[LINK] "Internet Archive Canada Laying Off Most Staff"

[rfmcdonald]

There's something terrible with an archive being forced to fear for its survival.

Last week, while the rest of Toronto was focused on Pride, a free Arkells concert, and the Hot Docs acquisition of Bloor Cinema, the Internet Archive Canada was laying off 75 per cent of its employees. On Wednesday July 6, all employees participated in an organization-wide conference call where they were told that due to drastic funding cuts, the layoffs were unavoidable. On Thursday, the company sent out the list of affected staff: out of the 47 employees working, 33 will be laid off effective August 12.

While the layoff is huge, it isn't entirely unprecedented in the current economic climate. What makes the IAC cutbacks unique is the dedication of the departing employees, several of whom independently reached out to Torontoist with a similar message: losing their job was sad, but the prospect of the IAC stopping production is devastating.

The Internet Archive Canada is a wing of the larger, San Francisco–based non-profit established in 1996 that is working on building an open source, completely unrestricted internet library. Currently the Internet Archive has over 150 employees in six countries worldwide: the United States, Canada, Guatemala, China, England, and Scotland. The Toronto office opened in 2004 and has rapidly expanded since then.

Kate Farnworth, an IAC employee who has been with the project for over three years and is one of those laid off, explains that the IAC is an “open source digital library so that people can access information wherever they are… Free access to information is a wonderful thing to work towards.” In discussing the Toronto downsizing, Brewster Kahle, founder of the project, argues that, “At the end of the day [employees] are building a library for the Wikipedia generation and to that generation—if its not online it’s as if it doesn’t exist. The real value is the loving care in terms of building the collections of books that are now being put online.”

[. . .]

Becky Simmons, who began working at the IAC in 2007, clarifies that it’s not the work itself that is enjoyable—indeed, she says that the act of scanning, flipping a page and scanning is often boring and monotonous. The major job requirements are “tolerance for repetitive motion and a good eye for detail.” Despite the tedium, the employees at the project love working there. Patrick Stitt, an employee who has been with the IAC for over three years, sees the people who work there as “craftsmen and women, mining books with our hands and cameras, shaping that information into artifacts that would long outlive us.” He remembers scanning a Bloor bus transfer from 50 years ago and medical prescription pads from the 1930s. By digitizing historical works, the books themselves can be browsed without being subject to physical handling and ruin. The IAC employees we spoke with believe that they are preserving and helping to disseminate pieces of Canada’s history.

As, indeed, the IAC employees are.