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Library Of Congress Will Not Digitize Books
ATKeiper writes "Science fiction writers, like Neal Stephenson in his classic Snow Crash, have written about a future where all the Library of Congress's works are available online. In an underreported lecture late last week, the Librarian of Congress said the Library will not put its books online. But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
luddite:
a) you don't have to be physically in a room with someone to talk to them. You sound like someone saying phones will make the world impersonal. As an aside, in the next ten years we will be talking to each other through online video confrencing when convenient.
b) I'm not an isolated individual. I talk to hundreds of people each and every day. This includes businesses I consult with, friends who live halfway across the world, and my wife at work; all through ICQ, newsgroups, e-mail, or telephone. Note that I can't just walk down the street and find people with similar interests other than the fact that they live in a suburb in the same neighbourhood and therefore might be in a similar economic situation. On the internet I can talk to people from various backgrounds around the world with similar interests and therefore have intellectually stimulating conversations instead of inane pointless drivel small talk unless the other person has something useful to say. Note also that I've met several people I've met on the internet in person.
d) the printed word would not become obsolete until such time as technology emerges that is sufficient to replace all the pros of the book in paper form. There are problems such as display, non-standard characters, illustrations, portability etc. It would not be a tragedy at that point. A digital book would not magically replace those in paper form. I challenge you to draw any causation from the imaginary events we are talking about and the death of paper books.
e) As for adding hastiness to the world - that's a completely idiotic thing to say. Oh yes, increasing the latency on a search because the human mind isn't exactly suited to searching at a fast rate is so smart. In a reality apart from paranoid delusions, I would find my information faster and be able to do something useful like actually read the information I was searching for.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't support waiting for digital books due to the various problems with them. I'm just making a point that your entire post is a stupid rant that makes no sense at all except when you're a short-sighted luddite.
and how many geeks have been told that reading itself is isolating, lonely, and arrogant?
Isn't this the way it always works. Was it not albert Einstein who sait that new ideas do not triumph by convincing the establishment of their new truths. No. It's that the old scientists eventually grow old and die and a new generation grows up with the new ideas and finally takes over.
I type this response on a friends Winblows box so I do not wish to sound holier than thou by attcking your OS. There are free spell checkers out there for windows and it only takes about 30 seconds to spell check when I do it.
The rating system helps keep everyone happy and is not censorship. It simply allows peopole to make postings about hot grits without annoying the rest of us. Some people on slashdot don't have time to read about hot grits to though. I personally read at -1 when I can but when I read at 1 I get all the humorous and informative postings as well as all the "read this before they moderat it down!!!" and "/.ers all cruise around at +2"
Notreading all of the posts on slashdot well that is the fault of the individual readers and not a problem with
Perhaps its time to setup a slashdot account when your postings approach one a day
Circular reasoning. Thus: "Hemp is not practical to differentiate from marijauna because it is illegal and it is illegal because it is impractical to differentiate it from marijuana".
The flaw here is the notion that one can't differentiate. The law is an ass because it outlaws all hemp, regardless of the amount of THC. It is illegal to grow non-THC bearing hemp in this country, but it is legal to import non-THC bearing hemp for industrial and commercial use, so obviously it is not that hard for the law to institute tests to differentiate the two. Nevertheless the irrational ban on hemp growing persists and the hysteria over the "war on drugs" ensures this insanity persists.
Are you really insinuating that if a couple of pot heads see large, commercially tended and harvested fields of hemp, they are going to mistake this for THC bearing marijuana plants? That's just stupid. Of course if everything is outlawed they might mistake a small patch for the real thing, but if non THC bearing hemp was legal and widely planted they would quickly learn the difference and would not harrass the legitmate grower of commercial hemp.
In short, your "argument" against hemp is circular and rests on the projection of our current, irrational laws to the status of universal truths about the plant in question.
There is something "mindless," "isolating," and "arrogant" about not making literary works available to people who have no other way to access them. Gee, I thought that's what libraries were all about.
Do we all look forward to the day when there are no more paper books? I don't. Maybe someday I will, but right now I search out opportunities to remove myself from my computer screen.
Moderators mark the parent of this up now...!
That link takes you to the actual speech.
The actual speech is an enlightened document which shows a real vision for the library, for all, not just the nerdelite...
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
As long as this book is digitized and put online, I'll be happy.
God, what an idiot:
...and just what do you think you're exhibiting? Humility and self-abasement? You're basically saying that because we want to view books on our computer screens rather than have to travel to get them, we're all sex-obsessed illiterate morons.
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
Uh huh. So let's not try to improve anything, let's keep the books in dusty shelves far away from where anyone could get at them so that we can feel good about ourselves in our big, white, superior building.
"It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen." He described this as "arrogance" and "hubris".
What I want to know is, how does one become the Librarian of Congress, and more importantly how do you kick the Librarian of Congress out of office? This guy is just an arrogant luddite.
A few thoughts:
They are making other items available on the Web, mostly things that would be rarer and harder to find than many of their books. This is, at least, a good start.
Billington's first reason for not putting books up is, "We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out." I can understand this. The LoC has a lot of material. I can certainly understand trying to focus on putting the rarer stuff up first.
Books are certainly not going to be removed entirely from our lives. Many people (including myself) far prefer a physical book to reading large chunks of text from a computer screen.
However, as several other people have noted, having books available online is wonderful for research. The ability to search through a book for specific text would be wonderful for people trying to find information on a single topic from a book with a wider scope. (Yes, the index is a useful resource, but only as useful as the indexer made it.) Plus, electronic books are as portable as the reader is. I usually have several short stories to novellas on my palm pilot, so I'm never out of reading material. Reading on that screen is nowhere near as nice as reading from a real book, but my pockets aren't large enough for the average paperback, either.
"Billinton [sic] explained that some of the hostility to the printing press originated because cheap reproduction made books and pamphlets available to more people." MP3s, anyone? (Not an exact correlation, but I think that there are more similarities than Billington sees.)
Finally, however, Billington does seem to stand up against government-mandated censorware in libraries. He says, "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries ... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." He goes on to talk about how trying to define what's "bad" is a slippery slope.
So, while I think he's very wrong about the fufure of electronic books in his society, I do think he has a number of good things to say (especially if you make it down to the end of the article).
--Phil (Why does it always seem like many of Slashdot's posters comment on articles without having read them?)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Riiiiight... and isolated, lonely nerds never go to the library.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Sorry, but this is another one that comes down to money. In a lot of cases, the rights revert to the author when the book goes out of print (depends of course on the contract), and the author can still hope to get it printed / filmed / whatever in the future by somebody else, and get paid for it. Which won't happen if the text becomes freely available simply because the original publisher didn't want to print any more. Once a book goes out of copyright, all bets are off, but until then you'd be ripping off the person who should get the bulk of the credit, the author. Good authors are hard to find, and should be treated with care in hopes that they have at least one more good book in them.
And for books that _are_ out of copyright, the answer is the same as with Open Source software: DO IT YOURSELF. Scan them. Type them. Give money to the electronic Gutenburg foundation. Every bit you do helps everyone else. Don't wait for the Library of Congress/Microsoft/your mommy to do it for you and present it wrapped in a bow (and a license agreement). Go find some book or play or essay that is out of copyright that you think should be free for absolutely everyone, and get to work.
If you want more information on the intellectual property rights issues here, this was thrashed out at length on the Lois Bujold mailing list. Check the archive at Dendarii.com for this thread about a year back, especially posts by Patricia Wrede, an author and former accountant.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Actually there are more people who would read via the net then would go there...
Hey, if you can't do 70 you'll be very unpopular round here!
Who is Seg Fault, and what is he doing with Kernel Space?
What if they did, and reading via the net became so cheap, easy, and pleasurable that making more books stopped being profitable.
Then many years later someone introduces a nasty worm into the internet. *Poof* Western Civilization dissappears in a puff of logic.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
That was my first reaction.
Oh well. He's got a point. Maybe the belief underlying what he actually said is that established political institutions don't create revolutions... grassroots movements do.
I'm glad that they are digitizing something at least... seems like a good goal to make available things that previously weren't...
And new material will increasingly be published on the web anyway. Physical libraries will eventually realize they have to digitize to stay relevant. I hope they keep all the paper books too though.
I agree the digital migration problem is now not such a big deal. (with current fast transfer random access media, etc ...)
I have to disagree with you about using the project gutenberg setup for a case as large as LoC though. We are dealing with a collection many many orders of magnitude larger. A new process is a must.
Of course I really think gutenbergs text formatting standards suck, and am therefore very biased. (They should have used a markup or formatting language.)
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
There is something mindless, lonely and arrogant about experiencing a tale, or wisdom from a book. Only knowlege gained by listening to storytellers has any meaning. And none of those city dwelling story tellers either! Real wilderness hermits they must be.
my initial reaction to the loc's stance was what a bunch of luddites! however, upon further reflection, it dawned on me, that access may only be one part of their mission.
"The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations."
the other part is the preservation aspect. we are the first generation who's history may not be preserved. there are web-sites which, due to various reasons - lack of resources, sabotage, natural disaster - are no longer with us. our history is chronicled in ones and zeros which may be erased at anytime.
the loc may be agonizing over this decision since their is a tendency to destroy the hard copy, once there is a soft copy somewhere.
just a thought.
icq 11041108 GB/AT$ d++$ s: a C++ UL+@ P+ L++ E W+ N+ o K w O M V PS+ PE+ Y+ PGP t++ 5 X+ R- tv- b+++ DI++ D G+ e+++ h
Clearly this shows that the bureaucrat in question is merely abhorrent of change. The Library of Congress, more than anyone else, has overwhelming reason to switch to electronic storage and retrieval, considering that they keep multiple copies of every book published, for archival purposes.
...and while normally I'm not the type of person to call for someone's head on a platter over a singular incident, the comments made demonstrate such an overwhelming ignorance and arrogance that I find the word "Luddite" as used by other posters to feel completely accurrate. Let us hope that the man either quits, is fired, or dies or old age or cranial calcification soon so someone with a functioning brain can take over.
How can reading books online be any more isolating than a vast warehouse with fewer people than one per 100 square feet where no one is really even supposed to speak to each other!
Lunatic!
Absolutely. As a scientific researcher, the ability to be able to search a topic and have actual abstracts or full articles come up is so very useful and saves me much time.
"Harshly criticizing" the internet is like harshly criticizing radio waves. Both are a medium. What is done with that medium is up to human beings, who seem to harbor great interest in things which aim for the solar plexus such as car chases, explosions, and sex. I think Mr. Billington is too worried about his own job security and/or has been watching too much Tee Vee to get his information on "the internet". Can't he see that we can have the best of both worlds? I doubt books will ever completely go away, and believe that having books displayed in the electronic medium can coexist with books in the old paper and ink medium.
Leigh Orf
p.s. I did not find the word "arrogant" in the article which you cite... c'mon slashdot, no need to embellish.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Call 202-707-5000. Hit "0" (zero). Ask to speak to the librarian of congress. You'll be transferred to James Billing's office. Ask to speak to him.
At this point, you won't be able to - they're neck-deep in 200th anniversary celebrations planning for this Monday, and he's (obviously) really busy with that. But ask if you can schedule a time to speak with him. BE POLITE - they are nice people answering these phones. Chances are, you won't be able to, due to their preparations. But, read on.
I called about 20 minutes ago and spoke to Barbara. She was very nice. She asked me if I could call back Wednesday (April 26th) to speak with James Billing, or at least schedule a time to speak with him. I let her know a quick synopsis of why I was calling - the speech he gave, my desire to understand his position and express mine,etc, which you should do too so they know that there are people really concerned about this - and agreed to call back on the 26th.
Don't bother with email. CALL HIM. That way, it's not just an electronic message, which he seems to have a major problem with - it's a breathing (but not too heavily!! :) human on the other end of the line that he's talking with and listening to. It makes a difference.
Call him, folks. This is a big deal.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
I thought this is a long time solved issue in an advanced country like the US. When the hungarian state library published several thousand of classic literature (here), I said finally, we are probably lagging behind the rest of the world by a decade... Looks like I was wrong.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
In response to the arrogance of James Billington, GEEK Force has launched the Worst Features campaign. Included at that page is GEEK Force's own letter to the Library of Congress.
Excellent analysis. However, I prefer the original books because, sometimes, it is very rewarding to read an original text. It's almost a religious experience to read a book printed 200+ years ago in it's original binding of lambskin and parchment. Yes, I've held such books in my hand. Also, searching through archives of such books for nothing in particular is a rewarding experience. Chris
He has an opinion. We have ours. How about the truth. If all that information was online imagine what sort of things could be done with that information. For one my(his) important job would be done the tubes.
TOUGH!
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
It's our library. Let us proof them.
OCR the books and keep the originals. Provide a way for reader feed back of problem spots.
That would maintain The Librarians musty stacks while providing for us in the country (really, the country...with corn and deer and gun racks).
[ Foget about the stability of digital media. It will always change. In 8 years I've had 8 harddrives; one filesystem. My home directory contains files that have not been modified since 1992. I've moved from a 15 MB filesystem to a 40 GB filesystem without loosing any data. Expect evolution of media. ]
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
I just loved one of the quotes from the article:
"Secondly, behind this ... is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced."
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
How many people want to bet that the same kind of discussion took place during the introduction of the printing press? "Oh, this new-fangled print medium just allows you to product many impersonal copies of the same document. What about the skill and craft of the scribers? Where is the personal attention to detail and care that they provide a book?"
It was the printing press that enabled the masses to become literate. It broke the stranglehold the Church had on the Faith, allowing people to read for themselves the holy texts. It completely changed life and society... for the better I think.
And it's happening again with the Internet. The printing press drove the cost of distribution from high to low, allowing many more content creators to reach a wider audience. And now Internet technologies are allowing everyone to become content creators, and driving distribution costs to closer to zero than can be measured.
Hello Mr. Billington? Here's a dollar, go buy a clue. I guess he's never used a good hypertext system. Say you're reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Wouldn't it be nice to have hypertext links to other reports on the subject from the same era? Would that be a lot more convenient than digging through some fscking microfische trying to find newspaper articles. You could spend all day on what could/should be a few clicks.
Public libraries are a political institution, sure, but not as useful as they once were. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have limited space. A lot of the older works get stuck back in storage (or sold at book sales) because few people want to read them anymore. Wouldn't it be nice to continue to have these titles available on-line?
Our greatest literature (Shakespeare, Chaucer and such) is so widely spread and already in electronic form that I'm not worried about it. However, there is a lot more good stuff out there that isn't accessible to anyone. For the less popular authors, there may be only a few dozen copies of their work left. Who knows where they all are (probably stuck in someone's attic), but I bet the Library of Congress has a copy... and can find it!
Heck, there are some excellent works of the 20th century that are now hard to get. For example Vernor Vinge's excellent "The Peace War" was published in the 1981. Just try finding a copy of that now (I have two, and you can't borrow either :-).
I'm sure the LoC should be making an effort to get other materials on-line, but they need to work on books too! The books are actually the most practical stuff they have to put on-line. It's already in a kind digital form (printed text) as opposed to recordings and such. Most books weigh in at a few hundred KB, and you can fit many of them in the space of one high-quality audio recoding.
All in all, a stunning lack of vision from the leadership of the LoC. Why am I not suprised?
James
If the LOC wont do it, there are hordes of folk onthe net who will.
Things like Project guttenberg, etext.org, the Emonks archives and other text/book/doc online efforts will get the stuff out there.
Now , how does the LOC blanace what they say with the exclent WEB SITES they have been putting out? Makes Ya wonder .
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
... which makes one wonder why a book about book burning would be named "Fahrenheit 451"
;-)
the People of the world were disgusted because the Library will not put its books online. But their argument for not putting books online - "even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about the Librarian of Congress ."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm going to save this article, look up this guy's lineage (on the net :) in 60 years, and have my grandkids zip over and laugh at his great-grandkids.
Why should I sit (in isolation) and read chemical ink stamped onto chipped, bleached tree guts when I can buy a thin LCD eBook reader once, and beam infinite amounts of data to it over my lifetime, whenever I want to read something?
I understand the tangibility of books means a lot to us (myself included), but 100 years from now digital media will be so liquid and user-friendly that there will be no reason to drag a knapsack full of wood pulp around to crack open and fill our brains. That should be readily apparent to anyone over the age of 20, who has seen the evolution between a TRS-80 and a wireless-networked 500Mhz laptop.
What a nimrod!
The future is now...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I just wanted to publicly thank Mr. Billington for standing up those of us who aren't a member of the elite. He is bravely protecting our ability to read some of those precious,decaying tomes that only the Library of Congress contains.
It would be a terrible thing if those disintegrating copies of various works were saved and made accessible. I mean really, someone might actually get to READ THEM!!!
I think what we are seeing here is the opinion of someone who is nothing more than a high level bureaucrat with no idea what is really going on in his library.
Whomever copies texts into the future and causes
their preservation wins. Each century it may be
a different institution. If the LOC doesn't
perform this function, then is becomes irrelevant.
A little off topic, but I actually tried heating paper to 451 degrees once, but it didn't burn. I put it in the oven, and in fact cranked it up to 500 or 550, but it still didn't burn. I realize that oven-style heat is qualitatively different from match-style combustion, but I thought it might work anyway. After all, temperature is temperature.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
There's no need to phase out public libraries. Most public libraries are adding more and more internet connected terminals. Hence the whole debate about censorware in public libraries.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
There's more to many books that simply ASCII text... You'd lose the page breaks, bolds and italices, all those fancy swoosh characters they use in chapter names and numbers, etc... I don't think that many books would stand up very well to being translated to straight ASCII. Yes, the text might all be the same, but there's many other subtleties that would be lost in the process. It might be good enough for some people, but overall, I'd rather wait until all the infrastructure is in place to guarantee that as many people as possible can view the books as originally intended.
Further, I'd hope that books whose copyrights haven't yet expired not be put online via the Library of Congress without the author and/or publisher's permission. When it becomes possible to view electronic books that look identicle to the printed versions, many authors would suffer financially if their works were suddenly available for free... I don't think the mp3 encourages cd sales argument could be applied effectively to making whole books available online. If it seems off base to bring up MP3's in this discussion, sorry!
This story is immediately followed by the one about Miramax planning to distribute movies via the net... Don't hat just beat all?
So a movie house can be 'mindless', 'isolating' and 'arrogant' (we already knew this) but a Federal entity will not?? Ha!
There is hope though. If a wealthy corporation were to amass it's own library of 'all works', and make them available online, in competition to the LoC; such a company would be doing the world a service. (BillG, you reading this? Want to REALLY make a difference?)
The government is used to being competed with in the service sector. The Post Office is being displaced by the likes of FedEx and UPS, not to mention AOL and other ISPs..
If the Fed won't do it, vote for someone else. If that doesn't work, talk to the corporates in charge.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
There's plenty of sex on the internet, but TV is still the best place for violence. The semi-literate chatter on usenet is better than the near-illiterate chatter on TV talk shows and some radio talk shows, and the internet is thin on ads compared to TV, where 25% of all content is ads. Or maybe Billington only listens to National Elitist Radio?
is he a hypocrit, or just plain stupid??
or, maybe he realized what a pain in the ass digitizing the entire Library would be?
