I really hate to be that person, and content-wise I find the article very interesting, but:
“The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete,” he writes,
and instead migrated to “closed, membership-only FTP servers.”
More recently, though, those collections have moved online
So an FTP server is not "online"? I know, I know, it is a minuscule nitpick. But for some reason this kind of thing takes my attention hostage.
And let me repeat, content-wise this is a fine and fascinating article.
I always have to stop and consider whether I'm talking to someone who equates the web with the internet. If your first and only exposure to the internet was on the web, I suspect it's a very hard notion to shake.
For those of us who routinely use non-http protocols (even if that's only ssh), or are old enough to remember using gopher, telnet, UUCP, NNTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, etc., then ~"moved online and off ftp" is just weird...
It seems that the "moved online" part is less about FTP and more about the "closed, membership-only" part.
Colloquially, "online" pretty much means "available online", and data that is on systems technically connected to internet but accessible only to a few people isn't considered available online.
I get that. The wording was not misleading or ambiguous.
In my job, I have to deal with network problems of various kinds from time to time, and at the network layer, "online" has a specific meaning (Okay, actually several, depending on context), and that was what my brain came up with first.
And let me repeat, content-wise this is a fine and fascinating article.