Aluka

» see aluka.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Aluka started in 2003 inside Ithaka Harbors, the nonprofit that also ran JSTOR, funded by the Mellon and Hewlett foundations. The problem it went after was narrow and very hard. The scholarly record of Africa mostly sits in Europe and North America, in herbarium cabinets and colonial archives, which meant a researcher in Accra or Maputo often could not see the documents produced in their own country without buying a plane ticket. Aluka scanned that material at high resolution and put it on the web.

The public release came in February 2007 with three collections and over 300,000 items. The African Plants Initiative was the biggest of them, a photographic record of type specimens pulled out of drawers in dozens of institutions and shot at a resolution good enough to identify a plant from a screen. Struggles for Freedom carried the paper of the southern African liberation movements, down to trial transcripts and oral histories taken from people who were still alive to give them. The third collection did cultural heritage sites, and it went further than photographs into 3D scans and GIS data of places like Great Zimbabwe.

Registration was free to everyone during the build, and that ended in June 2008 when the Ithaka and JSTOR trustees approved integrating Aluka into JSTOR. The collections did not disappear. They are still served, mostly under JSTOR Global Plants, and JSTOR kept access free for academic and nonprofit institutions in Africa, which was the point of the exercise. What ended was Aluka as a thing with its own front door. Type aluka.org today and you land on a JSTOR page.

This is a corner of the web I would have reached only if my work sent me there, and it never did. A computer engineering department in Turkey in the 2000s ran on IEEE Xplore and the ACM library, and when a paper was not in either you went and found a PDF somewhere less official. Africa-focused humanities archives were a room I never walked into. I am writing this from the record it left rather than from anything I remember.

~ the record ~

~ what it became ~

The absorption was not a shutdown in the usual sense, which makes it harder to see. Nothing was deleted and nobody was locked out on a specific Tuesday. The material was rebranded into JSTOR collections one at a time, and the Aluka URLs were left running for years afterward, serving JSTOR-branded pages under an old domain that most people never noticed was still there.

That slow handover is why Aluka barely registers as a death. The grave here is for the institution rather than the files. A project that had its own funders and its own argument about who scholarship belongs to became a set of product lines inside a larger subscription service, which is a normal and mostly benign fate that still ends with the name gone.

~ the long tail ~

The plants collection turned out to be the durable part. It kept growing after the merge, past two million specimen images, because a type specimen scan is worth the same to a botanist in every year that follows and the underlying material is finite and known. Digitization projects that survive tend to look like this one: a corpus with a known edge, and an institution willing to carry the hosting bill forever.

The liberation-struggle archive is the part worth remembering harder. Those documents were held by organizations and individuals rather than by national libraries, and a lot of that paper is not in good condition. Aluka got it scanned during a window when the people who could explain what the documents were had not all died yet. Whatever happened to the brand, that work does not have to be done twice.

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