In which case he's worse - he's an arrogant ass for covering up his lack of capability with a veneer of intellectual snobbery. Unfortunately, Congressional attitudes towards the internet aren't good, with the liberals running scared of its ability to inform and empower actual people, and conservatives running scared of its ability to spread pornography. Otherwise, we could expect someone in Congress to slap Billington down for his snobbery.
So this begs the question: are we going to slowly phase out public libraries and phase in public computer labs to allow free access to all?
I was under the impression we were already doing so... we're adding computers in libraries nationwide, and rapidly these are being used for research more and more. I think, especially for research purposes, electronic storage just makes more sense in the long run...
-Jer
Just my less-than-humble opinion, but my IBM Thinkpad is small, light-weight, and makes a great book. There are quite a few options, and they're improving as time progresses. I don't think we should limit ourselves based solely on the idea that right now we don't have a comfortable way of reading the material. There's still definate pros, not the least of which being ease of searching and small footprint of the books themselves. My bookshelves are rather full. It'd be very nice to be able to contain those books on one small hard disk.
-Jer
You referred to the wrong science fiction writer there. Ray Bradbury better described what the Library of Congress is doing. "People shouldn't read books online because it doesn't make them happy" could be a quote straight out of F451. Yes, goodness, you wouldn't want people to have access to books from their own homes, better to hide them in one city where no one outside of the area has access to them so that no one starts thinking, no one questions the establishment, and everyone is happy.
La la la *sticks fingers in ears* the world is pretty... change nothing... la la la.
The question is not so much whether a book is in print; it's whether the copyright is still in effect. Despite that, there still exists in some quarters the concept of fair use. Scanning isn't much different from photocopying, and most libraries I've been in recently have photocopiers. That doesn't mean the copying is always legal, but copying isn't always illegal either.
Beowulf survived through a single manuscript. Various other parts of the manuscript are missing, and the manuscript itself narrowly escaped destruction in the Cotton library fire of 1731. As it exists now, the edges of the manuscript are scorched, and much of the manuscript is rather heavily worn. Parts of it are only legible with the aid of various transcriptions that were made at the time it was first printed in 1815.
Parchment lasts a long time; this manuscript is about a thousand years old. But it can wear out, and it was most vulnerable when there was only one copy. Out-of-print books which may exist only in the LoC are in danger of loss, and I think society has some responsibility to reduce that risk, especially when such actions can increase accessibility.
One advantage to digitizing works is that it's relatively easy to duplicate the digitized versions. We may need to refresh the copies before bitrot sets in, but I'm inclined to think we'll learn from our mistakes and get stable long term digital storage media.
wanting to read books online, I know working at a computer all day long gives me enough of a headache without reading "War and Peace" on a monitor, too.
This is certainly true today, but it's going to change in a few years, as people start buying Web Pads and the like. Eventually display technology will be good enough that reading a hand-held LCD screen won't be significantly different from reading a traditional book, and at that point I believe people will find themselves preferring these to dead-tree books, if only because they don't have to keep going out and buying new ones.
And any material put on the web will be usable now (on your computer) and then (on your e-book). Hell, you can even take your e-book to the library if you miss the social aspects...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When books disappear, we'll be one brownout away from the Dark Ages. Computers make us dependent on systems we don't understand. We're trapped in the hardware upgrade treadmill that is totally beyond our control. Would you want to wake up one day and find that your copy of "Crime and Punishment" had expired and it would cost you 10.00 to get it back? Or if you dropped your lithium ion battery into your Corn Flakes? You're just an addict. Library sharing at least allows you to share with other people in an orderly way.
You are an acolyte of technology. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it is necessary. Technolust has become the mindless and all-consuming fetish of the developed world. Technolust is responsible for the vicious intellectual property rape being perpetrated against ordinary people. It gives the mass-media "buff boys" enough drool to make the capitalists hard thinking about the "New Economy" and the importance of the "money shot".
I think the librarian fears that if people CAN access any book from a home computer, then they will be EXPECTED to do so -- witness what is happening in schools. A computer is not a formal requirement, but tremendous pressure is exerted on students who don't have access to computers. Once civic governments realize this trend, they can gradually whittle down the funding for libraries thus dividing and conquering the library constituency. Read E.Con for an insightful, if paraniod, look at the hidden agenda of the "wired library" advocates.
One day all the libraries will be closed and we'll be as dependent on the LOC Corp. and it's industry "partners" as we are on Ma Bell (or her spawn).
But by then the LOC will have been privatized or it's entire collection sold to Microsoft.
You will require the latest version of Microsoft Internet Exfoliator in order to view an online copy of the Gettysburg Address. Please press the "I Submit" button
I think we should have hasbro buy the library of congress and then sue the estate of Mark Twain for copyright infringement.
Or maybe Michael Jackson could buy the LOC and re-release all the titles in his name.
I personally hate reading online because half the people are jerks and the other half can't spell. Online text is so impermanent that people really don't give a shit what they write. It all goes away eventually. It evaporates. You don't have to burn anything, you just have to unplug it. Cheers.
However, I do not love the Harlequin romance. I do not love the latest business bore, or the danielle doorstop. I find Stephen King* mildly diverting, though rarely for all 600 pages.
Digitization will stop the disgusting waste of trees (which I also happen to like) on books that are truly consumables. What are the chances that you will keep the latest bestseller on your shelf and pass it down to your children? Very small, which is as it should be.
In this new world of electronic information, precious book-making time and space and labor will go towards creating the books that aren't consumer items. Rousseau's works will come out in marvelous new leather-bound limited editions, perhaps hand illustrated and hand bound, and signed by (for example) the author's nephew's brother's ex-wife. The most wonderful and enduring works will make it onto paper, and the home library will be a joy to walk through. The world is slowly changing to a place where people have enough money to afford material objects created by artisans** instead of by mass manufacture. The reason for this change is and will continue to be gains in efficiency in manufacturing consumer items, as well as the digitization of needlessly tree-based information***.
New books should have to past the test of time before we honor them with the hand of an artisan bookmaker****. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can research Victorian England by downloading scholarly texts, and then enjoy some quiet time on the porch with a beautiful copy of Little Dorrit.
Notes
* The perfect candidate for throwaway e-books, so we can stop throwing away the t-books
** Novica.com
*** Newspapers, most textbooks, newsletters, junk mail, romance novels, etc. -- just to name a few
**** I like maps too
----------
----------
"If children weren't copyrighted, no one would have babies." -- Alex Eulenberg
To DeepDarkSky
Your use of agism to make this otherwise valid point is unfortunate. Arrogance and Luddism are hardly unknown among the young.
- a 50+-year-old reader of Slashdot.
I agree wholeheartedly. I vastly prefer the real thing, and love wandering around in archives of old books, just to chance on something. But if those books should get damaged, we need a backup.
Or how about papyrus. The ancient Egyptians used it and since it is made from banana skin it means it comes from a resuable source. One advantage over hemp is that the narrow minded politicians won't automatically think 'Drugs'. The only thing is I have no idea whether anyone has perfected a process to improve the quality of paper made from it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Apart from the unnecessary Reformation-era rhetoric and Catholic bashing,
there are a number of historical fallacies in your post. Prevent the Bible
from being printed? The first book off Gutenberg's press was the Bible. A
Catholic Bible. Prevent it from being translated in English? There was a
bunch of awful non-Catholic English translations before the respectable and
beautiful King James Version. But then we have this minor detail that the
Catholic Duoay Rheims version predated the KJV by a couple of years. Be
thankful that there is a Bible at all: without those Catholic monks
hand-copying those manuscripts all through the centuries, there would have
been no Bible to print.
Then there is Latin. In medieval Europe, most people were illiterate. The
few who could read, could read Latin. Europe had a universal language. The
value of a printed English translation was doubtful. But literate Europe
insisted on reenacting their Babel, splintering themselves along nationalist
and language barriers. Good going, guys.
Which is about the only way I see to deal with Mr. Billington. Though it'd be nice if we could replace the old reptile with at least a mammal.
I wrote my undergrad thesis on the impact of the development of the printing press on German Literature and the Reformation. So, to me, Billington's comments seem more than a little familiar. Though it's nice that it's not a member of the Inquisition, this time...
While I don't disagree with the importance -- and possible priority -- of digitizing the "special materials", it *is* imperative that books get digitized as well. Not necessarily put online for open access -- especially those with copyright issues -- but digitized both for preservation purposes and for research purposes.
I was taught about original sources as a child. And it would be *far* more useful -- and perhaps *enhance* the LoC's annual funding arguments -- if they had a plethora of original material digitized for schoolchildren and university students to search on and use -- or at least *know about* so that they can request the item through interlibrary loan. The LoC is *not* going to be less of a research-friendly institution by digitizing books.
It was difficult for me to obtain the facsimiles of a court process -- handwritten -- in 1439 in Strasbourg (Gutenberg was sued by one of his VCs, whattaya know?) while I was in college. It was an original source that was recommended to me by my prof; otherwise, I'd never have found it. I eventually got the book -- well out of copyright even then -- through interlibrary loan. This is a typical problem -- research materials that cannot be easily obtained should be available online. Traveling to the LoC in Washington would have been *vastly* prohibitive for an *undergrad* thesis.
The LoC is supposed to be an "open" repository of knowledge. Mr. Billington is making sure that it's only open to *his* type of scholar. At least for his tenure.
Yeah, we oughtta send Jon Katz, just for laughs. And I'll add this to my list to send to Congressman Mike.
--jas
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
Ebcdic was proprietary. ASCII is a 30 or 40 year old WORLD standard...
Ebcdic is hardly unreadable even today...any unix machine has the software needed to translate it into ascii.
The only real problem is with the use of proprietary formats. Were the LoC to turn all it's books into Word documents, then we would be in trouble. But if they use an open non-binary format then they won't have any trouble at all.
The virtue of hard books is that so MANY are printed.
Uh, this only applies to mass market books. the vast majority of written works are not printed in any great numbers... The situation would be greatly improved if more books were made availble in digital formats.
I guess you don't know that some of the very first CDs pressed are already deteriorating due to delamination of the substrate.
Thats really a special case, though. The problem was caused by the fact that the aluminum layer on these early disks extended all the way from the inner edge of the hole to the outer edge of the disk. As the aluminum was exposed at these points, it would oxidize...
Modern disks have sealed edges...so this isn't a problem. There are now 20 year old CDs which are still in perfect condition.
Of course, CD-Rs haven't been tested nearly as well...
I see this popping up all the time: good ol paper book much nicer and easier to read than something on the 'net. Now, I'm not going to claim that it ain't so for other people, but for me there really is no difference. I've read perhaps a hundred or so full format (300papges +) books on the 'net and sometimes I read paper books and it feels exactly the same to me. I guess I just soak up the content and the form isn't that important for me. Maybe you people have bad refresh rate set on your monitor or just a bad monitor or something? Also, NS or IE aren't really meant for reading books. I use lynx where I remember the page and can jump to it easily (ie you can hit 273p[enter] and jump to page 273). As far as this article goes, I think this guy is very mistaken. If he can give people the choice, why not? Saying that it's isolating and stuff is pure bull - let's say I have 2 or 3 hours left at sunday evening, and I have work tomorrow, would I go to library and spend perhaps 1-1.5 hour getting there, picking the ./ or something as time-wasting :>. The point is, he obviously "don't get it". Simple as that.
book, getting back home and reading it the time I have left? The truth is, I simply won't do it, and most people won't either. Momentous accessibility of Gutenberg project goes a loooong way. You have a free hour, you go there and read something. If it wasn't there, you'd probably go and watch teevee or read
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
I've read ton's online and I don't feel that mindless. It's a shame that a crack-smoker like that can make such a major judgement call like that. Let's hope the decision is overturned someday.
Doesn't sound as if you read the article. Wait that's the POINT!
Did any of you actually read the Tech Law Journal Article?
I disagree with this logic. Sure paper lasts longer than magnetic media, but until they invent the matterfax(tm), digital is a safer bet in the long run. Digital copies are easy.
What I'd rather see is an immediate start to the submission of all books to the libary in a digital form as well as the hardcopy. The cost of this should be bourne by the publisher. After all don't the vast majority already use DTP? The cost to each publishing house is a copy of Adobe Acrobat or similar.
Offline storage for these books is going to get huge though. That is a problem and more than likely terrifies the LOC.
Bof.
Predictions like those and These make some sense at the time based on current technology. They were often based on fantasy in their day. Personal robots didn't catch on due to many impractalities, starting with keeping them powered. The "Pushbutton Society" they predicted in the 50s and so forth have not been wholly realised, but some of the technologies have. PCs are also a part of the equation left out in the 50s, but they developed anyways!
While the conversion of ALL books seems ludicrious, MOST of them can be translated to machine code. A great deal of the books out there can be OCR-ed and formatted into a usable format and some stories are only available online.
Besides, the prediction of all books being available online are more limited by publishers than technology. Until you have some sort of cross-platform (fie on Microsoft!) book-reading solution where payments for material are made, you won't see everything online. This is more societal than anything else.
Lowmag.net
Man, he was on Reading rainbow before startrek!
(oh, and follow the link. This post is NOT redundant)
Lowmag.net
So we know who to write to to get him fired?
--Ben
Geez, I thought that was what American government was already in the business of doing? Heck it's what he's doing when he talks about how bad it is to (snicker) read books (Oh, hee, hoo!) online! (BWAAHAHAHAHAH!!)
(Wiping eyes) Oh dearie me! (Hehehe.) Anyway . . .
How about this definition of bad? A bad librarian is one who believes it's his business to restrict the disemination on information.
Those trees have already been converted to paper. No trees will be saved by doing this
Most all wood pulp used to make paper comes from trees grown on tree farms, rather than from trees grown in forests. If the market for paper shrinks significantly some of those farms will be converted to other forms of agriculture, thereby resulting in fewer, not more, trees on the planet. But since the valuable asset we should be concerned about saving is the forest, and not the tree, it really doesn't matter.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
If the LOC renders the public library obsolete to 50-75% of the public, the remainder,
whether they are too poor or technically illiterate, will suffer. I'm not saying that
I agree with his decision, only that the issues involved are more subtle than they first appear.
I don't think even if the Library of Congress digitized and put online every book with an expired copyright, or even somehow every book in their collection that they would render the public library obsolete to 50-70% of the public. The LoC doesn't keep a copy of every book every printed in America and haven't for some time. Most of the books they would put online in a would be of more interest to researcher than to the average person, so digitizing the LoC might hurt university libraries which is where more research is done, but wouldn't affect the average person who stopped by the library to pick up the latest novel to enjoy, or most kids doing research, since it is easier to ask the reference librarian for help locating research that it is to browse through a huge online store of information.
I think he forgot a couple - "impatient" and "lazy" spring immediately to mind...
Anyone that matters is...
Uh... can you exsplain why the library of the United States Congress should care about access by people from other contries?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Until really fast internet access is avaible for every house with a telephone jack don't expect this to work.
A 56k, or even 26k connection to the internet is pretty fast, when your talking about written words. This is plain text here. Most books would be between 500k and 2000k
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I fail to see any subject matter ignorance displayed in the root post. Could you illustrate some, or are you just a dumbass?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What is wrong with all you people? I've never had a problem reading online, and if you do, why not just increase the font size??
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What it actually means is that it's completely unnecessary and caters to a small elite few.
Yes, those elite 90 million americans with internet access! curse them!
Do you think someone who can't afford a modem can afford to fly to DC to read a book from the library of congress?
You do not need a god damn cable modem to read a book online!
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I believe the that the material for the linked story was derived from the Question/Answer session, with statements like "when asked if..." etc. Actually, the slashdot blurb was even more inflammatory then the article itself, and really tries to explain his position rather then bashing it. I don't agree with him, but from the story, it does sound like he's thought this through.
I personally just think that they don't want to take the time to scan/OCR/correct all the stuff...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Bandwidth has nothing to do with it. Its not hard to split books up into chapters--the splitting point is already there! Whoa the big-assed file just got a *lot* smaller.
There are lots of FAQs and HOWTO's and even online books which are split up just this way. One table of contents to link all the seperate files together.
"Text is too bandwidth-consuming" is the silliest argument that I've ever heard.
Please continue, what does interaction have to do with reading? Its you and words, not you and another person.
I disagree, I have no problems reading from a screen. There is more benefit of running it past another person IMO. Hell, I email documents for proofreading by other people (its just plain text); but for all I know, they print them off and proofread them.
I think its just a personal preference. Perhaps you should try a higher refresh rate, maybe it won't hurt your eyes anymore.
I live in Fairfax, VA, and, actually, all I had to do was get a library card. You needed a valid driver's license or similar ID, but you can just walk in, sit down, and start resuesting books. The stacks are off limits to the public (for good reasons, I think) but you can request anything and it'll be on your table about 30 minutes later.
Oh good, somebody already put those quotes here.
I checked to make sure that site wasn't a parody. This Billington guy seems like a straw man representation of the elitist literature prof who hates everything to do with technology, and whose entire worldview is constructed by the words of dead philosophers. This pompous fool probably doesn't even realize that writing itself is a technology.
Everytime I start to feel some sympathy for the people who feel overwhelmed by the rate of technological progress, some moron like this guy makes himself known, and then all I want to do is drag these people kicking and screeming into a world dominated by genetic/nano-engineering and mechanical intelligence.
I have to agree that there is nothing like the feel of a book in your hands, and that I would read a paperback or a hardcover over an electronic version any day.
However, there are some materials that are simply impossible to find at the local library. If I need to find a certain book, paper or article and the library doesn't have it and can't order it in, then I'm out of luck. At that point, I would love to have the option of looking it up online.
I'm not advocating that we dump paper for photons -- in my bedroom alone I have almost one hundred books, let alone the majority of them sitting in the next room -- but by making more books available in electronic format, I can only benefit. I'll still buy every decent book I can get my hands on, but those that I can't physically get my hands on, I can look up online if need be.
Of course, the question then becomes "will putting more books online result in a decline in the number of paper books published?" I don't think so, not when the majority of the world still abhors deciphering the crusty, pixellated characters on a computer screen. Not only that, but when was the last time you took your computer to bed with you to read?
Uh... everyone's been talking about books on which the copyright has already *lapsed*. Not about currently actively copyrighted works.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Computers are great for disseminating information, but lousy when it comes to what most people consider traditional book reading. Let's face it--you can't curl up on a couch on a rainy day with your 750MHz mini-tower and 19" monitor. And even if you could, why put the unnecessary strain on your eyes?
:-)
Microsoft's new palm PCs with ClearType support are released today. Just FYI
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The Library of Congress isn't the congressional records. It's basically a regular library that's run by the US government, with lots and lots and lots of books.
Copyright infringement != theft, it's copyright infringement, and is likely to be civil rather than criminal an offense, unless you make available to the public enough within a 6 month time period to run afoul of the NET act.
And me without moderation points. Damn. That was actually funny.
