points by robcohen 1 day ago | 0 comments
Agreed, this just reads like the universities have no idea how to actually serve data effectively. Just bad architecture and lazy or incompetent administrators.
[–] Driver8 1 day ago
[–] moi2388 1 day ago
Well I have experience with universities, and their IT is horrendous. Departments are little kingdoms, none of them agree on procedures, architecture, data formats or even care about the absolute basics of software development or security.
It really isn’t a resource problem. It’s that academia is ruled by little princes who are full of themselves.
[–] mcmcmc 1 day ago
Couldn’t possibly be that serving data to scrapers isn’t a core function for a university or that they can’t pay big tech salaries to draw sysadmins and engineers that know how to handle large scale deployments
[–] hedora 1 day ago
If the core function of the university library's archival system is not providing free access to their collection, then what is its core function?
[–] JDups 15 hours ago
Free access for its student body and research community wouldn't have required to be able to handle 11k request a day for a single item.
If you believe that they should focus on the scalability required to handle bot traffic perhaps you would be best donating money to them to help give them the resources to be able to do that, or volunteering to try to help understand their problem and fix it if you believe that it's a skill issue.
Reframing what you said in a more positive way could be: - I wonder what architecture they used for this and how it could be improved? - I wonder what resource limits they have that prevent them from handling this issue? - I wonder whats unique to a library that limits their ability to do what tech companies do?