For some years, I have paid attention to www.archive.org, headquartered in San Francisco. This outfit, now in its 25th year, is home of the Wayback Machine as well as an archive with millions of books and papers. Many books are free downloads, others are set up for electronic loans, backed up by hard copies. Archive.org has a large collection of these.
We, IAPCT, now have our very own Collection – “Perceptual Control Theory” – with its own link Perceptual Control Theory : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive.
With our own books and papers for download, and by other publishers’ PCT related books for loan, reading on screen, we will have a third party (in addition to our own websites which obviously have an agenda, and perhaps less longevity) place to gather PCT literature, a Collection to which we can point people with an interest in the life sciences.
Anyone can register and upload files to Archive.org, as I did, and once a large number of uploads (over 50, I started with 84) by one person have been made, one can ask to have those uploads turned into a Collection. As uploader I turned into the administrator of this Collection. At my request, Archive added Bruce Nevin to be my co-administrator with full rights and privileges. (Bruce expects to be passive for now; he has plenty on his plate). Only administrators can upload to, edit metadata at, and delete files from the Perceptual Control Theory Collection. (I will make another pass to edit all the metadata; it has been quite a learning curve for me).
When you want to add a document to our Collection, please email it to myself or Bruce. Please spell out appropriate metadata, such as you find for other documents.
I have found items that reference PCT in other collections, such as in a defense research collection, analyses that deal with helicopter stability. I not yet found out how to reference these.
Along the way, a friend pointed me to www.z-lib.org, another Internet archive. z-lib.org is a strange outfit. I find that anyone can upload anything without a trace. Anyone can download without a trace. I was uncomfortable with that until I perused Z-Library - Wikipedia and read “Librarians and the Z-Library”, which led me to “Herding the Wind: A journey to the strange world of the e-library in the autumn of the year 2020” (see # 10 in References). The Homepage of Mikael Böök. You will note that tthis page features Swedish, Finnish, and English. Given that Sweden ruled Finland from (as I remember from school) the early 1200s until they lost it to Russia in 1815, there is a 5-10% Swedish/Finnish minority in Finland. Scroll down through all the entries in Swedish and Finnish until you reach the ones in English. http://www.kaapeli.fi/book/libpub/Z-Library_en.pdf
Given that one objective of IAPCT is to make PCT literature freely available to students around the world for a looong time to come, I grew comfortable with z-lib.org. Searching by titles, I found many files for our PCT books, and a great number of books on control theory in general.
I uploaded our Book of Readings. It appeared a few days later. Someone, somewhere, did a decent job of extracting metadata. For sure, I could not enter any.
As a PCT enthusiast, you too can upload relevant literature to z-lib.org and other Internet libraries. Greg Williams, our original PCT archivist, told me a long time ago that the way to safeguard the long term survival of books and documents is to help them get archived in as many places as possible.
All for now,
Dag