He host[s|ed] a show on PBS called "Reading Rainbow".
According to the US Code, the Librarian of Congress is appointed by the President. Seeing as how this is a) an election year, and b) a fairly minor matter in the broader scheme of things, I seriously doubt we could get Pres. Clinton to act on this.
However, we can forward this to our local librarians. I suggest printing off a copy, complete with the URL, and going to your local library and dropping it off. If we could get the various libary associations in on this, and convince them of the benefits of digitizing these works, a grassroots effort might be more beneficial.
It might also be beneficial to explain how the .PDF format works, and what it can (and can't) do.
-Rev.I'm always hoping for a version of grep that works in the 'real world', myself.
-nme
Besides the knee-jerk luddite reaction I think it's interesting that the Librarian knows that there are parallels between the introduction of the printing press and the internet but then ignores what many slashdotters would consider an obvious conclusion:
That the internet has the capability of providing almost free information to everyone.
I had to snicker at the statement that
Furthermore, in public libraries "there is an inherent adversity to censorship."
Public libraries invariably practice censorship of a sort, they can't afford to have every copy of every book available. The public librarian has to make decisions about the books that match their communities wants and needs. In a small public library this means that many books that should be considered essential reading for citizens in an informed democracy are unavailable. Books full of 'radical' notions are also frequently passed over. Instead there are racks of bad romance novels... I'm not blaming the librarians, or the public library system. This is just the reality of having a very limited budget and limited space.
The Librarian's perception of the internet is also dangerous:
So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate
chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
If this is true, I would suggest that the reason is that people like the Librarian, who have the keys to huge amounts of 'good' information, aren't doing their jobs to bring this information to the internet.
If these statements accurately reflect the attitudes of our Librarian of Congress, I think we need someone with a better grasp of the abilities of technology in charge.
Dan
Isn't it just like a cranky old out of touch person to decide that the rest of the world has gone to hell and they're going to solve everything by doing nothing. This is total crap. Give us a good reason for not giving us an alternative: low funds, huge time demand, copyright issues, etc. Not "there's too much sex on the web, so instead of putting more substantive content up, we're not going to put anything up". (yes, I realize they're putting something up, but come on...). I hate mean old farts...almost as much as mean young ones..
I would have thought reading a book in the reading room of a large library was isolating and lonely. Also I think it's arrogant of someone to insist on it.
Not being American, I can't answer this but maybe someone else can. Who actually owns the contents of the Library of congress? The government or the people?
Bob.
Hemp does produce 4 times the paper fibre per acre that trees produce, but you are correct, that doesn't mean it should be wasted.
The oldest book I ever held in my hands was printed in 1784 on hemp paper. The pages were still snow-white. Wood paper sucks unless you use expensive acid-free stuff.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I thought that the US taxpayer paid for the LoC. I was really suprised that it belongs to James Billington! If the public has a demand for it to be online, then it should be online. It should be evaluated now if the demand will exist (not always accurate but it's better than half-assing it when the demand does exist). I think it is insane for Mr. Billington trying to make the place sound like it's his personal library and you should only read books how HE says, and you should only be able to read them HOW he says.
I personally can't stand reading online, but online material gives me access to it from wherever I am.
Now, there's ridiculous amounts of money moving around creating and maintaining sites whose sole existence revolves around banner ads and acquiring email addresses. From time to time, Technocomputron Corporation may email you about special offers that IT feels may be of value to you. Click here and we'll only spam you when we absolutely have to.
Do we really need all these portals? Bah, humbug. I miss UUCP.
>This is the gov't telling the poor and the non 31337 that they have no right to knowledge
I know...I would rather see books online. Reading itself is a pretty solitary activity, unless you're reading to a group. There's nothing arrogant about reading online, it's just a sign of the times.
I would also like to read paper over computer screen but when you think of all the paper that could be saved by putting bookd online i will put up with a little eye strain.
Yeah, but say the LoC or whomever puts all their books online. Those trees have already been converted to paper. No trees will be saved by doing this; only by beginning to publish new books and 're-issues' electronically will alleviate that problem. Besides... even if all their stuff IS put online, do you really believe that the general public will be willing to sit down and read entire books on their monitors? Or is it more realistic to think that, instead, people will just download the file and print it on their own computer... thereby INCREASING the amount of paper used.
I think people need to remember also that a big part of the LoC also is the cataloguing of books and allowing people to search for Dewey Decimal references and get those books at their local library/university. I live in DC, and I I've haven't once actually gone to the LoC and picked up books there. I've searched their catalog numerous times, but always got the book I wanted from other sources. Yeah, LoC has a lot of obscure things as well, but truly how many of those wouldn't be able to be collected through the library sharing system we already have?
I really don't think we should be 'pooh-poohing' the amount of time, effort, and money that this would take and label those against it currently as 'luddites' (granted I found those quotes about arrogance et al. pretty crazy). I think that this may be done in the future, but that's a lot of money to spend on something which still should be talked out to see just how useful it would be in our current world.
MORON.
Hemp looks exactly like contraband (Marijuana).
"Of course officer, its just legal hemp we're growing in our hydroponics..."
There was an experiment in our neighborhood (the first of its kind in Canada) where a farmer took an acre, fenced it off, and grew hemp (this is on the west coast, I know our pot is world famous). He couldn't get a decent crop because of STUPID kids breaking in and stealing plants, wrecking plants, etc.
In short: Hemp doesn't work because:
1. Enforcment. See caption above.
2. Cost to protect it. See paragraph above.
Granted, if you change the laws about pot growing, you remove the enforcement problem. Trouble is, another legal drug is a serious problem when its pretty easy to grow it in your backyard... tends to take a chunk out of the taxes on alcohol, never mind the social implications.
However, you still have the protection problem - there will always be enough stupid kids to go out and wreck your crop, just because it might be 'the real thing'.
I don't know why I'm posting this, I just get fed up with the stupid 'hemp can save the world' mentality. It has nothing to do with DuPont, it has nothing to do with some US Government anti-save-the-world-fuck-you-neo-hippies conspiracy - it just doesn't fucking work.
Cyano
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Granted, if I wanted (or could take the time), I could drive the 8 or so hours it would take me to get to DC from here, so it is available to me. However, as a prgrammer, I notice that "and" between available && useful. It (the Library) is of no _use_ to me if I can't have access to it when I need to.
Well, thanks James for doing your part to make the internet better. Idiot.So it's isolation to read online but not to read in a library. Does this mean that I can go to the Library of Congress and throw a party so I'm not isolated?
Who put this fool into the position he is in? I would think they would love to get all this information out and on to the web if for no other reason so it isn't lost (in the case of old books). I would even pay to subscribe to a website like that. I can see them saying that they won't do it soon because of cost but to say they won't at all is silly. Of course they will. Maybe not while this guy is around but it will happen.
They could make money off of this by charging for access or just raise my taxes a little. This is something that I would pay more taxes for. Gladly. Or even better take some of my Social Security that I'm paying (and will never see again) and funnel it so that it can pay for a online Library of Congress. At least then I will have something to show for my money. With people talking about online universitys and such is a online Library of Congress really all that far off? (Luddites not withstanding of course)
they were only going to release works with expired copyrights.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Not everyone can fly to Washington DC to the library of Congress.
Not everyone can drive to the library of congress
I would even say that there are more people on the net then there are people with the means to get to the library of congress
Everyone where I live can go to the local library and get on the net.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
no it caters to many. No one is saying that you would have to get the stuff on the internet it would just be another option. Your car analogy totally doesn't apply. Besides people on modems can download stuff either in parts or download it slowly.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Tell me in what way putting books on the internet is restrictive??? True not everyone has an internet connection. But that doesn't mean they are restricted. They wouldn't loose anything but many other people would have alot to gain. People who live in the countrey far from libraries can still get internet access. Well that means that putting books on the internet would enable those people. It would save others such as my self many trips to the local library. Tell me who would be limited by putting a book on the internet.
Pdf files are not big(usally under 1MB). The biggest I have seen was the gimp manual. This was about 9mb. I have seen this as a pretty hefty published book. I'm sure that the library would have something about ten times that size. That would be rare though. But there are programs wich let you resume downloads. Before I had gotten any of these came out. I downloaded the diablo demo. At the time it was huge!! 40MB on a 28.8 modem. I had to download this as one continuous download. It took a few tries but I did it. I used a modem for quite some time and still do when I'm away from home. Last time i was away I downloaded 10MB worth of mp3 over long distance on my laptops modem connected at 28.8. and I did it in one day. It's not as difficult as you make it seam to download files bigger than 500k. You really are makeing it out to be worse than it is. Most modem users can connect to the internet stay connected and get downloads of about 2.8k/s. And that is a low estimate.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Other than that, I prefer reading a physical book over an e-book any day. Paper is much nicer on the eyes than an LCD screen.
I would also like to read paper over computer screen but when you think of all the paper that could be saved by putting bookd online i will put up with a little eye strain.
Simple, just ORC scan all the books with TextBridge or something similar. We can all be reading miscanned books by next winter! "We the purple.."
I do agree completely what the Librarian of Congress says about reading online. I hate it. I find it much better to sit down and read the newspaper while eating or reading a book on the couch. However, this does not mean that the contents of the Library of Congress shouldn't be digitized. I think they should do so, and still keep the hard copies as well.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
I'd rather spend rainy day on my couch reading on-line books then in LoC reading them form the dead trees :-), even if it is "community thing" and I wouldn't feel "lonely and arrogant" there :-) Besides, have you actually seen any books recently? Well, at least these I'd like to read are usually thicker then half an inch...
Regards,
kovi
And good paper isn't always used. I'm going to have to re-buy my venerable copy of I, Robot by Asimov one of these days because the paper is so acidic that the book is self destructing. I doubt I'll ever have to replace my great works of literature CD-Rom, though, unless I'm careless (or future computers no longer have the ability to read it because it is in some proprietary format.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I strongly suspect that the Library of Congress has it, though... pity I can't go to Washington D.C. in the near future.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I was an isolated loner as a child (much as now) and if it wasn't a computer that was keeping me away from the world, you can bet it was a good book.
Hooray for books, and for the chance of rewarding, unsocial behaviour they provide. Since when are books a social activity anyway, has he never read Thoreau?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
(I should note, I'm not an Objectivist, but I admire the way Ayn Rand shakes up the Establishment anyhow.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Guess I'll have to wait until a truly permanent storage medium becomes available.
Whatever happened to that old saw that plastic was bad for the environment because it never disintigrates and stays around forever? (I took some comfort in thinking that long after my body had withered away to dust my Sega CDs would still be around...)
This is actually pretty disturbing. But then, I would never, ever advocate digital media replacing the actual books (I just want to make that clear), I just thing that redundancy and backups in various formats are a good thing... just not as good as I thought.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Adjectives can have a variety of suffixes, you know...Just to be picky.
It's called the Guttenberg Project. Know it, love it, volunteer for it. We are digitizing our asses off! So it's happening with or without librarians.
Sharkfish
Kiss off. I hate librarians. They were always looking at which books I checked out, etc., as if it were any of their business.
And if the LOC doesn't digitize, private publishers will, based on DEMAND, fool. Your library will become even less significant.
I dreamed, as a child, of a time when all books were available on line. I looked up books in catalogs on green screens at my neighborhood library, and 90% of them were never available. That SUCKED! Of course I was too poor to get to where they were...and of course the library exchange program was WEAK and LIMITED.
So now that my dream of a digitized, widely available library with every book in the universe on line...some pompous asshole that looks and smells of old fart with reason to keep education and access to information within the hallowed halls of hell...tries to stop progress.
Well, don't worry, Billington. You will be overrun. Books will be digital, and knowledge will be for everyone. The internet will speed the LOC to its useless, archaic, limited existence.
When this happens, we will all be rich with the last stronghold of control that old farty assholes have...information.
Sharkfish
Or just use (La)TeX instead. It's free, fast, heavily-used, compatable, and makes virtually any text look better. Whenever I read a book from Project Gutenberg, I usually LaTeX the text and read it using xdvi or kdvi --- it's easier on the eyes than using Xemacs (serifs, margins, etc.). Not to mention LaTeX source code is plaintext as well, which should be readable for at least a century. If paper isn't subject to bit rot, then why not simply print books instead?
While in this account Billington doesn't mention it, there is a bigger
issue for the LOC: How long can they expect paper media to last?
We know from experience that bacteria-free bone lasts for many
hundreds of centuries. But fliers and pamphlets aren't reliable for
more than a half-dozen centuries, scrolls have wooden rods and other
moving parts that fail over time, and some studies indicate that the
fiber in book pages may deteriorate after five hundred years.
And this ignores the formatting issues: Can you find hardware to read
your archive of hand-written manuscripts and original scribblings
today? Will you be able to find paper readers 200 years from now? And
if the data's stored as text, will anyone be able to find scribes? My
senior thesis is safely stored on a papyrus sheet in Grog Writing
Picrograph format. It might as well be written in an alphabet.
If the LOC were to take the trouble to paperize the books, what media
and format could they reliable store them on so that they'll still
exist for future generations?
Given these constraints, I'd rather not have them spend my tax dollars
on the labor-intensive process of reading, writing and correcting text
from millions of bones.
WTF does this dood mean when he says, "mindless"?
Doesn't he know that this only applies to Windoze users?
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I agree that this seems like a bull-headed stance to take on what seems an inevitability. I can see where he's coming from as far as people not wanting to read books online, I know working at a computer all day long gives me enough of a headache without reading "War and Peace" on a monitor, too. However, as you said, what about the books that are old and falling apart? Wouldn't it be in the interest of academia to have digital copies to thumb through? And what about research? Certainly it would be awesome to have all those tomes online and available to the public.
As for his degrading commentary about internet content and its subservient position towards commercialism, I flip him a hardy bird. I hate ad banners as much as the next guy but somebody's gotta pay the bills...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
In the much shorter run, your digital media will either 1) decay or 2)become outmoded. Actually given the short longevity of data formats with the tech curve these days Your acid paperback book will probably outlast any of today's digital formats. Books don't crash. And they yield more readily to my personal modes of sorting and classifying information than most web search engines. There is merit to what Billington says, (hint:READ THE ARTICLE ITSELF), he just chose possibly the worst choice of phrasing that anyone could think of. I keep a small shelf of books and magazines in my bathroom. When I go to the can, I pick out one randomly and read from it until I leave. The best of today's and tomorrow's tech is too much of a timewaster by comparison. It's the same reason I keep a reading nook in the same room as my computers.
I would also like to read paper over computer screen but when you think of all the paper that could be saved by putting bookd online i will put up with a little eye strain.
I can't presume to speak for the author of this, but perhaps what he (she?) meant by "paper could be saved" is that the existing paper copies could be archived and preserved far more efficiently, as they would need to be exposed to far less everyday wear and tear from being used.
Moreover, books (and other more perishable media) could be stored in more effectively "preservationist" environments if they had to be removed less frequently. (I don't know much about this sort of thing, but requlated temp/humidity and such has got to be good for books)
Please note that I'm not suggesting that, by any means, we make "real" books available only to the elite, or something like that. This seems to be what Billingsworth was afraid of. (or, at least, it seems a reasonable thing to be afraid of). However, as online holdings increase, fewer call will be made for tree-media materials. Let's face it, crummy screen or not, for "serious research" very little about tree-media can beat the searching, indexing, and exporting capabilities of a simple electronic format.
abszero
---
"..it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics." Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography.
Uh... can you exsplain why the library of the United States Congress should care about access by people from other contries?
- Because we can afford to.
- Because reliable, cheap/free (beer), free(speech) access to information is THE breeding ground for democracy.
- Because the more places in the world have access to this information, the safer the information is.
- Because, once the information is avaliable electronically, there is little to no extra cost involved in providing it to foriegn people (at, least, those who read English).
- Becasue the notion of providing the contents of the Library to the world is romantic and idealistic, and romantic idealists are not nationalist pricks.
- Becasue information want to be fucking free.
---abszero
The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped -- a unit of the Library of Congress -- is very actively pursuing the creation and distribution of digital content. Check out their website for information about their Web-Braille and Digital Talking Book initiatives. The NLS is very interested in developments in the eBook world, since this has tremendous potential as a source of accessible content for their members.
I'm sure that Billington is totally unaware of what the more forward-thinking parts of his organization are up to.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."
Gerald Ford
You won't find this in the LoC...
No Laughing Allowed!
heh.. Whatever happened to "The Medium is the message?"
:)
Having read several books online, I can tell you that it is NOT the same experience. Distribution is good, but reading a book on a computer screen just plain sucks.
I think this will eventually catch on, but only when you can have a high resolution foldable screen to carry around with you.
You could even roll it up and bring back the reverence of the scroll
The text of Mr Billington's 14 April remarks can be found on the LoC website: http://www.loc.gov/today/trans cripts/041400-npc.html Nothing about his remarks in the Q & A session, though.
...disavow all knowledge...
I just stopped and thought about it and have concluded this argument is total crap. What is your point? That because people don't like something no one should have it?
Not everyone has a car.
Not everyone can drive.
Cars have killed people.
So no more cars? I don't like avacado's, who gives a shit?
There is no valid argument why information chould not be spread in as many forms as is possible. Blind people can't read text, so not text books only braille? I can't read braille, no more braille books?
- I like pudding.
No, you don't have to release copyrighted material. There is only a fraction of LOC materials that are copyrighted. Everything written between 10,000 B.C. and 1920 A.D. isn't copyrighted. Lets start with that first and move on.
- I like pudding.
The cake is a pie
I think you're mixing up some technical issues here.
The problem of saving data in electronic form is more of a hardware issue, not software. XML, HTML, SGML, ASCII are useless if your 5.25" disk is saved in commodore 64 format, and 10 years old to boot.
the magnetic media can wear out easily. the equipment to read the disk may be unavailable. that's why saving data electronically is so much trouble.
Well, in theory it can be. I find using the computer at times to be all of the above with the possible exception of 'arrogant' (of course that can exist in most #windows and #linux channels). I at least demand the option of getting up and going to the library or reading a book online. I want to be able to say to myself, "hey...I need some sunlight and maybe some not-so-stale air. I think I'll go to the library and see if I can meet some intelligent REAL LIFE women." I mean, hey where better to meet intelligent women who might have a life outside of computers?
Anyway, I think it's arrogant not to adapt to new technology. I also think it's arrogant to think one can completely replace old technologies with new ones. There can always be a happy medium.
"The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is allev
Sounds like your typical librarian weirdo. They are just too lazy put it online. God forbid we ask a govt. employee to work.
With all the debate over which media will provide the best storage for the future, a thought struck me. The brain stores information as a type of standing wave in the electro-chemical currents. Has the net gotten complicated enough that all information is circulating out there somewhere? Considering all the cross-links and pirated sources I have a feeling that everything is always out there more than once.
There is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online
/.
We need a paper version of
Perhaps with mailings every half hour.
