself. So there's a whole range of philosophies being approached, but just getting the backend into a shape where it could sustain a new interface to it was a lot of non-obvious work.
Moving to the site as it is now.
Definitely slow. Definitely a shock. Definitely some great choices, some which might seem like head-scratchers. There is a designer, with a vision (his name is David) and there's been approaches to all the intended known shortcomings of V1 Internet Archive in this prototype.
One of the issues with Archive.org that's been an issue is non-responsiveness for different platforms - you got one site and that was it. Another was a lack of visual interface as an option. Now there is one.
The tagging and metadata efforts were spotty before now, because you were not really rewarded for doing so. The V2 site uses these tags and metadata extensively, and will continue to. This has been a nightmare for me, frankly - I've had to add logos to the 1,200 collections of items I've been uploading, and I'm doing descriptions as well as tags. But under the new system, the chance for finding things has increased exponentially.
There are definitely cases where I have to swap back to V1 to get kinds of "work done", because as an intense power-user, I do all sorts of grandiose work. But then again, 99% of my interaction with maintaining and adding content to the Internet Archive, I do through the API, and specifically through a python command-line interface we've had a developer working on for over a year:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive
I've uploaded many thousands of items, analyzed and upgraded their metadata, and done search-and-modify runs by the hundreds with this tool. It's being constantly updated.
In the future, I expect us to see multiple improvements to the interface - one which is much more bandwidth and processor friendly, a version of the "view" (we have image and list right now) that is optimum for researchers, and so on. But I'll stress again:
- This is a prototype which was done with a pretty small team who had to keep the old site running as smoothly as possible, while doing essentially a decade of upgrade in one swoop; - Now that it's "proven" that it works, refinement by the truckload needs to happen - Your comments are not just welcome but encouraged - Increased interest in the archive and the materials, and working together to find ways to access the petabytes of data in a meaningful way is not just a nice side benefit, but a vital core of the Archive's mission
Thanks for reading.