So they found the operator because they did some opsec mistakes while scraping? Man that sucks. Now is the time to back up the Archive I guess. Hope some good samaritan comes along as dedicated to the cause as them... Godspeed Anna, you've been incredibly helpful in setting information free
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They claim to have found the operator...
The evidence they present for that is that she wrote a python library to interact with their websites (or in their words "developed a repository for a python module for interacting with OCLC's WorldCat(r) Affiliate web services"). Also that she worked for a competitor, describes herself as an archivist, and has publicly stated that libraries and archives should be open and publicly available.
It's not exactly convincing evidence that she's involved with Anna's Archive IMHO.
As a former library developer, I've written all sorts of little bits like that for all sorts of archives and databases and publicly supported open access. If that's really all they've got, it's pretty light. I imagine they've at least got some sort of access logs, surreptitiously viewed conversations about it, or something similar.
A software developer who once volunteered at a library in 2012 wrote in that very year a Python library to interact with a library catalog [1]. What more evidence do you need that she was involved in a scraping operation in [checks notes] 2023?
Her name (Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo) even contains the letters Anna (almost), so she must be the mastermind behind Anna's Archive!
Her library is the top search result if you search for WorldCat in github. Though I personally would have gone with bookops-worldcat, since they claim they made major changes to the library to account for 2020 API changes in WorldCat.
Welp, I glanced at her github and when I decent see any recent related projects assumed that it had been taken private, it didn't even occur to me to look at projects that hadn't been touched in a decade!
This personal is likely originally named Mark Matienzo and won the top award in 2012 from the Society of American Archivists. Details in another comment
If they are suing someone for writing a python library that was transparently and non-anonymously published, without any evidence the author participated in any of the scraping acts... that feels like extra evil.
Really not thrilled to see an organization which claims to represent the interests of libraries stepping so hard on freedom of expression to write software. Pretty shameful.
They probably found her identity a different way but only show this to the public (she most likely is 'Anna')
That's just your speculation. This is not the FBI or NSA, it's a private company doing some random homework. They could well have got it wrong.
Yes. Hopefully!