While it may not be in the spirit he intended, and as a librarian, I may not agree with the points about 'internet as cesspool' I do believe there is some arrogance in believing that you can get everything off the Internet, for a couple of reasons:
Libraries constantly fight funding reduction because of clueless legislators who hear from their intern or aid or whoever that 'you can get everything off the Internet, so harrumph, what do we need these libraries for?' (remember that bonehead from Arizona a few weeks ago that wanted to restrict campus internet use to "educational use" only?) This results in an accelleration effect: If the LOC started digitizing books, certain factions would take it as a fait accompli that all the books were already digitized, therefore funding for the LOC should be cut drastically --resulting in reduced capacity for the LOC to digitize books and continue to collect paper copies in the transitional period (I believe that most/all books will be published electronically or dual format someday)
Secondly, there is a tendency to rush in and digitize in shovelware fashion and say 'there, did it, done!' where a more studied and careful approach would result in greater overall accessibility in the long run--I've seen more crappily done PDF's than you can shake a $69 scanner at. I also did a paper on this years ago, but it's on 5 1/4" floppy and darned if I have anything that can pull it back up now...
There's something mindless, isolating and arrogant about browsing porn too, but that never stopped anyone :)
Copying all of a library's LPs onto CD doesn't alienate the vinyl crowd. It just lets in a whole other crowd.
Now, granted, one copy of a hardcopy book isn't enough to ensure that it's preserved. It could get burned, worm eaten, etc. The virtue of hard books is that so MANY are printed. And this is the kind of thing we need to do to digitized books to make sure they stick around: maintain a plurality of formats in a plurality of locations.
So, modern day. Gee, I love it when a book is printed too small, or the lines are too close together, or a page gets ripped or stained. Not! I'd love the ability to resize pages, respace lines, not worry about damage to the text if my equipment was damaged... all kids of advantages to e-books.
Of course, this is devil's advocate to a great extent; i prefer "real" books now, too, especially because CRTs really hurt my eyes, but LCDs aren't the greatest either. We've got work to do. But it might seem like the scroll vs. print issue, eventually...
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Worship this hard copy! Printers worked day and night, bakkinaday, to make this information available! Um, hello, it's about the information, not the format. I'm sure few authors cared more about the text formatting of their books than about how many people received the author's ideas.
the 'net is a community thing, too. And much more so than a library, IMO. The net certainly provokes more social interaction than scouring for books at a library does.
I think that many people have yet to realize the great, immense potential of the interconnectedness of things. I know it was a significant paradigm shift when I began to think of the net as a global conversation; where the cost of distributing and assembling information drops dramatically, and the potential knowledge and experience base one individual can tap into is exponentially larger than previously possible in many areas.
I think there is general agreement here that Luddism is rarely useful. So the question is, what can we do to educate others?
Mozilla
wrong.
the LoC's resources are contrained. if they spend 20% of their money, time, space, on digitizing existing content, they would have 20% fewer resources to apply to the first two priorities.
that's not to say that congress couldn't just budget a lot more money to the LoC for them to do so.
does anyone actually have a real estimate of how much it costs (equipment, time, etc) to digitize content?
additionally, by the time 50% of today's content was digitized, the original digital media would probably be obsolete and a great deal of effort would have to be spent preserving that data. you can't just put digital data on acid-free paper, store it at the right temperature and forget about it.
--
And reading on paper isn't?
I guess that the people at the Library of Congress must do their research by sitting in a big circle and reading books to each other.
Oh please. The Internet is a fad, just like talkies.
He he, I agree. I also heard on the radio today that the TV fad'll run its course and be gone in two years.
Does this
The guy comes across as an idiot, granted, though his points are individually correct. But even in the visions of hallowed science fiction writers the library remains a powerful cultural and technological force. Anyone can read on a private terminal (and get research done quickly like Heinlein's Friday who gets to "feed the elephant" (her thirst for knowledge). But look at the Encyclopedia Galactica or Asimov and other authors' visions of libraries. They have experts dedicated to protecting and promoting knowledge, and often higher technology too.
Libraries first need to guarantee that everyone will have access, first to the Internet and second to a comprehensive optical database of the full text of as many books as possible, to allow *all* libraries to have equivalent access to knowledge. The great universities have such amazing libraries and so many books it seems impossible with current technology and funds to make a dent in it with digitization.. but with requiring all publishers to make an SGML version available to libraries (at increased cost perhaps) will be a good start.
Libraries can then embark on developing more advanced systems than most individuals can use for reading books or similar experiences.. perhaps a high quality audio library and playback room, or in the future a CAVE-like immersive environment at any rate, 500 MHz Pentiums are just not the pinnacle of technology. Perhaps high bandwidth and CD or DVD writers would make sense in a library in a more affluent area for example. When I was a small child I remember seeing filmstrips at school, and at the library. That was multimedia! Microfilm readers were also amazing.
If libraries today have microfilm it seems a small step to having a CD burner. Some of the first CD-ROMs available were just collections of great literature and where are they now? If done right it will be very damaging to publishers and authors, so perhaps compensation on a per-view basis is necessary. I know of at least one person who has decided to pursue a study of library science because of the promise of library technology. I also have been involved in photo library digitization and studied the work of the Bettmann Archive (now belonging to Gates) where scanning could barely keep pace with the speed at which the paper media crumbled away. For the Chief Librarian to be so unwilling to consider technologies makes him the biggest impediment to bridging the current reality of inadequate libraries and the hope-filled vision of libraries of the future. Libraries should be meccas of knowledge and with universities, be the most powerful enemy of the tv culture this Librarian fears so much.
The media is not important. It's the words that are important.
Anybody who reads and enjoys a paper based text will feel the urge to share that with as many people as possible.
Traditionally that was expressed by saying "Read this book - it's good!", or in extreme cases by lending them the book.
However in this brave new E-world, putting that text online is the best way to share.
Now the fact that the LOC has stated that it is not going to do this is irrelevent. The online world does not really need its contribution in this area.
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
So it's time for us to take advantage of this website and the chance it gives us to organize. We should all be writing our representatives to ask them to pressure the library of congress to digitize their collection (At least those with expired copyrights.)
And we should write directly to the LOC to express our opinions as well.
I interned at a security company some eight years ago where I got to work a bit in the LOC. (Installing alarms. Lots of fun, especially the 200yo attics of the Jefferson building.) At that time they were already well underway with digitizing the collection.
One of the main reasons for digitizing is to reduce the wear-and-tear of having to handle the actual items, where the worst damage is done by well-meaning but careless patrons, not to mention ill-intentioned people who manage to get access to the stacks. That is, if they could find anything of major importance in the first place -- I got losts many times in there. Which of course is the second reason to digitize. As well as being able to deliver an item quickly, and without risking further damage to it, more than one person could be reading the same material.
I don't remember exactly how they were storing the data. I don't believe they were ordinary CD-ROMs, but in retrospect they may have just been an early type of DVD. (Or at least, a disc using DVD-like technology.) And one day I happened to walk by a disc changer they were testing out -- big mutha' that was. As for how they were scanning them, that was being taken care of some outfit in Pennsylvania.
So as for why Billington said they're not digitizing books... He must've been smoking something. I don't recall talking to a single librarian there who wasn't looking forward to the reading room to become nothing but a bunch of terminals. And while providing a web interface to the library would be incredibly difficult, I see it as only a matter of time.
But something else he said struck me as just wrong. "The internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of teevision's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing."
First: Most of the contents of the LOC are any different? It is not the role of a librarian to be saying that one type of expression is any more valid than another. He speaks of arrogance, but this is just intellectual elitism here.
Then there's the pitiful fatalism of that statement. It is precisely because the internet is the new "vast wasteland" that we need libraries and universities and such to provide a balance of content. And he says it as if the crap would somehow smother out any virtue of the LOC. He's probably thinking of walking into an adult bookstore looking for "Paradise Lost". Except that the internet has no size.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Yes, I read the LOC article by James H. Billington, and it is far different from the report posted by Slashdot. Librarian Billington regards the Internet as a tool, subject to misuse, like any other tool. He does seem to recognize that eventual posting of the entire Library of Congress will improve the Internet. As for the size of the effort, slashdotters should know something of the storage capability of a few DVD's. He also recognizes the place of brick and mortar libraries in neighborhoods. The LOC is not about to concentrate its resources on any single effort to spread the benefits of book leaning to everyone. He also makes it clear that no good tool will go unused. The report posted by Slashdot seemed to be biased by sloppy writing and out-of-context quotes, making a good and careful man look like a Luddite.
1. Only 28 million of the 119 million items they have are books. "We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out." Not everthing can be easily transferred to the internet. Limited resources might be better used elsewhere.
2. The library of congress stores (and is primarily concerned with) primary references. The sort of things that are kept in climate and light controlled rooms. Scanning them in will just degrade the document further.
3. "It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen." He described this as "arrogance" and "hubris". Perhapse he is right.
There's one thing wrong with that argument. Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are - so now, it is not discriminating against those who are not royalty or elites, but against those who simply don't have the funds.
True, but you might want to read the library's mission statement.
LoC's primary mission is to make useful information available to Congress, which is most definitely within travel distance of the library. It's secondary mission is to preserve materials for the future. LoC is not a public library. Serving the public at large is quite low down on its list of priorities.
LoC's catalog is available online, and FWIW, they do a lot of high quality cataloguing work that is used by lots of smaller libraries that can't afford to do their own, so they do provide an important service to the public in that regard. You can search LoC's catalog and if you find something you want, go to your local library and, if it doesn't have it, you may be able to request it via interlibrary loan.
I don't know if LoC has open stacks or not, but I suspect they would be closed, meaning that even if you did make it down to Washington, you probably wouldn't be able to browse the shelves anyway.
May I ask where you got this CD? Sounds cool.
No comment at this time
Why the hell wold you want to restrict access? Everyone in the US - no, everyone on the PLANET - should be able to access this.
I'm tired of paying taxes to support things that I don't use. Welfare. Private book collection for some asshole who won't share. Marble buildings for buearucrats that I can't even enter.
No comment at this time
I have to wonder if there were people who reacted the same way when people started writing instead of passing stories down generation to generation by word of mouth. His argument of community vs. isolation would have held a lot more water in that fight!
Addlepated - punk & metal
Because reading a paperbook is such a group effort
Please! We're not talking about throwing the book onto a CD ROM and tossing it into a vault. We're talking about putting it on the internet--where servers are kept up and formats are quite interchangeable. Ascii going out of style? a2ps. Postscript goes the way of the dodo? ps2hmtl.
If the book's paper crumbles, it's game over. On the internet, the text will be copied innumerable times, and put into innumerable formats, perhaps with lots of separate people keeping them up. There's no way for a book with even a slight interest to pass into nothingness.
Let's please leave the lame arguments to the Congresscritter librarian, and keep them off slashdot.
There is no requirement to phase out libraries as digitalization takes place. The presumption that dead tree form will be replaced by the electronic is not, IMO, a real danger with books.
I see digitalization as more of a complementary resource, not one for replacement. This is especially important as many people do not have access to the library of congress (or any library, depending on nation and locale).
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Exactly what I was planning to post. We need to all write to congress and tell them to can that asswipe and hire someone that isn't so friggin arrogant that he can't see people reading hard to find books via computer.
Cross references:
1. proud
ar.ro.gant \'ar-*-g*nt\ aj [ME, fr. L arrogant-, arrogans, prp. of arrogare] 1: exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance in an overbearing manner 2: proceeding from or characterized by arrogance - ar.ro.gant.ly av
- passion
The 'library' (small ell) is free and easy to get to. That doesn't mean that it will have what you need... When I lived in Richmond, the local library was very lame, for example. If the library has a couple pc's then it would cost the same to access the e-LOC then it would be to browse their much smaller stock of books.
The 'Library' or the LOC, is restricted and not so easy for everyone to reach. That bus far you speak of would be $50+ and two days travel time one way for some people. That PC is looking cheaper already...
To browse the internet in your underwear still requires the above mentioned PC , telephone line and ISP, alas.. : )
In anycase it is Billington who uses the 'A' word, and with less justification or proof...
> Until then, kudos to Billington for waiting when everyone else is running like rabid rabbits towards whatever technological
> fad is in vogue this year. When the time is right, we'll have the Library of Congress accessible over the Internet.
According to your timeline, when the time is right, we will then have to wait for the books to be digitized.
If we start now, when electronic paper is practical, we will have a nice library to use it with.
Even before electronic paper, there are other machines that are almost as useful, after all, all computers aren't mini-towers, even a laptop is almost useful, but there are smaller things out there... like palmtops (such as sony's PCG-C1XS picturebook computer)
I see this more as an annoyance than a real problem for the long run. Either the LOC will get a new librarian or the present one will change his mind eventually. The numbers of people that will expect all or most information in the world to be online will grow amazingly in the next decade. He is in control of that information and I doubt hecould stand under the political pressure of so many for that long. Later Mick D
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
Given the current state of cryptography what Author in their right mind would want an easy to pirate text version of their works distributed freely over the internet. Let's start working on realistic solutions to the technical issues instead of all saying gee the spin is Luddite.
The political motives are obvious. Less than 30% of the population currently has easy access to books online. In the decades to come the politics will shift as society does.
Are we talking about digitizing the rare book collections? New books? Out of Print books? It seems to me that it would be a mammoth undertaking to simply prioritize which books/pamphlets/papers, etc should be digitized. Any book published in the past 5 -10 years are already digitized. This should be the responsibility of the publisher not the library of congress. Perhaps they can archive the copy when it is published but since the Library of Congress doesn't publish books - why should it digitize them now. If we are talking about rare documents, then we are not simply talking about digitizing - we are talking about scanning as well. Are they to preserve the look and feel of the book with photos and illustrations? This also goes way beyond putting the text on disk. They are putting documents and maps and other materials into electronic form and this seems right to me. Who is going to pay for all this and at what expense? Stop keeping the real thing for disks? I hope not.
Cut the guy some slack. Do you think he needs every bonehead in the world e-mailing the chief librarian of the Library of Congress? Personally, I hope he has better things to do. I'm sure he has a private e-mail address he uses.
I also could point out that you don't give out your e-mail address, either.
--
"connected 24/7/365 to "
Twenty-four hours a day...
7 days a week...
365 weeks a year?? Per 7 years??
Perhaps "24/7/52" would make more sense.
Then why'd he include the "7"? If you're doing something 365 days per year you're also doing it 7 days a week. It's redundant.
"Yeah I read that book too. And no this is not possible because it has been uttered. Anytime people know about a possible outcome it changes the eventual outcome even a little bit."
Well if you don't mind I'd like to take this opportunity to utter a few possible outcomes.
1) Windows(and it's descendants) will remain the dominant OS in the world. Especially on servers.
2) Congress will cut NASA's funding.
3) AndyL will not win the Lotto jackpot.
4) The gravitational constant will remain constant.
Remember all the problems nasa is having with keeping their data from deteriorating ? The shelf life of a book outweighs that of a tape. Once all these books are digitized what happens in 10-30 years when all the tapes begin to "go bad" simoultaneously? I think that problem may be much worse then than it is now. Plus, keeping the data up and available would have higher cost, and that's not including the cost of digitizing the LoC's collection in the first place. I agree there may be a time when this is nessesairy, but until a more resilient mass storage media is found it just isn't really feasible IMHO.
- Sig
HEY DON'T CONFUSE US WITH FACTS AND CRAP! H3Y 3V3RYBODY LETS GO And burn down that freaking library, bunch a damn musty books. who needs that?! Oooh! my pr0n is finished downloading, c ya lusers later, I gotta go touch myself in the mindless, isolating, lonely and arrogant way, I love so much!!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Real librarians will get a lot of flak over Billington's comments. But the kicker is:
James Billington is not a librarian.
In fact, only two people who have served in his position have ever been librarians -- i.e., only two "Librarians of Congress" had worked as a librarian before being appointed to that job. Billington is a historian, and has neither the master's degree nor the professional education that an actual librarian would have.
Please don't take his comments as representative of all librarians -- most of us DO honor our responsibility to make information as accessible as possible. To that end, many librarians oppose UCITA, oppose the Copyright Extension Act, and oppose censorship offline and online.
get a palm pilot, fitis in you packet instant on bookmarking all that good stuff I bring one to school and read books from gutenberg.net all the time:)
Reading books for the sake of bettering yourself and expanding your horizons is great, but those of us who also read because we need to get at that information, process it, understand it and use it to create something new are inevitably limited by our ability to access that information.
How great would it be if the library never failed to have the specific book you're looking for on the shelf? If books became like free software - no matter how many people have it, it's always there for the next person?
How much better would our academic lives be if no matter how many people in class need the half-dozen or so references the library has about Obscure Topic X, those books were always available, 24/7, for everybody?
This is what the "information revolution" is about, for cryin' out loud.
--
Mike Hoye
The e-books may soon have a medium as good as real books. Some of the electronic papers in development are not light emitting like a CRT or LCD, but rather are physically black and white dots, moved by electronics. Could make e-books better than real books -- lighter and just as clear.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
Don't you see the evil? Just like that damned phone. like talking to people in person also inspires a certain presumption of reverence.
And trading stocks on the internet? bah! It takes alot of reverence to do it the old fashioned way. And whats with the automobile crap? Walking inspires reverence. Driving inspires soccer mom's and all those other secular attrocities.
ok enough with the satire.
he is right though. Driving across the country to the library of congress and searching its mammoth amount of information would be much better than a quick search on the net from my room.
I'm guessing librarians are scared of being moved to the level of respect that guidance counselors and telephone sanitizers get.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Ever read Farenheight 451?
If the only limitations are resolution and expense (as it is for me,) it is only a matter of time, as better and cheaper readers become available. For those like Billington, one wonders if there is more than simple satisfaction over piles of paper...
Fortune favors the bold. -Virgil
This reminds me of the old argument the catholic church used when the printing press first came about. The printing press made books available to the masses and enhanced the knowledge of the entire planet. No longer was all of the combined knowledge of the world locked away in church libraries, it was made available to the masses. The printing of books, contrary to the opinion of some scholars at the time, did not cheapen the value of the texts. The printing press has given us an incredible gift which we take for granted on a daily basis. Soon we will be able to take the digitized version of the library of congress for granted as well. Gods will be done. It has been thought of and it shall be reality!
Well I'm not sure about the less susceptible to decay, in 40 years will we still be able to read the CD-ROMs and computer tapes from today? Will we still be able to read the document formats? When I wrote that, I was thinking of the Library of Alexandria, and the cries of woe of archivists having to deal with not enough money to preserve all the worthwile modern books, which are printed on less sturdy materials than the ancients did. What to choose, the dead-sea scrolls, or the complete worls of Shakespeare? You can't save both, so choose. Modern digital methods are somewhat less susceptible to decay, I heard, so in my opinion there is no time to lose to even preserve all but Vogon poetry, and preferably even that. If only to preserve what was, to illustrate how it was. As to formats, old programs can usually, if they themselves are preserved, be translated to new media, so the reading part can be a task, but at least there is some task to undertake, unlocking older "scripts". It's been done before, from a stone found by a man called Rosetta.To know where you have to go, it tremendously helps to know where you came from. Stefan..nosig today.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Stefan, angry.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Stefan, sometimes a little paranoid, which doesn't mean tey're not out to get me.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
I'd like a digitized library very much, naturally, as we would all:
Stefan .sig today, my love has gone away...
