Internet Archive: What’s new with v2
blog.archive.org
blog.archive.org
Criticism by long-term members is not purely a matter of confusion. I highly dislike the change from a "tabular" and highly text-based design to the image centric infinite-scroll one we got now. Showing cover images of random unknown music makes no sense in my opinion, there is nothing to recognise and music does not show in images. The information density has been drastically reduced. Things are reduced to icons and everywhere there are transitions.
If archive.org is trying to change its audience (and contributors) then it might be a step into the right direction, but for me, the new design is a step in the wrong one.
There definitely are discovery problems but I don't see how the new design helps. It reminds me more of a random modern 10 second attention span site than a well thought out interface to a vast archive.
But then I found these amazing treasures that were so much better than what I was looking for [0].
The Internet Archive is so priceless, so special, and so impossibly good, that I have to trust the people who make it.
As long as they are "focused on how the site looks," there is nothing they could do to ruin it. Yes, the changes are pointless for someone who was already happy with it. But if they are able to bring more attention and support this way, then more power to them. Their #1 job is to keep it alive, and I'm sure this is motivated with that in mind.
And after all, they have an API.
[0] https://archive.org/stream/playseditedannot03shakuoft#page/1...
I totally understand their motivation and I think it is great to present the potentially popular parts of the archives to the public in an "experience". But it worsened my user experience and motivation as a contributor(!).
I meant things like https://archive.org/details/texts where random, weird icons are displayed that say very few things about their collections while using up quite a lot of space and visual attention.
I think it does a bit better if you know the exact name of what you're looking for. I get a much better idea of how many duplicates or variants of an item are in the collection now.
However, I think it does a much worse job navigating to finding things you already know are there, but maybe don't quite know the name of. It's almost impossible to navigate to something if you just have partial knowledge of it, or generally know where it is in the archive but don't have specifics. I find this super frustrating.
I love archive.org more than just about anything else on the internet, and I'm willing to be patient with the new design as they flesh out the ideas. If they can fix the navigation issue I'd be relatively happy.
I think what archive.org needs more than this redesign is an organizational meta-layer on-top of the archive where volunteer "curators" can organize content spread all over the archive (or siloed under some random collection somewhere) into more familiar, library-like organizational structure.
For example, I like old computing magazines. However, archive.org doesn't have a "magazines" top-level hierarchy. If you search for "magazines" over on the right side-bar there's a "Magazine Rack" Collection, but it's not prominently places. And then the layer under that is a mishmash of "Collections" that include magazine genres, individual titles, etc. but no clear "computer magazine" collection. I poked around for a few minutes and still didn't find the collection for old computing magazines.
So I did another search for "computer magazines" and finally there's a collection of "Computer Magazine Archives".
However, this is probably incomplete, there's bound to be other magazines that are not part of this collection.
It'd be much easier if I could go
Texts/Magazines/Computers
and everything would be there by title, maybe set a filter for "English" or something and be off reading
But right now it's takes a dozen navigation clicks and a few searches to find the same, once you find a collection you end up bookmarking it in your browser because you'll probably forget the magic combination of searches and clicks that got you here.
It's tough though, they're doing an immense job with relatively few resources to organize everything. So I can live with some of the disorganization. It's still an amazing treasure trove.
However, even though the site is ruined for me now, I really want to thank Internet Archive for all the years of enjoyment it has given me.
> now it's a big mess ... for smartphones
This would have been very much appreciated if you pointed out specific things in the new design which you don't like.
In-fact, as a developer, I even think that styling the website from dev-tools to make it look (almost) like you want is a very good idea and helpful to the site developers. It can be a good way to "thank", since you "really want to thank".
So, first I'd like to make clear that none of the underlying collections or data has moved anywhere. That is, all the items that are in a collection of, say, newspapers or music performances are still there - the URLs are precisely the same and were designed to be permanent. Nobody's shifting those around here. Google searches work, and the site search works the same, using the same criteria.
Next, in the results pages, which include those "tiles" and infinite scrolling that is not to you taste, if you look in the upper right (next to the "Results" number), there's an icon that changes from tile mode to "list" mode. You can also turn on "details". That makes things into a list form, at least. However, for the moment, infinite scroll will still be engaged. Also note you can sort the list alphabetically, by creator, or by views.
After doing those two steps, is the problem at that point JUST the infinite scroll? Is that what makes it a mess for you? Or is it a different set of issues? I'm happy to hear it in this thread, but also, if you click the "beta" button in the upper right, and write exactly what you'd like, I guarantee it's read.
Please reduce or make your JavaScript a bit more efficient - mobile devices have little RAM. (cut the JQuery-extensions)
The Wayback Maschine (https://archive.org/web/) could look more lean like the Google frontpage.
That said, two annoyances I just noticed with the list view (braindump style):
There is no header. I have no idea what the columns are. I can only guess, and that is useless for e.g. the rightmost column here [0]. Mental thoughts as I view it: It's just an icon? It's not clickable and doesn't appear to show anything useful. The speakers change to blue when I have my mouse over them. What does this mean? It's still not clickable... what is it doing?
Another problem related to not having a header: when I sort by e.g. views, the views are not actually shown. Maybe I wanted to see that information as well as having the rows sorted by the column.
Oh wait, I just noticed that there is a header there... but it's not clear it's for the columns of the table underneath it. They're not aligned... and it still doesn't explain what that column of icons is. But now I see that the number of views is shown as the leftmost column. I guessed that it was some sort of filesize initially (1.6B, 377.7M, etc.).
One last thing, I wish clicking the column in the header would toggle ascending/descending sorting like almost every other table I've interacted with. It's not clear at first that I need to go all the way over to the left to toggle that behaviour.
* The design was the first major overhaul of the back and front ends of the site in roughly 15 years. * Introduced to the public in a very light was in October 31st, thousands of modifications/fixes have happened since then. * The V2 interface truly hit major audiences around the beginning of January. So it's been roughly 4 months, in which feedback has been huge, and read. * If you visit the changelog, https://archive.org/CHANGELOG.txt - you can see the mass of changes that are occurring, nearly daily. * The site is nowhere near done.
I have yet to find an example of infinite scrolling being good, and this is no exception.
And it's gone from being text-heavy to image-heavy.
If it's trying to become instagram, well, good for them I guess. But that's not anything I'm interested in.
At least have a theme option to keep using the old interface. I suppose I'll have to wait until someone comes out with a usable interface using the API, I suppose.
It's that time again.... I'm looking for a willing volunteer coder (C++ with some Javascript) awareness who wants to take a shot at JSMESS. We have a strong theory that someone could look at the code and, essentially, fix the speed problem (which would likely fix the sound). Are you out there, coding hero? https://twitter.com/textfiles
Anyway, the new design is very nice!