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AMS has reorganized their web site AGAIN. Now even the search in google gives wrong results. This will be fixed in few days, but hundreds of defunctional links from nLab to AMS will take much more human work to correct. I wrote the following letter to their webmaster:
It seems that you reorganized the site and that consequently even the google custom serach you provide gives wrong outputs. I have spend many hours putting correct links to many AMS pages into nLab http://ncatlab.org and now those links do not work. Mathematical community in the world is mutually related in a ocmplicated net of connections and much of it is not commercial but done by voluntary work. Amer. Math. Soc. should be cooperative with these methods and use intelligent web updating.
For example now do not work
http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-sao.html
http://www.ams.org/online_bks/surv14
http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-depts.html
and hundreds of other links. Now I have to find all the replaced links (harder as google search gives wrong results) and replace the links at hundreds of nLab pages.
(I’m moving this to “nlab - Technical Matters”, I don’t think it belongs in The Cave!)
Ouch! That’s not nice.
If there’s a general pattern to the replacements then it may be possible to do a batch replace on the affected pages, so let me know if you spot something like that.
Well, I submitted the email via the web form with intention to see if they will tell me about some pattern. If not I will wait until new system is googleble and go on manually. Maybe there are not that many links, but some of them are at more than one page each. Several of them are important. Surely the best would be to have permalinks somewhere.
The kind response by the AMS webmaster contains the following essential information
There are several changes to the AMS website. Math on the Web has been moved to its own website: http://www.mathontheweb.org/mathweb/index.html. This is why you will not find indexing to this site on http://www.ams.org. Second, the online books were just removed from the AMS website. The books are still indexed at the moment, but these links will also be removed once Google re-indexes the site.
The AMS webmaster should not have to write a kind response; HTTP can give us this essential information automatically. The old URIs for Math on the Web should redirect (HTTP 301) to the specific URIs at the new site. (If the new site’s webmaster is uncooperative, the old URIs could still redirect to the main page of the new site, which is all of the information that the kind response gave anyway.) The old URIs for the books that have been taken away should be marked as gone (HTTP 410). No URI that has worked in the past should be HTTP 404, ever.
Wow what a grasp of perfect ethiquette! Toby should create internet protocols in heavens :=)
Zoran, you should be the angel overseeing the heaven of portmanteaus. Before we had “jargot”, and now we have “ethiquette” – brilliant!
In fact the case is more serious. I do not know what is the reason that the books are taken off the website but the info pages Math on the Web which we freely advertise here and which we have put (by principles of freeness, as we do not much list commercial publishers) hi on the various math resources lists and were under AMS’s website are now part of another company copyrighted version:
Copyright, database rights, and all other intellectual property rights in the contents of the Math on the Web website, www.mathontheweb.org, throughout the world are the exclusive property of the Associated Ions
You may not, without the express permission of Associated Ions: * Download substantial portions of the content of this site. * Conduct automated searching or downloading, by use of scripted searches, robots, spiders, crawlers, or otherwise; * make password-protect content of this site available to any third party, whether by telephone link, password sharing, permitting access through your computer, or by other similar or dissimilar means or arrangements.
I have updated some of the links to the new commercial version. I do not know what is the background of this, but I might consider putting it lower in priority and particularly remove it from the short list at math resources.
For example they (“AI”) have a page with (small list) links to free books
So the authors make them free, and than a (commercial? AMS spin-off?) company abuses their web addresses to make money of the books which they provide and (possibly somebody else) hosts ? And AMS gave them collected list to start ? Did they revamped the generic name “Math on the Web” to be registered ? As a member of AMS, I protest if any of the above is true. It might be that these are wrong assumptions (it is not what it looks so), so I apologize for it, but we have to discuss the issue starting from some suppositions.
The statement
This website is presently edited by Associated Ions (AI) who are committed to protecting the privacy of users of this website.
suggests that it might be that they are just a technical interim service and maybe AMS or somebody did not yet decide what to do with it.
I have not foudn which data are restricted, but such are mentioned
Non-personal information is collected behind the scenes by web servers and is used to compile general website usage statistics or facilitate access to restricted website services.
The point is that the publishers etc. should be replaced by professional organizations of mathematicians for all informational purposes. Thus the editorial boards should leave the Elsevier, Springer etc. and go under London MS, AMS etc. and not other way around that mathematical societies give the information they have to new spin off companies or to give them to the big monopolites.
I didn’t create this protocol; Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW and the author of the essay that I linked in #4) did.
Toby: yes, I know.
http://www.mathontheweb.org/mathweb/mi-preprints.html
NOTE: this system is under redevelopment from the previous one hosted on the AMS web site.
I got some good news today in mailbox (good if I understood the message correctly), from Director Business & Publications Computing of AMS, Mr Gerry Loon. Here is my response with the content part included (headers and so on excluded to avoid spam and personal data)
Mr G. L. wrote:
Thank you for informing us about the broken links for Math on the Web. The links are now operational. Please know that Math on the Web is 3rd party content and is no longer hosted on the website. However, we will continue to redirect all mathweb traffic to its new location.
Z. Škoda wrote
This will be very useful! Thank you for your kind service.
Mr G. L. wrote:
Unfortunately, most e-book content has been temporarily removed from the site in anticipation of a new e-book site coming sometime in 2012.
Z. Škoda wrote
Well, this part may actually be a good news. If eventually we can have even a better and cooperative permanent site for e-books, this may be well serving the mathematics community. We will be happy to index the relevant parts of it from our voluntary Lab project once available.
This makes no sense to me:
Unfortunately, most e-book content has been temporarily removed from the site in anticipation of a new e-book site coming sometime in 2012.
But people seem to say it quite often.
Right, it is not logical nor reasonable to discontinue now as if current availability on this site were tempering with the future availability on another site. But still one can be happy that the unavailability is only temporary and that future site may be karger and more systematic. Though who knows os something else will go worse with possibly new rules of usage. But let us hope that this part is reasonable.
Prof. Peter Michor whose book was also removed from AMS server kindly, after being alerted by me, posted the book to his web server (his contract with AMS allows this), doing a kind service to the community:
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