No
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about being a government bureaucrat too but they still keep lining up and doing it... Gee, drive to washington to get some data "or" login via my T1, get a life so the rest of us can have a break. (Maybe he works for Ellison?)
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
This gentleman argues against technology by making an argue of emotions or romanticism.
That's fine. Its great to listen to everyone go on about how wrong he is, but even at a very high level I think it ieasy to see that when they are through digitizing the non-book material, they are going to go through the books.
Eventually this material will become available online. Its just a matter of how long progress will take to arrive.
BTW, did anyone else remeber the LOC on a laptop in Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"? I'm pretty sure this book predates "Snow Crash". Its set in 2010 or so I think.
--Pete
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Lets try and get this strait. The church was not preventing people from translating the bible into other languages. First when the printing press was invented and Gutenburg rolled out his first Bible it was fucking expensive. Not only that it would take months to print a single bible even with a printing press. Of course this was much quicker than when monks used to spend a lifetime to illuminate a single bible. Second what was the literacy rate back then. Virtually no one could read and even fewer people could write. The only people that could read or write spoke all spoke Latin. This was not some way to keep people down or to further theocracy it was because it was the only universal language in the globe at the time. It is still used today by the medical community because of it's universal nature. There wasn't even a common English language until the well after the reformation and the counter-reformation. The prayers and bible readings were always in Latin, but sermons and such were delivered in the language of the local people. The Catholic Church spans the entire globe. One of the main focuses of the church is to ensure that the faithful could receive the word of the Lord the world over. I realize that anti-Catholicism is the last of the socially acceptable prejudices but please quit pulling facts from different time periods, different subjects and placing them together to spread your hate of your fellow man.
Well, I'm already one of those mindless futurists, but I'm loving it. I really don't think I need to elaborate any more. This ignorance speeks for itself.
Has anyone released a study showing over time how many books have been published over the last, oh, 150 years or so? I would imagine it's kind of snowballed.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
b. been released under a GPL license of some sort (e.g. Neil Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was the Command Line"}, or
c. had the copyright run out on it, then
yes, it is restrictive. It is restrictive of the author's rights to control the distribution of their work. There may be other conditions I'm overlooking, BTW.
I don't know exactly what percentage of the Library of Congress's collection fall under one of those conditions, but I would hesitate to say that most of them could be released without some kind of licensing issues.
I'm not an advocate of copyrights that last for 70 years or more, but we have to work within the existing framework of laws before progress towards a public electronic library can really be made.
P.S. I was really impressed by Stephenson's integrity in releasing "Command Line" the way he did. It really shows dedication and contrasts nicely with Stephen King's approach, for instance.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
without compromising either of the first two priorities.
More like while also achieving at better quality the first two priorities. A deteriorating disk can be copied to another disk at 100% accuracy more easily than a deteriorating book can be copied to another piece of paper. And with the ease of searching digital archives, does this not make the information therein more available to the U.S. Congress?
As a future librarian, and one who is interested in the technological aspects that profession entails, I can say that the books should be digitized, however, for the purpose of preserving the original text (and only text) of the printed works. There will never be a replacement for the physical act of sitting in a comfortable chair and flipping the pages of your favorite book, or going to the library and hunting through the stacks for that one book that you've been looking for.
I also think that the digital and physical world (especially in the case of libraries) can live harmoniously. Imagine reading a first edition Jane Austen novel without having to touch the book and potentially damage it. Or imagine being able to patch in the text from the missing page that holds the climax to your book. The possibilities! I think the combination of digital and physical would complement each other in a way that is not currently possible.
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is not for you.
>Libraries allow books to be borrowed, taken home and read.
Actually, the Library of Congress doesn't allow you to check out and take a book home. You have to read it while inside the library.
This interview is an absolute scream! Do you not see the absurdity of the principal librarian of one of the preeminent storehouses for the world's knowledge making such falacious and ill-considered arguments?
Not only that, but he destroys his own case.
Consider his reference to the Reformation. This was spawned by the ability to get thoughtful discourse in the hands of the masses. Yet, he doesn't see the parallels with the Internet.
Consider his lament over the "futurist before lonely terminals" and the library as a place fostering social gathering and public interaction. Apparently, he is unfamiliar with the stereotype of the librarian as introvert with "a nose stuck in a book." Socialization requires communication and, in the case of books, this is decidely one directional.
Don't get me wrong - I love books and the act of reading them. But, I bet even Johannes Gutenberg would have been fired up about the possibilities of the Internet.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
You know I was watching ST:TNG reruns last night and you can't help but notice that our friends-in-uniform are usually reading real books ("antiques"). I've tried the PeanutReader and flipping pages on my laptop, but I think even if electronic publishing becomes more mainstream, there still is no substitute for the look, feel, smell of a nicely bound book.
1) One guy decides he has a personal problem with using the web to transfer info, so now no one will be able to access the LofC texts online.
The worst of it is, he says that since electronic text will never be as good as reading a book, no one should be reading books in electronic form. Unless he is worried people would rather read books on screen than in print, there's no logical reason to prevent them from doing so. God forbid that the Library of Congress would trust people to judge for themselves what constitutes a satisfying reading experience. Idiots like this guy give a bad name to *real* librarians, who actually believe in the freedom of information.
Slash has nothing to do with Slashdot.
"You don't want to be one of those mindless futurists, you want to be a mindless ludite like me." Who's he to tell me what I want? The Bastard.
Thad
Thad
I can't speak for the herd. I'm cruising at a level sufficient to read your posts.
The moderation system may be flawed, but it's an interesting approach to filtering in a bulletin board. I can't say I agree that the system is actively censorsing. It restrictions are arbitrary or at least seem so in my perspective. If you want to read everything, you can.
Look at the bright side. There's no system in place that filters posts from people with low kharma.
cheers,No e-mail address given
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
If the guy doesn't even have email, of course he has no clue what the internet is all about.
An increasing amount of the world's information will never be put in paper book form. Two reasons are accessibility and cost.
h +palshome, which isn't accessible to the general public as far as I know, but all it would take is a permissions fix to change that). There are a few paper copies kept in fireproof vaults as a backup, but the online archive lets me find in minutes what would take days with the paper version.
For example, the enormous volume of documentation on the Space Station program (on which I work) mainly exists as an online archive( at http://issa-www.jsc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/dsql+/ORAP?-
Second issue is cost. A standard 5-drawer file cabinet holds around 225 MBytes of printed text,
and costs $1700 to fill, counting the cabinet and
printer costs. Printing books is going to be on
the same order of cost (shelves rather than file
cabinet). That's around $1 of hard disk space.
If you multiply printing and shelving by the number of copies in libraries across the country,
you are talking factor of a million or so cheaper to store on disk rather than paper. Having the internet as a distribution system brings the cost balance back a bit, but I think any rational comparison would show online is much cheaper than paper in total. So the LoC is costing the taxpayers money by insisting on paper.
Daniel
The only way the Library of Congress can make meaningful access to its storehouse of information is to digitize this all and put it online. A Librarian of Congress who can't figure this out and expects his customers, i.e. US, to come physically to DC to use "his facility doesn't need to be feeding at the public trough anymore. The only arrogance I see with respect to whatever he was blathering about is his own, and I think he should be nurturing it at his own expense, not ours.
It's a bit frightening that Congress didn't pull his plug as soon as Billington's speech hit public domain, but I think it's gotten obvious to all of us that Billington works for people as obsolete as he is.
Remember, Billington works for the people who were bribed or duped into voting for the DMCA, CDA-I, CDA-II, and other legislation apparently intended to endanger the economic future of the USA.
Congresscrittters get more cooperative with end users during an election year. I suggest you send a copy of that article to yours... with a polite note asking that Billington be fired immediately and that you'll be remembering what was done and wasn't done on Election Day.
y2k info - http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html
Tech Public Policy stuff
That being said, curling up with a nice large book is a pleasure, and when I do that, I'm typically alone, and there's that smug feeling of doing something fun (arrogant). Hmmm --- I think the person at the Library of Congress should spend more time reading...!
--- I like to sit in front of a fire with a copy of ``War and Peace''... a big book like that can feed a fire for hours! --- Emo Philips
If your local public library has internet access you would have access to more books online than what are available in the library.
It would in fact be less restrictive, because you could view the material on the screen, or take advantage of the digital format by printing your own copy and... more quickly find what you are looking for.
Not everyone has the internet, but is that not one of our governments goals in the first place and also why the internet is being put in libraries and schools?
Sure, maybe reading a book on a 15" monitor sucks, but e-book technology is coming along rapidly. Paper-like displays should be in production in a few short years. Is the Librarian's foresight that short?
--
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I'm with you brother. But you will not be modded up, because the self-styled pioneers of the new electronic frontier believe they are right, always, even when they are wrong. Reading and books are more than 'information'. It is the same reason online, distance learning cannot replace face time with a teacher, or daycare replace the care of a loving parent, in the home.
Damn. Who is he to decide whether I should be able to read online or not. I find it arrogant and presumptious of him to force me to come to the library to read. Sometimes I *like* to go to a library or bookstore for a couple of hours and browse. But sometimes I really really like the convenience of just sitting down *at home* and reading. He/they should be facilitating. Make the information available is many forms.
94TT
After reading a few of the comments here I have a comment myself. You are a arrogant bunch of asses!
This electronic form of communication is all nice and everything but I do not see a good reason to put EVERYTHING "on-line". Get off of your lazy butts and walk down to the library and go check out a book. It's a bunch of silicon snake oil you have all been subverted.
This generation is being created as a bunch of mindless idiots that do not have a concept of the basic fundamental concepts on how things are really working. What is coming out is a bunch of script kiddies. Fundamental concepts are those things that allow building more complex designs. If these are lost you will only be able to build on what previous others had conceptualized.
A "book" is more than just printed words. The creation of it is also around the way it was going to be delivered to the recipient. A translation of anything has ALWAYS resulted in the lost of some of the information. A translation can come in different forms, between languages or between media.
You always need to keep track of the roots of all knowledge to be able to understand were you are today. To keep track of the knowledge you need to know how it was created. The creation of the knowledge is as important as the knowledge was in the first place. How will it be recreated if the method is lost? It may be a royal pain in the butt to actual walk somewhere to look for something but sometimes the trip is as important as the final outcome.
I would like to write more but I do not have time to put down here what I really feel. There is a balance between the past and the present. Do not overbalance because you may loose the past.
There is one tag line that someone has that really strikes a cord here "he who controls the past - controls the future". Those books are our past. Printed material is our past. Libraries are the keepers of the past.
You can find most online books that exist at upenn, though obviously they aren't on CD.
A lot more expensive than a free library card, though :(
The King James Bible is about 4MB as plaintext That's before compression. As I remember, with decent compression, you can put it on a floppy disk (~1.5MB).
1.5MB takes about 15 minutes to transfer over a 14.4Kb link. The bible is generally considered a 'big book'. Very few people are on the internet today with less than a 14.4 link. I'm rounding up, so 15 minutes makes a decent upperbound for how long it would take to download a book from the Library of Congress.
I don't think that that's onerous at all.
A few years ago, a flood ravaged the newly-renovated library at Colorado State University, destroying thousands of books, and reducing others to unstable masses of wood pulp and silt.
Many books were recovered, and the library today has full use. But in the mean time, its functionality was assured through the use of digital books.
Students were able to browse destroyed books online using special terminals. Some books were actually online, while others were, I understand, manually placed on a scanner at the nearby Colorado Univ Bolder campus.
Either way, the library remained a storehouse of knowledge despite the destructive power of nature.
So. Here is my reason one for digitizing books. When you do this, you save the book from its death. In the same way that pictures and voices are immortalized in easily-copied images and recordings, books can be immortalized through easily-copied and stored digital representations.
I don't need to speculate on the enormous loss that fire or flood or warfare would cause should it hit the Library of Congress.
Secondly, I grew up in a small town, where I was blessed with a library with an active Inter-Library Loan service. It was slow and painful, and probably quite expensive to both libraries. But they did it out of the kindness of their hearts and the respect for all that a library stands for.
Make their job easier. Make it easier for even the poorest library in the country to have full access to the knowledge of the world.
Now where can I get a bound copy of last year's slashdot archive? I don't want to turn into a nerd... brianboru
While James Billington suggest the internet is not a "community thing," imagine if LoC built The Right Website, with slasdot style commenting along with books... moderating good discussions. I might actually find out what my peers are thinking, especially if comments were integrated in the text.
When I go to the library, I find my books, check them out, go home, write my paper, and then wait until the books are overdue and return them... libraries are social places only for people whose only friends are books (I imagine Billington fits the bill.)
-Erik
Hmm.. Its impractical to have all the research libraries on line.. Hmm.. No electronic access to Geneological research so someone in Maine can search out their family tree .. no access the medical journals so medical students in UCLA can research from their dorm rooms where they can take electronic notes and possibly help discover a cure to cancer or aids... no access to "The Classics" so that a literary student can do research on Beowulf (and NOT find stuff on the cluster) or Chaucer...
... I can see how bad that would be...
Yeah I can see how bad it would be... So what if I can't download War and Peace on my 28.8K modem.. BF'ND... What if I want to search for specific topics in the library ? (ie. search ALL medical references for something like "Chrones Disease" ).. This way I could see ONLY the texts with the info. Its MORE accessable this way.. Instantly ALL colleges, ALL libraries, ALL homes have instant access to the LofC, 24/7/365
UPS Sucks
If it were costs.. Then he should have said that.. It would be a lot smarter to say "Yeah.. We would like to put the books online, but our funding is limited and we would rather purchase new books with it"...
UPS Sucks
I don't think anyone should decide what's better for the public in the long run - they should let us choose which way we'd rather access those texts.
--
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
Just because the "people in charge" share your views does not mean the are not idiotic and contrived. In fact, the "people in charge" are notorious for being idiotic and contrived.
Just because most people can't access it right now doesn't make it impractical - and you haven't proven that most people can't access it. You say if you want information from the LOC that you could request it from your local library - but most libraries are already on-line. Wouldn't it be easier to just hop on a public terminal at the library rather than wait for the physical material to be transported to you?
As to the "most people can't access it" argument - how long do you think it would take to get all of this information digitized? If they start now, by the time they are done a lot more people will be able to access it. If you wait until then to start, it will only take that much longer.
Finally as to your question "what possible reason would you (other than for pleasure reading) want to read books not on copyright."(sic) There are lots of books that are out of copyright with useful information. There is more to the LOC than "computer book(s)."
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
"It is isolating. It is a lonely thing." In contrast, "libraries are places, a community thing."
What a CROCK. I don't know about you, but in my community, I'm allowed to talk to other people at a normal volume. Libraries, as a rule, are pretty spartan in terms of their level of social interaction. Even if you stay there to read your book, instead of taking it home with you -- libraries let you do that, you know -- you're still there to read a book, not chat with your neighbor. Especially not if she's doing research for her term paper and can't spare the time to converse. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against libraries. I was raised by librarians. But how can anyone say with a straight face that they're not just as "isolating" as the internet? (And at least on the internet, you *can* chat with others while you read.)
Anyway, the real issue is not the ability to socialize, but rather the freedom of information. And James Billington's opinion about how people shouldn't be able to choose to be isolated, or that "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence," is definitely not the issue. (Reverence? Is he suggesting we revere the book's physical presence, or its content? Because the latter will not change one iota by the book's being published in electronic format.) And make no mistake, the only reasons Billington gives in the TLJ article for never wanting to put books online are strictly born of personal beliefs.
I suspect that, despite Billington's reluctance to promote electronic media, people will continue to read books, and to use the internet, in preference to real human interaction. He's just making it less easy to do both at once. I guess it's up to Project Gutenberg.
[We Have No Product] [The Swindle
of course digitising the books doesn't mean you have to arrogantly read them on your lonely screen .. if they're tagged intelligently (some SGML variant) they can be read on any electronic device or printed out in any format.. then they'd be searchable, indexable, crossreferencable (those indexes in the back could be linked, &tc.), but also, you could print them out or whatever
2) let's not miss the fact that his point seems to be that there is a whole lot of stuff in the LoC that he's placing priority on in terms of getting it online.. and the harshness of his description of online reading could have been the article writer's slant--most of those quotes are completely out of context....
jNaObSkPiAeM@mondus.com
Some (including it seems the Librarian of Congress) say that most parts of the internet cater solely to people wanting instant gratification and blood&boobs. Okay; take a look at the First Person Shoot-em-up scene that has recently been growing huge (finally) due to the prevalence of high-bandwidth connexions and good networking protocols. You do have your QuakeIII bloodbaths, with seeming chaos all around, but at the same time you have Clans getting together to practice tactics and maneuvers (I'm thinking more along the lines of various Half Life mods, TF and CS). It really is growing into a new sort of community where people get together to razz eachother over an exciting game. Not unlike an arcade, whichmost will agree is at least partially a good social setting. As bandwidth and network protocol prowess increases, we will see a rise of voice technology over gaming (already the fledglins like Roger Wilco and such are there), and maybe even one day video.
Who are we to say that communicating with someone over the net and gaming with them overthe net is any less valid a form of socialization than talking with them across a checkerboard on a Saturday afternoon? Sex and violence are prevalent everywhere in our society, so of course they will be prevalent in any new mediumn that comes around (porn videos were some of the first to hit wide distribution); but soon the medium will expand to include all parts of society rahter than just the flashy ones.
#end post, should always return NULL
---------
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
I cannot believe the words that came out of this guys mouth. It is a sad state of affairs when someone who went to college can utter such mindnumbing crap. All books will be online in the future. If the library of congress wanted all books printed now could be online immediately. Presses are computerized so no one even needs to type or scan the books in, they already are available digitized. Only the onlder books will need any effort to be placed online. There is hope since the this crazy librarian will not be the librarian of congress forever. He will have to retire at some point.
hehe, if i had a scanner that processed a bit faster than one page every couple minutes that could be feesible :)
though on a more serious note, i didn't know that those were legally feesible options, i'm not exactly a person well versed in the knowledge of copyrights and whats avalible as far as intelectual property and the restrictions there of
Thank you
Personally, I'd much rather sit down curled up on the couch or in my lazyboy with my books. Computers are great sources of information (depending on how they're used), but it is NOT the same as a book
On the otherhand, some books are just hard to find, and would be much appreciated, though maybe only by a few, if they could still be found in some form
just my -.02 rambaling
I bet this is the same guy who tells his kids how he walked 10 miles uphill to school each way and HE LIKED it that way. His days are numbered and the chains of access will break.
Perhaps the word the Library was looking for is 'EXPENSIVE'. Every action in the universe has a cost (reaction) associated with every modification made on it.
On a related note, humans devised a fabulous method for creating a universal interface between the desire to do something and the ability to do it... It's called MONEY.
Why doesn't Microsoft dismantle their evil company? Financial economics.
Why does Quicktime not exist for Unix yet? Financial economics.
Why is X software not open source? Financial economics.
Why is X product in X configuration? Financial economics.
Why is X entity in the universe in the X configuration it is? Economics. (of a sort)
Why is X? Economics. (of a sort)
Hint: If there's money involved in any way, shape, or form, economics is going to enter into the equation. And scanning oodles of books just so they can rot on some overpriced jukebox in the Data Storage Flavor Of The Month is kind of expensive.
Incidentally, the Library of Congress's money is... erm... MINE.
I say we spend it on coke, whores, and booze instead of poopoo old books. Fuck the children and the future. I want state-sponsored injections of heroin into my anus on the hour.
-troll taker
This is an absurd argument. Of course some people can't fly to D.C. to look at a book and of course, some people don't like the Internet. There will always be two sides to an argument. The deciding fatcor is the neccesaty of a decision. In this case, it's a simple answer.
They have info, info goes on-line. Now if you don't want the info on-line, don't look at it.
Munky_v2
"Warning: You are logged into reality as root..."
Jay
You're getting the hang of it.
Munky_v2
"Warning: You are logged into reality as root..."
Jay
It's almost a religious experience to read a book printed 200+ years ago in it's original binding of lambskin and parchment.
Funny you should say that. Before the time of Gutenberg, it was a religious experience to read a book. If you were reading a book, the Church most likely produced it. The printing press allowed non Church sanctioned ideas to make it into print. They could even be mass produced.
The Internet and digital text allows for an even more open model. In order for my ideas to be archived in the form of a book, I must first convince a publisher that my book has merit (read, will sell). With the Internet, no such limitation exists. Anyone who can create text can publish that text.
Books are not the content, books are the storage and retrieval device. The words and images printed on the pages of the books are the important part. Gutenberg knew this. He saw that by creating a way to copy these words and images quickly and cheaply, he could get the message to more and more people. This is all putting books online will do. It will enable people to utilize the content of a book in more ways than simply to sit and read it.
?
Digitizing the books does not mean the printed materials go away. The library will still be there for those who choose to visit it, but now others who can't (for whatever reason) could have access to the wealth of information available. The only potential downside is cost, but I think that is offset by the good that can come from digitizing the library.
When I first read the headline for the article, I assumed it would be regarding the LoC not digitizing its books as in not converting to digital format for *archiving.* Which makes me curious, what percentage of the works in the Library are in danger of loss from shear wastage? Microfiche has a bad habit of decaying as well as paper.
The idea of putting the works on the Internet is up in the air IMO, Im not sure of my stance on the issue. It would certainly cost a great deal by introducing the logistics of digitizing, cataloging, and maintaining the online library. If you maintained the Library as a big FTP archive it would make it much lighter in maintenance (vis a vis web based), and also address the archiving issue, but still... there are a LOT of works in the LoC and not all of them are books, and I would argue most have licensing issues which would restrain the distribution.
I do agree with the gentleman about it being less effort to go to the local library. I personally find it much more convenient to go to the library, and browse the books off the shelves. But I like having hard copy in front of me, so its an issue of personal taste.
Ya know, I'm not sure I like having some lonely, mindless, arrogant book clerk deciding what I should and should not read online. While I agree that there's a difference between reading online and the intimacy that comes from holding a book in your hand, I find that no excuse for refusing to digitize information. This information should be made available to everyone ONLINE. This way, if I want to read a book, I don't have to go to the LOC, or spend three hours on the phone talking to a clerk who wishes I had not called in the first place. I really can't believe that they should be allowed to get away with something as regressive as this.
As you can see, we, the demanders of the good, are offering a price of $0. At that price the supplier is also willing to supply 0 books. Were we to offer a larger fee for the librarian's digitizing services, the quantity that the librarian would be willing to digitize would likely be greater than 0.
Clearly, we don't have enough information, yet, to explain what the efficient price and quantity of digitized literature will be, but all we need to do is establish that we're willing to pay a certain price for this literature and the librarian may think us less arrogant.
A brief note: we are aware that the literature held by the Library of Congress with expired copyrights should be free, particularly in a digital medium, however there is still a cost associated with converting the literature from meat to bytes. The price which we need to offer the librarian must be larger than the cost he/she would incur... Call it a publishing fee.
One might argue that these materials are now being held as property of the government and should therefore be free for anyone to view in any format they desire. One must also remember that the library of congress has a budget that has been established by past practice. The "new way" of the electronic age probably hasn't been fully considered into the Library of Congress' budget, which means that anyone who views the purpose of the Library of Congress from this perspective ought communicate with their governmental representatives in order to have the Library's budget increased for this particular purpose.
--
Hello;
Enrico Fermi once said that real scientific advances took time to be adopted because the old generation had to die out first.
If this Librarian doesn't digitize the books, the next one will, or the one after that
something are better read online, other not. For example, a article on the bleeding edge of some new software, is going to change a lot and has to be updated a lot, this is better online. Dynamic content and things like slashdot, better online. Really, if you could get a slashdot newspaper, would you? (err, bad example, a slashdot newspaper is a dam good idea (fuck, there just goes my point)) Things like this are better online.
Other things are better in books, stories that don't change, like Old English Lit, the Bible, the dictornary, things like that. Who would want to read a 600 page "tale of 2 cities" online, not me, screw that. Or a good O'reilly book, curl up on the couch and read about the wonders of Perl/C++/Unix without all the dam eye strain and back problems.
After sitting at a computer screen for 16 fscking hours a day, it is nice to sit back with an O'Rielly book on a comfortable couch, smoke a few cigs and not getting emails/phones calls while reading.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
If he's this clueless about technology issues, though, I wouldn't bet on it. Feh.
Chris
let's hope he'll die of cancer soon.
I'm not sure of the exact amount of THC, but it's so low that there's no way you can get high from smoking it or ingesting it. It's reported to give you a very bad headache, and that's it.
Do the Evolution
Hmm, I think I missed the point there, I thought that was a reference to Geordi's blindness and the ability to use speech synthesis on digitized text for the visually impaired. Which is an interesting argument for putting books online, in any case.
I'm with you. That's the first thing that came to mind when I read this article. I want to hear what the man himself has to say, not the hack attitude-monger that wrote this article. How about a link to the source?
And let's not forgot the library of Alexandria, where the vast majority of Greek knowledge went up in smoke. It is certainly feasible that physical disaster could strike the Library of Congress. Digital backups could mean the difference.
So the plant pot comes from is NOT hemp? hmm interesting
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1) eMail these well thought out points to your congress persons. Most representatives have a web site with there eMail address on it. /. could get an interview with this guy?
2)cc: James Billington. If his email is not listed on the Library of congress website, try to find an eMail address to the most important persons you can find. They should have a webmaster address if nothing else.
3)cc: speaker of the house.
4)cc: the President and Vice President of the USA.
I personal am going to take the attitude that James Billington is just ignorant, and his only knowledge of the internet comes from the media. I hope to educate him of what the internet is really about: Information for all.
Physical mail would be nice as well, but I understand that can be a little more time consuming, and costly. But not that much more then eMail. Print letter, sign it, fold it, insert into envelope, seal, address, stamp, put in mail box. so we're talking about 60 sec's. and 33 cents per envelope. Really not that bad considering how important this issue is to every American.
Maybe we should contact a group who represents the blind, and make them aware of the tremendous opportunity for the blind that a digitized LoC will be.
I wonder if
I am aware that many of you live outside the US, and for you I would like to say 2 things:
1)If you have something similar to the LoC in your country, find out if they are going to digitize there content. If not, explain the benefits of doing it, and try to get other people involved.
2)If it is on the internet, then you would probably have access to this information as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your arguement seems a little specious to me. If hemp was so good, why would companies that could exploit it not want it. If companies like Dupont could make product from HEMP. and it was cheaper they would be pushing for it's use.
Farmers carry a suprisingly amount of weight in congress, if hemp could improve there yield, they would be all over congress.
Considering the size of the population, even if we used hemp, shouldn't we still conserve paper? If we started using hemp, it wouldn't mean we will have Infinate resources all of a sudden.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Could you clear up a point of ignorance for me? Can hemp be used as an illegal substance? i.e. can it be smoked. Or is pot from a completely different plant?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I doubt I'll ever have to replace my great works of literature CD-Rom, though, unless I'm careless (or future computers no longer have the ability to read it because it is in some proprietary format.)
I guess you don't know that some of the very first CDs pressed are already deteriorating due to delamination of the substrate. We just don't know how long current media will hold up.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
IIRC, Levar Burton started doing Reading Rainbow in order to serve the community service obligation he was sentenced to after being convicted on drug charges.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
One of the reasons for digitising is to preserve old volumes. Wider access for people is another stated reason.
What, me worry?
Please, be courteous and polite in your responses to Mr. Billington. No one ever convinced anyone they were wrong by shouting and using obscenities. Politely suggest that he reconsider the internet as a valuable tool, that it is the mission of the LOC to make information accessible to the public through every means possible, and that we, too, are anti-censorship advocates. If you are angry right now, think of what might have happened between Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos as a model -- and what might have happened had O'Reilly instead said, "You cocksucking moron, how could you be such a jackass? Are you fucking nuts?"
In other words, be nice.
No e-mail address given, just that of the webmaster of the LOC.
Phone: (202) 707-5205
Note: This should be the number for his office, but I've been wrong before.
Snail mail:
James H. Billington
Mail Stop 1001
101 Independence Ave. S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20540
But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
What's so different about holing away in a library, sheltered from society, poring through book after book in the quest for pure knowledge? What basis does he have for this misguided double standard? Internet research is far more portable, social and interactive, so I hope he has a better argument.
The Danish Royal Library has already done this. Classic works of literature (whose copyrights have expired) and a host of old (and new) literary magazines.
Besides, as I'm sure everyone else has mentioned, there's nothing isolated about reading electronic books; particularly if neat-o portable gadgets like PalmPilots get more popular, cheaper and longer lasting batteries so it's possible to comfortably read books on them in buses and trains.
"'So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing,' said Billington."
Ha!
--
"I don't really love computers, I just say that to get them into bed with me." --Terry Pratchett
Oh please. The Internet is a fad, just like talkies.
What is the illiteracy rate in the US these days anyway?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Well, the page on the LoC is the official speech he gave before the National Press Club. The other quotes attributed to him were responses to questions asked by members of the NPC.
Perhaps, instead of flaming everyone for not checking resources, you should should do some research on how the NPC works. The data is out there if you want to see how many journalists were there, what press associations they have and who filed the story.
If you believe that this article is false, libelous or wrong, and you can prove it, think of the innate personal satisfaction, plus, won't it be fun to gloat? :-)
Now, I agree this article is particularly inflammatory and doesn't have a byline, which makes it a little suspect. But I find it hard to believe that the techlaw journal would print something for which they don't have proof.
----I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.--
Whatever else might be said, it's refreshing to see a non-bland government official for once...
Despite the Librarian's comments, the Library of Congress is a sponsor of the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Project. Although the project doesn't attempt to provide all of LOC digitally, it does attempt to address the technological issues of a Stephensonesque `library.' Currently, this is done mainly through providing small online libraries on special topics. It's pretty cool, since it doesn't limit itself to text.
'Myopic' is my answer to Mr. Librarian. Digitizing data is about having options, the option to read on an airplane, the option to have it read to me via speech synthesis, the option to snip and recombine into a derived work. IMHO, not allowing me to choose how I want to use a work is the extreme of 'arrogance'. - Thomas
However, he elaborated that "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries ... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." Furthermore, in public libraries "there is an inherent adversity to censorship."
Wide availability of books through the internet would (over time) diminish if not supplant the role of the local public library. Is this really just the nation's head public librarian protecting his professional turf - or perhaps his union members?
"Ok think for a moment the population of the united states is >450,000,000" Your estimate of the population of the United States is a good indication of the value of your arguments.
Fair enough. However, I was not attacking the religion, so much as making a broad comparison of one group's actions to another.
One, the introduction of movable type may have made it easier for the Reformation to spread, it did not cause it.Agreed. However, without the use of the printing press, how far do you think it would have likely spread? Far enough and fast enough for the Reformation to have spread before being crushed?
All of the arguments that you brought up are good solid ones, often the same ones used by the Church at the time to explain/excuse their actions. However, an argument is not (necessarily) a reason. I am sure that all the arguments that you listed above were, in fact, arguments that the church used and that they fervently believed in, at least the local clergy. However, and I must state that I cannot prove this, but look at other power structures and draw your own conclusions: As one moved higher in the Church around the time of the Reformation, the reasons became less and less about piety and more and more about power. If the Church could not control people's souls, it could not control their lives, and it could not control their money. The upper echelons of the Church at that time were, in general, far more interested in fleecing their flocks than tending to their needs.
Just scanning books from the library without checking to see if it is out of print may be theft. I'm sure the boys down at the jail will really be impressed by what a hardcore you are. The only burning you'll feel is when you sit.Excuse me, but at what point did I recommend scanning copyrighted books? While I perhaps should have been more clear, I was referring to books that are no longer copyrighted. What I had meant, and it seems that you deliberately avoided this by attempting to insinuate criminal activity, was that there are several projects, most notably the Gutenberg Project, that are trying to do what the LoC refuses to. If you find the LoC's attitude abhorrent, which I do, go and donate your time to those.
And, on a more personal note, thank you so much for undermining your argument with a useless bit of nastiness at the end of it. I feel I should extend the same courtesy to you.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
It may not happen, but not for the reasons you mention. There is a great deal of convenience in having things online. It would be extremely benficial to general research in the same way that Lexis/Nexis is vital to journalistic research. It could save incredible amounts of time. It's not just being able to read an entire text on a monitor (painful), but to be able to call up a few pages from an incredible assortment with a few keystrokes. It's like the ultimate encyclopedia.
Furthermore, the money and the lack of people working there "endorsing it" are not real obstacles. If the next President says "Wouldn't it be cool to have the Library of Congress online?" and the House appropriates a few million dollars, Fiat Biblio, it'll happen. The US is running a surplus of over a hundred billion dollars a year. Money is not all that scarce. And finally, it's nice that you can go to a library and get things, but many people have only small libraries nearby, with very limited collections. And an online library is available 24/7. The book is never "checked out," too. And there only has to be ONE online library, instead of a zillion local branches.
"claiming that those new-fangled 'automobiles' will never replace the good old horse & buggy...
Of course, printed books *DO* have their charm, but going digital offers so much more - one advantage is that machine readable data is SEARCHABLE, and I love being able to have a computer slog thru tons of data looking for what I want to find. He should be thinking "books on demand". "
Which is funny because there are still horses and buggies and thusly there are still buggy whip manufacturers.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
>Umm..that's not really true anymore. I don't agree. Any electronic data ultimately on some physical storage medium, and all such electronic storage media are either poor or unproven long-term storage devices. All electronic file media and formats also require particular HW and SW to decode, and the lifespan of formats/media and the equipment to read them is very short (typically a decade or less.) Electronic storage is okay if you keep it fresh year after year after decade after decade (on the "well-maintained webserver" of which you speak, for example). But that puts you on a treadmill you can never get off. Say the LOC lets things slide for a few years after the depression of 2025 ... and the server hosting the rarely-accessed Rush Limbaugh collection crashes ... and the backup is left in a basement in the aging Deluxo-XML format, on the obsolete Super-Memory-Stick medium ... Stuff along those lines actually happens quite frequently. Paper has its own weaknesses (e.g. a good hot fire), but you can safely leave it alone for decades. Wide accessibility is nice, but for archival preservation over the next hundred years or so, paper is probably a safer bet than electronic.
I found this quote on Jerry Pournelle's site (www.jerrypournelle.com): In 1979 I said "By the year 2000, anyone in Western Civilization will be able to get the answer to any question that has an answer."
Regardless of the views expressed in the interview, knowledge wants to be accessible to anyone, not just people in Washington, D.C. Just yesterday, I needed help with Javascript. Altavista quickly found several comprehensive references - entire books online.
I think the Library of Congress will soon realize the revolution has passed them by. Given the pace of technology, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" has taken on more significance than ever.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
Aside from the many other misconceptions and logical non-sequitors in his talk, our Librarian doesn't seem to understand the difference between utilizing a digital medium to store texts, the distribution mechanism for the texts, and the ultimate UI.
Is there such as thing as long term digital storage? Wasn't it NASA who in the 70s decided to put their information onto computer for storage, and found recently that none of this storage was readable. There are authors who have now lost stuff they wrote in the 80's and stored on computer, because they can't read the disks any more.
Magnetic charge decays. CD's only have a limited life. Equipment becomes obsolete, replaced by something new, and it takes time, money and manpower to port it across. Will any digital storage last until it is as old as, say, the British Library's copy of Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon?
Ask me in a thousand years... Just don't expect to see the original article anywhere...
"Information wants to be paid"
...and should not be replaced.
Hear Hear
There's nothing like the feel of a book in your hand, and no electronic reader is going to take that away. It would be a sad day for civilisation if all the books were digitised. Paper books are going to be around long after any present digital format is dead.
Hey, when I take a book on a long trip, I don't have to worry about the batteries running out.
When I have a power cut, I can still read my books.
I would not swap my four book-cases for a pocket reader, no way no how. I love books, and no electronic gizmo is going to replace them in the hearts of people who read.
"Information wants to be paid"
Probably he himself is a prolific writer, and definitely a big reader. He has watched books that he loves so much being replaced by television and the Internet. I think what he feels is that the people are forgetting how to enjoy the books: the part that involves imagination and patience. And he blames technology for it. And while I disagree with him, I think I understand him. He is afraid that the paper books, where each book has a different personality will be replaced by plastic devices with LCD's, that are now known as e-books. While the text is still there, perhaps to him there is more to a book than text. Perhaps it's a tradition of reading and of learning through reading, that he is afraid will be lost. So I am not angry at him. I pity him.
Also, I think I understand his argument about old pamphlets and other rare works. If I were choosing what to put up first, indeed I would put up the rare works. Let's face it, whether or not the works of Leo Tolstoy are available on the Internet, "War and Peace" is very easy to obtain. Not so with some of the lesser known works.
For the record, I support digitizing all public domain works. In fact, I am currently trying to write e-book-like program for TI-89.
All that having been said, here is a paranoid conspiracy theory as well: he could be in cahoots with the publishers, who would loose the money they are currently earning by reprinting public domain works, when anyone can download the work to their palmtop computer.
Yes, Mr. Billington's reasons for the Library's not wanting to digitize were pretty lame... And yes, it smacks of elitism...But we're just being soap box critics posting here (like I am now :o) Because the Library is a 'public' institution, we do have the means, via our representation in Congress, to effect changes in their policies. For example, if I want to get ahold of quote by William Henry Harrison from his inagural address on why he wasn't wearing a hat during his speech, I should be hollaring at Joe Congressman instead of posting here. Of course, I'm not sure how much good that would do. And I'm not sure why the guy wouldn't wear a hat on a cold DC afternoon....
managers...why god invented purgatory
When asked about the parralels between the Internet revolution and the invention of the printing press, he responded that:
And the internet?
What he doesn't get is the drive of this, the second media revolution. The first gave us (the great unwashed masses) access to published materials, this one gives us access to publish materials. No longer is the media (news, non fiction, fiction et. all) under the control of "Kings and an elite few".
So no, Mr. Billings, I will not "be one of those mindless futurists, who sit in front of a lonely screen", I will be one of the millions who will be shaping your future, your nation's future, and that of the world.
From the cowardice that dare not face new truths,
From the laziness that is contented with half truth,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Good Lord, deliver me. - anonymous
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
there is something 'mindless,' 'isolated,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about the attitude of the Library of Congress towards the Internet, which represents 50 millions americans, most of which are (big)taxpayers. headGasket 'to understand recursion we must first understand...
Why do they have to be pdf anyway? Most of the time plain text will work.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E5%8D%8D&bt
Ehm.. why are you running wc on a zip file? Wouldn't df -sh be a little less obfuscatory? :)
As surprising as it is to say, I finally agree with something an American institution has decided. Digitizing a book and then providing on the Internet seems like the most crass thing that can be done to a work that was meant to be held in the hands, read in front of the fire, shoved into bookbags, put on the shelf, enjoyed on the train, lent to a friend, written in the margins of, sold at a yard sale, passed down to children and friends and stacked beside its kith and kin. Our libraries are the cornerstone of our society. The thought of all the collected works of humanity radiating out from a screen, downloaded in the night, and printed off in dot-matrix gives me the creeps.
Billington has not identified the main problem with reading online. Jakob Nielsen has. The problem is that current screens have insufficient resolution and they cause eyestrain. Nielsen estimates that that problem will be solved within 5 years.
So this begs the question: are we going to slowly phase out public libraries and phase in public computer labs to allow free access to all?
Why not? This is already being done to some exten. Many libraries offer free internet access terminals, which I would imagine also gives you the ability to search their library (and maybe others?) for particular titles. I don't find it difficult to imagine a "library" composed nothing but terminals with a nice fat pipe to an internet database. The technology may be lacking a little to make this feasible right now (EXTREME broadband, good OCR), but we're not far away.
I agree with a previous poster: this Library of Congress guy is just another buerocrat who thinks he needs to justify his position. From the article:
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
As opposed to pre-internet days, when we all lived in a commercial-free utopia, everyone spoke rationally and clearly, and no one would think of harming their fellow human being. Do you suppose this guy and Lieutenant Grossman shop at the same store for reactionary, short-sited quotes? With quotes like that, is it any wonder that Mr. Billington would oppose digitizing the Library of Congress' books?
There's absolutely no reason why books should not be converted to some form of digital media. Making such knowledge readily available (in any form of media) can only benefit a society.
"Tech Law Journal asked Billington if there is any parallel between hostility to the printing press in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries, and hostility to the Internet today. He stated that there is, but that there is also a significant difference. Billinton explained that some of the hostility to the printing press originated because cheap reproduction made books and pamphlets available to more people. Previously, only kings and an elite few had access to libraries. The printing press made the public library possible. Billington stated that in contrast, public libraries are a "political institution" today."
Of course, since "kings and the elite" were certainly NOT a political institution.
"Truth is like a tragedy" -Coal Chamber
> C'mon, go find in Snow Crash the part where the .002 sec?
> Metaverse is introduced for the first time. How
> long did it take? Was it more than
Can they make a searchable index for my brain? Or my apartment?
"I know I know the Chomski language hierarchy!"
"Where the hell is the REMOTE!"
Casey
________________
sucking the marrow is no excuse for choking on the bone.
-- John Keating (Dead Poet's Society)
- Sighuh?
Because I didn't vote for him. Someone with this much authority has the responsibility for preserving our nations data, and I don't think he's doing a good job!
Remember the Library of Alexandria? Much of the ancient worlds knowledge was burned in a fire, a legacy that we will forever be unable to share. How easy would it be for a fire or natural disaster or god forbid a war to destroy a huge chunk of our national heritage?
Please, somebody put someone with a clue in charge of our library. If there is a problem with being able to fund digitizing the books, I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers from the computer geek community. I certainly would volunteer to help such a worthwhile and noble project as preserving our nations data.
Thats right, data. Someone who thinks "Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing" does not belong running our Library of Congress.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I think it is interesting that none of the comments mention the disquieting fact that this is apparently the same guy who is going to be deciding important issues about 'fair use' regarding Copyrights.
Anything NOT worth doing is NOT worth doing well...
I'm going to make this simple. 24 Hours a day. 7 Days a week. 365 DAYS a year. Now isn't that better? Instead of making a post asuming someone is wrong, why not try to see it from thier POV? Ask your self, what is the logical result of seeing that number 365? I hope that logically, days a year would be what you would think of, but apparently, you had some trouble doing so. Defending malinged quotes and posts everywhere its N3! Look he even has a nifty utility belt!
Actually, digital formats aren't necessarily better for preservation. . .Electronic formats can become unreadable in a few years because 1) the physical medium can be unstable (e.g. magnetic tape deteriorates quite quickly), or 2) the medium or data format can become obsolete (e.g. 5.25" floppy disks). Formats can be converted, but this can be an expensive and problematic process;
Umm..that's not really true anymore. In the past, when digital information was stored on floppy disks or reel-to-reel magnetic tape, media degredation was a problem. But nobody's talking about putting the Library of Congress on 5.25 floppies. This is the era of hard drives, web servers, and multiple backups. Any serious effort to put the Libary of Congress (or any other large information archive) on the web will use a variety of easily read file formats, and will be upgraded frequently.
The Library of Congress on one set of floppies sitting in a warehouse somewhere would be very vulnerable to media degredation and format obsolesence. However, the same information on a well-maintained web server can be updated and converted to new formats very easily (FILE->SAVE AS). Also, even if everyone who wanted to could physically get to the Library of Congress and obtain research credentials (you can't just walk in, you know...), there are still only a few copies (max) of each work. Thousands of people can access a web site at the same time, and none of them will spill drinks or tear the pages of a rare book.
If anyone is interested in how a really well-organized e-text archive works, I encourage them to look at Project Gutenburg at http://sailor.gutenberg.org/
And I agree with him a bit. There's something unhealthy about the notion of an "online community." I know several people who destroyed their lives with on-line chat, for example. It's destroyed marriages and cost people jobs, from becomming addicted to it.
Physical libraries encourage a comminity of scholarship, and not just some people searching text and pulling out a sentence here and there for a quick quote.
--- Speaking only for myself,
If we could do an indexed text search we might not need those librarians to explain the catalogue to us...
or to do fill out those ever so troublesome Inter-Library-Loans...
Or to stamp the books as we take them out of the library...
Personally I echo the words above about respect for books. I love hard-copy. God forbid I start buying rocket-books. But sometimes, you just don't want to get on a plane for DC or wait 3 months for an ILL to come through... :)
Cheers,
Winton
We're screwed now.
I predict that congress will simply direct him to make the materials available whether he like it or not. This man is the chief librarian - he is not in a position to effectively pass access rules on goods that are publically owned.
Dear Librarian of Congress, First of all, let me wish you good luck and hope that you'll hold on to your bud and your privileges as Librarian of Congress while you can, but sooner or later, the entire collection of LoC will be digitized, with or without you. That being said, it is true that the feeling of touching the book, turning pages, while you are reading, is pleasant. But the main reason for reading is to acquire knowledge, so it doesn't matter whether you read it by turning pages or by scrolling down the screen. The reason for reading is not to go to the LoC in bus load so that you stupid jerk can feel the importance of your "stature". And then, reading is being lonely by definition. Have you seen a bunch of people reading out loud together, "as a community", in the LoC? Is it allowed anyways? Finally, just a reminder. We are in the 21st century now, Mr. Librarian of Congress, in case you haven't turned the page of your calendar yet. And things are different too. Remember you used to able to get a movie ticket, a pop corn and a soda for only 5 cents? You know what, now you get sound and color too. So adapt yourself to the new world. my 2Bits
This guy sounded a bit arrogant himself.
He's prolly only upset because if the library did digitize it's books, he'd be outta work.
In his ideals world, everyone who is a free thinker would be punished. Everyone would though 'Neuromancer' superior to 'Romeo and Juliet' would be pushed off a cliff. It sounds like Communist China, or public hish school...
====
Crudely Drawn Games
good one. hehe
At least when books are online, I have more access to them. Like 24/7 access.
!Let's all do it ourselves!
-m
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (A. A. Milne)
SAVE THE TREES~~!!! put the books online! (those mindless, arrogant, isolated LoC jerks...) -m
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (A. A. Milne)
I understand the hardware issues fine, the file type issue is the problem (to me.) We live in a time where you can buy a decent server for your home that will cost you around $1000. Since this is the government, even if the server costs $100,000 or more, it is still within their ludicrous budget. As a result, funding the hardware upgrades is less of an issue for them.
I am more concerned with having to continually re-scan in older and continually decaying books because of file format changes. by going SGML, you can have all your formatting however you want it, for the forseeable future. While an ascii file would give you the raw info, you would lose the formatting capabilites, and more importantly the possiblities for linking between documents that would make this effort worthwhile.
Imagine being able to see the documents that are in the footnotes of the book you are reading at the click of your mouse, how cool would that be?
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/
- never
get to the LOC another way, we're going to bury our heads in the sand, and act in an admittedly political, divisive manner. Instead of taking up what could be the single greatest (hyper)linked library of information based on copyright expired publications, and any additional texts that publishers would want added, we're going to bury our heads in the sand and instead scan some baseball cards and maps...http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/
I do love curling up in bed with a good PowerBook. Like I'm doing right now.
Have you ever even seen/created a PDF with ONLY text on it? A 4 page B&W newsletter is about 60k. Like 45 seconds even on a 14.4 modem. Are you going to say next that you can READ text faster than 5 pages a minute?
And I looked, and behold, the pokemon all spontaneously combusted.
This is the most short-sighted view I have ever heard, and I am appalled to hear it from our Librarian of Congress
What he said. (See above)
I shall save my outrage for the email that will go to the Library O'Congress.
Signature applies to Mr. Billington (See below)
"I am an American. You are a sick asshole!!"
We would not want to cut down on the Librarian of Congress' fiefdom would we?
I have learned much on-line. I have learned much from books. I love books. But Mr. Billington needs to catch up with the present instead of trying to preserve the past. His comments are arrogant and short-sighted. Posting books on-line would make them available to many more people around the world. Which I would think is more important than promoting some glorious notion of how we should obtain our knowledge and pleasure. The problems with the Internet are problems with humanity in general. Maybe if more books were available to more people, these problems would not be as large as they are. But I guess as long as narrow-minded fossils such as Mr. Billington are in allowed to hold positions of power, we will never know.
But more to the point, who is this guy to decide my reading preferences? Putting books online opens up a wide realm of possibilities, such as voice readers for the disabled. It only delays the inevitable - others will put them up, (reference project gutenberg).
---------------------------------
---------------------------------
Visit
Typical response of a gov't bureaucrat. how can any learned man advocate not distributing knowledge in any fashion. 1) Fire him 2) Hire someone who is not technico phobic, preferredly someone with a slashdot account 3) start digitizing in any format NOT advocated by bill gates 4) read to your hearts content
Flaimbait yourself.
But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
It's fun being right.
-( koutetsu )
How is it possible that one person can decide the fate of all the information pertaining to our Federal Government?
Shouldn't there be a commity that decides these kinds of things?
Perhaps he is afraid that he will not be able to keep tabs on all the people that download this information. Or maybe he see's his job and the jobs of his fellow co-workers at the library becoming obsolete? Whatever the case I think Bill needs to have his head examined. Also if they are putting some information online why not all of it? I really do not see the rational behind his explinations. The most I got out of his comments was that he did not want the precious information in the library to be tainted by the media. His statments to me show his incredable lack of knowledge. He seems to think, and even compares, the internet to television and radio. I don't what hole this guy has been under but the internet has been the meduim for valuable scientific data long before it was tainted buy "seductive" banner ad's. The only logical reason Bill would have for making such remarks is a serious hidden aggenda, and his postion should be reconsidered if he is not willing to give access to this information to anyone and everyone, through and meduim desired.
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that soon we'll have physical books with LCD pages. You could download the virtual book to your LCD book and read the text 'in real life.' Sort of invalides the Library of Congress argument. Sozin
Well if your into S&M
more POWER TO YOU.
I have it on good authority,
one Mr. Billington[?]
that it'll make you go blind.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Just as laser surgery can
improve your sight
a MICROWAVE LASER can
blur it
The reason that my post seems one
sided is because it was a reply to a
query & I was giving an alternate
view... some musings of mine with
regard to the Kharma credo & my
observations over several months.
Previous postings under anonymous
contain ' byMouseShadow ' in the subject
box or MICOWAVE LASER in the body text.
[Except on April Fools day]
I've never flamed anyone, How anyone could
consider my replies flame bait is beyond me.
Yet I get Marked down 2points for what I would
have graded as insightful, and your pro forma
piece is marked up, the masonic hordes strike
again.
I think that topics should be announced
8 hours ahead of taking posts and the posts
distributed amongst5 blocks so that the posts
can be distributed ina more amenible manner.
Just think 5 first posts!
I think Mr. Billington gave some reasons that
have nothing to do with his real feelings
on the matter. Personally I think he's
anxious to put the LoC on line. To think that
with a few deft strokes on his keyboard he
can rewrite history. Sounds almost prophetic,
*put the LoC on line*. Shades of Julius
Caesar... he won't renounce the crown on
the third offer.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Panic attacks can be induced
by stimulating the thyroid
& a portion of the bowel
[2 inches to the left of the navel]
with a MICROWAVE LASER.
I would have replied last night but
/. is a prig I only syggested ...am
/. that
:/)
/.
the aol nazis were cutting my line.
I couldn.t keep it going more than 2
minutes at a time. Dear Baby Jesus,
you'd think I was at the south pole.
After I posted 594 I started
having trouble with my lines. Try it,
its interesting.
The aol people assert, that
they cut your line for'inactivity'.
They willfully cut off downloads,
A PC can't be more active than that.
They say they only
monitor outgoing activity.
Well for each incoming packet
I get, a red spike appears
on my netmeter, additionally, an
'aknowledgement packet' colors
the base of that spike yellow.
The Ak packs seem to be as large
as the ping packs that the aol
anti timers use. Thus I figuire
I'm generating enough activity to
keep their machines up.
Of course they
don't time me out they just pull
the plug. A half dozen contact
numbers all having difficulties.]
I'm having a crisis in faith
You'd think that aol would
be too much trouble for a
beginner, when it crashes ALL
the webpages go too. [Netscape
doesn't want to piggyback
on my aol line]I Explorer
maintains the page or I'd
never get anything done.
BUT I DIGRESS... HEAR I AM
REPLY STARTS HERE... . . .
I didn't mean that Everbody
on
that [i like those occasional
spellig errors, makes me feel
human like Vennzetti~
no taulk dis engiliss, but
am know da face om justice]
that a number of them have lulled
themselves into a space where
they wouldn't want to be if
they knew the bigger picture.
But they aren't going to
even see the problem.
Why am I getting hashed
for saying whats been said by
others.
eg.
...here I am surfing along at +2 but I kind of miss seeing my
own posts go by
~ or words to that effect.
I'm not going to
speak of the rants that I've
seen go by at -1. Some of the
stuff down there appeared to
be rather erudite & worthy
of consideration. I'm not
pretending to judge, I know
in a way I've come in, in
the middle of something.
I know also that, what
might be novel to me might
be a belabored point in
the Linux crowd. These are
just the normal adjustments.
I believe that I've
posted stuff on
should have provoked interest,
[NSA, gun dealers,
tinkerers, inventors etc]
Yeah... so
... Almost no interest.
You'd think that some poor
soul would come up with...
"can you make a girl fall
in love too?"
I posted a piece on
how the Ozone hole
was an example of the
effect that Dr.P was
observing in a spinning
cryomagnet... loosing weight!
[gravity shield 2000-03-28?]
This is Nobel prize
winnin' stuff, even if
I'm only half right.
When I went to get a copy in
the archives, horrors my post was gone.
NO POST BELOW 1 WAS LISTED IN THE ARCHIVE
It was my impression everything
went into the archive, every last
damm grit.
Here I thought I made
a public posting of my one little
idea & I am undone. Unseen &
undone with not even a smile
of appreciation
If you were Mr.Billington
would you trust your your archives
to such treatment.
And not only are there accidents
but but there are the twisted & even
professional 'Spinmeisters'
[NYTimes Feb?] who for money
disinform various net pages.
There might be guys with a dozen
nicknames for
that they keep in an old
'CookieJar' on a floppy disc.
[Along with a batch file, that
rewrites the pc id.] Every time
Herr Spinmeister comes on line
he checks to see that freenet
has given him a new IP.
It's easy to get a few
nicknames for each box in one's
office and every library in
one's city.
If the good cmdr were to ask
his subscribers what their
log on e mail address was, half
the C I A would loose there
moderation points. The price of
a free web is eternal vigilance.
I oughta write a book...sorry
take care.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
Personally, I don't want anyone
telling me what I should be able to
see,etc. What I don't want more is a
system where some paid off syncofant
can rewrite history with a few
keystrokes. A little batch file that
'corrects' the same document in a
dozen databases. A non 'correctible'
medium would be best eg a non acid
polymer sized paper book; a photo
duplicate of an original. [maybe
a good filche.
One of the other
posters suggests that another
motive of Mr.B. is the fact that
people should go places not
have everything come to them.
Sucking up life through a
bandwidth pipe. Maybe Mr.
Billington figuires that we're
close to being wired up in
the 'Matrix'v. beta.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
You can be played like a puppet by
stimulating your internal organs with
the effects of a MICROWAVE LASER
I have the same kneejerk respect for books
/. would throw a fit if a web page with
that most other educated people do. The Jews
believe that books have a soul,they bury
unuseable books in a funeral. I can't see
myself mourning the pages of Camus or Tennessee
Williams.
Just as there are many sick neurotic or
deviant individuals, they have their mirror
images within our literature...[I'm not even
gonna go there!]
Just as many wierd individuals have made
important contributions to our civilization
there are definite books that really ought
be exposed to MANY readers within the
structured confines of an institution of
learning. How'd ya like to live next door to
Poe or Bary Goldwater or a reader channeling
Goebbals or Hitler thru the medium of books?
The library of Congress contains many
areas of information that could be
particularly hurtful like the propaganda
collections from several wars, a treasure
trove for racists. Most of the readers
of
this material opened, now your demanding the
LOC put it online.
The alternative is to use select works,
who shall be our judge? I personally
don't like to think that our treasures should
be placed on such a degradeable medium
that might be lost in the event of a
technological hiccup.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Got migrane,face pain
toothaches, sinus
flu,nausea or other
conditions pertaining
to the head & throat
...make an aluminum
foil hood, move around,
so as not to be reaquired
as a target; & don't
look at a tv tube
the morphological
similarities between
MICROWAVE LASERS &
TV tubes
is beyond the scope
of this message
Bandwith & eyestrain are signifigant.
,sizing, and glues charming your senses the feel the texture, the weight in your hasnds.
but except for watches, liquid crystal
displays that get brighter as you place them in the light seem a thing of the past. Going to
have to come up with a rotary polarized[cantrell
cell?] to change colors.
There's nothing like rolling about on a
billowy futon with a beautiful new book
folded on your arms. The intoxicating smells of the inks
Coaxing the pages into the wanning light of a quiet afternoon with the certain knowledge of
an ahhah experinceat the turn of a page.
The best part of all is, not having to call the twit tommorrow if she gets dissapointing.
Try & do that with your box... eunichs
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
You have never truly
been in love until
your gonadotrophins
have been adjusted
with a
MICROWAVE LASER
Hmm, the only thing I see in the speech about digitizing or not digitizing books is this:
We are not digitizing books, but bringing hitherto little used, specially formatted materials like maps and recordings, into the world of books where the fullest answers can be found to questions raised by a picture, cartoon, or old movie clip. The new, multi-medial electronic library is not replacing our traditional print library. The national library of America, like democratic America itself, adds without subtracting. A new immigrant does not evict an old resident, nor does a new technology supplant an older form of expression. Our virtual library does not replace our 28-million-item print collection any more than our published books replace our 53-million-item manuscript collection.
I agree with previous posters that eventually a librarian will come up, one that has used computers extensively and is comfortable reading online and who sees the need for digitizing books en masse. The only thing that will prevent it will be copyright laws, but older texts with expired copyrights will be available online eventually.
insipid
dp
---
http://insipid.com
I don't think even if the Library of Congress digitized and put online every book with an expired copyright, or even somehow every book in their collection that they would render the public library obsolete to 50-70% of the public. As long as we are only talking about books with expired copyrights, I can't see how this would render the public library obsolete to any of the public. My wife is a public librarian, one of her jobs is to periodically weed out books. Due to the limited shelf space, buying new books implies discarding a similar number of older books. By the time the copyright expires, many of the books are no longer in your library (but probably obtainable by interlibrary loan) That said, I can see the reason for digitizing some of the other (unique)source material first. What I objected to was not wanting to digitze the books at all.
This is a pretty weak argument: books have Table of Content, not to mention Index, which make searches supereasy. And you don't even need to do any typing, retyping, mouse moving, clicking,... not to mention that once you found what you wanted, you still need to read it!
What I'm looking for is the PhotoShop plug-in that'll make any document look like XIII century book handwritten by monks.
One part of what we're discussing here is completelly answered in the first quote of Billington from the article. It's just so well put that I have to quote it again:
This is an extremly accurate overall characterization of the Internet. This tells us that Billington understands very well what kind of medium is Internet. It also immediately tells us that all the nice sites you're talking about are peanuts, and we simply cannot define Internet by them. That's obvious from anybody's (yours as well) description of the Internet -- it invariably starts with "maybe there is all that comercialization, this and that... but there are some nice things too".
When you talk about any librarary, let alone LOC, you start immediately with Joyce, Dickins, Garcia-Marquez, and that's what the libraries are about. Even if we agreed that majority of books there might've been "bilge", that wouldn't have matered because libraries are defined by "good" (to paraphrase Billington). Internet is not and that's the source of incompatibility.
By "integrity" I meant intelectual integrity. When Billington says no to Internet he simply means LOC is too good for the Internet. Elitistic? Arogant? Let's think about it: all those literary masterpieces, practicaly whole human civilization concentrated there, and all that 100% uncomercial and free. To put that on the Internet is like to roll it in the mud. I mean I like Internet a lot, but tell me any five things born on the Internet that, combined, can compare with Joyce's Ulysis. And that is only one book.
When I was talking about your integrity I was thinking of your apologetic rationalizations of the comercialization of the Internet. No pun was intended.
To summarize: To say that the Internet is full of crap is a constatation. To say that any given library is full of crap is a philosophical statement.
Again, it doesn't matter if there are bad books inside because libraries are about good books. In other words, nobody realy enforces you to read bad books. Go to the Internet, and advertisements will be shoved down your throat.
How many trees (or kilowats of electricity) does it take to go to the library and loan a book or two?
We don't need Internet to read or preserve any book. And the Billington's important points is that putting books on the Internet will debase them! (because Internet amplifies the worst features of TV... comercialism,... etc). Also, libraries have much greater accessibility than the Internet.
This is a naive thinking, because, as you should know, medium is message. So that's what we're discussing, what kind of medium is the Internet. Does Interent provide the reverence for great books to allow the reader to draw meaning from them? Billington here very eloquently, with many painfull but excelent points, answers no.
It's not bad for the Net, it's bad for the books: imagine Ulyses where at each page you have to first see an advertisement (like here at shashdot) before you can read anything. Putting LOC on any hardware/software would probably be free, and my guess is that more than one company would offer the service. Now imagine advertisements how Microsoft software is providing all the great books to the world. etc...
I don't think that any of these things can compare anywhere near to Ulyses. One sure can see artistically interesting stuff, but things there are still "in progress". I have almost nothing against World Hunger Watch or SETI@home in principle. CNN, however, sucks in any form.
This is a realy silly suggestion. How are you going to digitize, for instance, XIII century books handwritten by monks ?
Some things are simply beyond the reach of the digital.
Here they are:
Now, is this the exact state of www or what? He also mentioned something I'd like to quote here:
That's again dead on. In US, where pretty much everobody either has everything separate (car, room, TV, cellphone, internet connection) or lives a life of third world subhumans (like in inner-city gethos all over the US metropolitan areas, where Internet hasn't stepped in yet), the "comunity thing" has completely degenerated compared to Europe or South America, for instance.
This reminds me on the interview that Umberto Eco gave to Wired magazine couple years ago (if anybody has that long memory anymore) where he talks about making surfing the Internet a collective, community thing much closer to the spirit of Mediteranian tradition.
Finaly, don't forget the inset:
Maybe then there'll be better information about what's up with this guy?
You hate guy's arrogance, but what about your ignorance? I mean look at your argumentation: First you emphasize that the Internet is not TV, which is not the issue here (read carefully what guy says and you'll realize it's worst than tv), then you go against your own statement. So maybe after all it is tv, you say, so let's fix it, and the fix is to put the libraries on the net. But, you see, that's the whole point of the guy: you won't the make the Internet better place by putting the libraries in, you'll make the libraries worst place by making them on-line, because of all the other crap there.
But this is not a quote of what he said, but of what was written in the article.
Where are those projects is simple to answer: they are nowhere comparing to the comercial stuff. But you seem to be okay with the comercialisation with the Internet, even inventing euphemism ("parcel of the new dynamism") to somehow rationalize to yourself that SETI and other your favorite projects are peanuts comparing to the real moneymakers.
So it seems that the guy, as opose to yourself, show some real integrity here, since he does not accept the Library of Congress to become another peanut.
Maybe we can take everything offline...all software, end apps like icq, and all online resources. Then maybe everything won't be so mindless and arrogant all the time. Hell, what's the point of the Internet, anyway...
-------- -1? Why? --------
In the long run, all books will eventually be online.
In the long, long run all, paper books will have withered away.
In the long, long, long run, none of this will matter because the apocalypse will have happened.
-cibrPLUR
As far as making information accessable to all, Billington inferred that he would, in fact, place many reference items on the website (maps, recordings, etc.). The issue is digitizing full books.
If books are distributed in 'searchable' format, why would anyone read the entire books? The great majority of people would simply search for a few keywords and pull from context instead of actually READING the books.
Distributing reference material is one thing. When the puropse of the literature is to distribute facts, there truly is no better way than the Internet. However, Billington's desire to preserve the "presumption of reverence" for books is something that should be admired.
In fact, this "presumption of reverence" idea is what prompted the "Borg-like" comment. The End of History theme (from Kojeve, Heidegger, et. al. and poplularized by Francis Fukyama) shows that in the modern movement, nothing is sacred and everything that was formerly respected is being vulgarized. Billington is now a member of the counterculture, one of those who resist this movement.
Ignoring your personal attacks, I am struck by your unwavering faith in technology. It is a symptom of the post-modern society to believe that technology will solve all our problems. Printed books are just an antiquity that will be replaced as soon as the technology is good enough. You are probably right that this will happen, but I cannot agree that this is good. Just because they are old and low-tech does not automatically deprive them of worth. In fact, these very characteristics give them MORE worth than some kind of digital book that attempt to mimic REAL books. Please explain to me how digitizing paper books can in any way improve upon the way they already are. Your immediate response would probably be "because they are made more available to everyone." I have already wrote of my reservations on this argument. I would be interested to see any new points.
you've probably never 'met' anyone, only a few at best. Talking to someone over instant messenger is far different than face to face interaction.
2nd question/point: Many modern philosophers are anti-technology (or are at least wary) because of its alienation from human input. Example: In the past there was one cobbler making his own shoes, very distinct and in some ways artful. Now we have one person pulling a lever that cuts uniform peices of the shoe. Much of the *humanity* is taken away when technology is introduced. Relating this to the current discussion is somewhat an abstraction, but still applies I think.
3rd point: You may have misunderstood me here. By authenticity I don't mean accuracy, which may be important too. By authenticity I refer to it containing more of the *human* element. On /. most everyone is very technically minded. To a technical person, nothing makes more sense than to make something more efficient and more accessable. For an art-lover, however, nothing is more destructive! I would far rather travel long distances to see a genuine da Vinci, or hear Wagner played by a fine German symphany, than to download a digital representation off the Internet. That is the authenticity I refer to. ( I think this may address teh 4th point too)
The final point reflects my concern over the idea of "searchable" text. Literature or intellectual non-fiction was never meant to be "searchable" but read in its entirity. While I know that the opportunity would be there to read in the entirity, the tendency would be to merely grep through to pull something out of context.
Before we continue this discussion, let me say that I don't see any problem with digitizing reference materials, it makes sense. My concern centers around works of literature and the like.
To address your 'improvements' point. Greater efficiency does not add anything essentially better to literature. To restate: simplification is not always an improvement. Again, some of these developments may be good for reference materials, but not for works of literature, nor even good non-fiction (actually, you might consider the point that the easier research becomes, the less rewarding it is also). There is just something sick about reading philosophy in digital form.
I agree with many of his statemtents regarding the isolation the Internet can cause, and reading books in eletronic form strikes me as extremely impersonal. I am an avid book reader, I probably read at least 3 new books a week, and I couldn't imagine having to read them on a computer screen. Think, no more handy little paperbacks to carry around for an idle moment, no more kicking back under a tree with a book and just losing yourself for a few hours, no more reading on the throne :). Granted, technology may make these arguments obsolete, someday someone will create a cheap, reusable display device the size of a Palm, with easily swappable modules that can take the place of a book, however to me it just wouldn't feel right. (I know, really subjective, but hey).
Now the part I do not agree with is his apparent presumption that nobody would want to search the library electronically for research and such. Digitizing the contents of the library is a very good idea for these purposes, it would make actually finding the information you want orders of magnitude easier. But I doubt electronic books will ever completely replace traditional wood pulp, nor would I want it to.
Ok, Obviously you Slashdotters get all riled up whenever you hear about someone not digitizing something or other. You try to make it into a free speech/open access/open source/idealistic/philisophical masturbation session. You embrace every aspect of a new technology so mindlessly that you don't stop to question what you are embracing. As any scientist can tell you, questioning is important to wade through the garbage and arrive at (or near) the truth. Anyone who know what the LOC does will tell you that the LOC is not about providing free access to its collection for every American. If you've ever been to the LOC, you would know that it's collection isn't even circulating. You can't check out books if you are not a government agency. What the LOC DOES do is provide a basic resource for other libraries to base their collections upon. When a library gets a new book, it checks the LOC databases to see how the book is classified, and verify that the book is original, unadulterated, and basically to make sure it is what it says it is. In not digitizing it's collection, the LOC is allowing *community* and *regional* and *school* libraries to tackle new technologies in ways that wil work for them and their patrons. If the LOC digitized it's collection it would set a standard for others to follow, for better or worse. Knowledge, reading, and learning require a certain amount of absorbtion, thought, and reflection that digitization might eliminate. Faster and more convenient does not necessarily mean better. Rene Descartes spent two days in isolation before arriving at his maxim "I think therefore I am". He didn't have, or need, speed speed speed. If he had it he may have passed right over that thought. It's not an issue of denying access to information. Walk down to your local library and find what you're looking for..It's free (unlike a $2000 computer that needs to be upgraded every few years). If they don't have what you're looking for, go to the inter-library loan department and they'll get it for you for free. Go ahead and ask about what kind of digitization projects are going on and why. Maybe you can even hlp out, since the LOC didn't do it for you.
As I'm english I'd just like to say, for the record, that our government publishes all acts of parliament, and the like, on the web already, and has for some time. All of 'em are freely available through Her Majesty's Stationary Office (www.hmso.gov.uk i think). Why the US senate can't do the same I can't imagine, it seems to me to be an eminently sensible thing to do but there you go...
I am confused to where and how the line was drawn that esoteric and "little used, specially formatted materials like maps and recordings ..." are acceptable to put on the internet, whereas e-books are seen as seductors and don't "inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
In fact the The Librarian of Congress, James Billington said that while "electronic books may succeed commercially, they are 'seductive.'"
I am not sure anything has been romanticized any more than the good old printed book! In fact Mr. Billington himself continues to perpetuate the notion that the printed book should hold a certain amount of "reverance."
Information is information. Those who control the information control everything. If they are (and i do believe they are) a government agency of a democratic society, they have the obligation - nay, responsibility - to share and disperse information.
It is one thing to state that the conversion of printed books to digital format is expensive and time consuming. But to say that they have drawn the line and that line includes "little used" items and doesn't include "greatly used" items seems completely and utterly ridiculous!
What an utterly ignorant person you are.
Ignorant fool. You talk big shit but you don't seem to be opening your wallet wide to help pay the costs of digitizing everything. If you can't afford to help money-wise perhaps you could volunteer some of your previous time? No? Then shut your pie hole.
Haha, after reading this LOC thing on /. I just had to forward the link to my sister who's a technical archivist for a university. I found her reply to be quite humorous.
-
So I went, I read, I cracked up. Those smarty pants don't even know what they are talking about. They are so focused on the technology side of this they don't even see the rest of the pie. One of my personal favorites is the one who asks that folks contact their representatives and ask that the books be digitized. He even provides a
link to find out how to contact your representatives.
I'm at a loss of words on this one. I'm just dumbfounded.
And as to the guy who thinks we librarians are hording information becuase we want to be the keepers of ALL the Books so that we will have that "personal" contact. Yeah, right. we ought to just digitize everything. And then we librarians won't be needed. Because folks can get to whatever they want right at the click of a button. I mean we all know how easy the internet is. If we could just dump all printed materials in one easy to access location the research problems of the world would be solved. If someone
needs to find out exactly what ingrediant it is that makes a deoderant dry, or perhaps someone is writing on Michael Jackson and wants to know who his dermatatolgist is- well then hey, all they need to do is click that button.
And, the library IS a community thing. Those nerd heads just don't go to the library. Sure, it's not the thing for everyone but you tell folks who do enter into a library on a regular basis that it is not a community thing and see what they say.... AND the Library of Congress isn't just
about books. A library represents a specific community and preserves and stores that community's heritage. Do you suppose that only takes place with hardback books. What about those pamphlets. People have less access to those
pamphlets and the LOC is losing it's battle to preserve what it has got now. There simply isn't enough time, space, energy, or money to attack every single little aspect of the library with a digitiztion plan.
If these folks want to see every bloody book digitize tell them to get a degree, learn about what a real library is and then volunteer.
And one last thing - how often do you suppose these folks make use of Project Guttenberg? What about the virtual libraries various states have set up or the Internet Public Library for that matter? I mean exactly how much do these people even know about what they are saying. Do you suppose that most of those folks have even explore the LOC website to see what they are doing?
That's all for now. I've got stuff to archive.
I would point out:
No one wants to throw out the original books. They are historical artifacts with value beyond the mere text.
E-archives such as the aforementioned Guttenberg Project, the English Server at Carnegie Mellon, and The Online Books Page at UPENN are tremendously useful and popular. These university libraries still get lots of paperphiles, who aren't even students.
If you don't want to read on a screen, buy a printer.
As for digital media storage, any hard drives, CDs, etc. that the Library used would decay in a few decades - unless they go for some real high end stuff, like some experiemental optical drive. Either way, the cost and upkeep would, presumably, be a fairly large multiple of the library's current budget. I would love to have a digital library of congress, but the costs would be huge. How would we pay for it? Fees would undermine the whole notion of free public libraries, and be fodder for the argument of a "digital divide". Banner ads at the Library of Congress website would probably be a poor solution. And I don't think tax increases would be well received. Nonetheless, our librarian said none of these things, which makes me wonder if he needs to get out of that musty labyrinth of shelves and breath a little fresh air. He sounds downright crotchty.
Well, yes it is. Since the book is in Washington D.C. and I'm in California, it does indeed take a great number of people all working together (pilots, reservation clears, rental car employees, bankers [travel costs bucks], etc.) to get me to that book. Sure, reading the real deal is more cozy, but puting the library online will open it up to millions who will never go to D.C. or simply *can't* afford to go to D.C.
This is the gov't telling the poor and the non 31337 that they have no right to knowledge. Sad. Sad and utterly pathetic.
While it would be expensive, it can be done slowly, and the value to every local library in the US would be immense.
In 1990 or 1991 when I lived in Gomel (USSR, then Belarus), all I had were some PC-AT (286) boxes and two 2400 bps modems. I have decided that it sucks that in the whole city (that had about half a million people at the time -- comparable to San Francisco) there is no public-accessible network, and that it will be a good idea to join Fidonet (that was the only thing available without insane fees) as a "point", open a BBS on it and maintain it. I did that, then "point" became a "node", some other people joined, and soon it turned into Net 2:452 of Fidonet. With cheap and primitive equipment, flaky phone lines, DOS software (that I had to rewrite to adapt to conditions where it was sometimes impossible to complete mail packet download between having the carrier lost and redialing for half an hour to some overloaded node), it supported reasonable speed of netmail (Fidonet equivalent of email, with store-and-forward routing) and echomail (newsgroups very similar to early days of Usenet), people started using "freq" (file request, an equivalent of FTP transfer, but as opposed to FTP and HTTP, it was queued as a "special" mail message, so it could be delayed until long distance discount hours, recovered from failure, etc.) to get things on remote servers, send files as "attachments" (as opposed to MIME attacments those were kept in original format, weren't routed and were processed separately from message to preserve precious bandwidth), use search-engine-like "robots", etc. -- all that using few 2400bps modems. The amount of information that can be found by Fidonet wasn't, of course, comparable to LoC, but it made a huge difference in the lives of a bunch of programmers that operated and used that network, including myself. Forgive me, Borland/Inprise/whatever, I had Borland C++ 3.1 available for download -- my excuse is that you certainly didn't lose any profits from people whose monthly salary was equivalent to $30 or less, and the nearest store with your products was way beyond their reach.
It was done by people with no money at the time when Internet (or any network) access really was hard to obtain, and it still worked.
Now almost a decade passed. Neither in Gomel nor anywhere in US it's necessary to deal with 2400bps modems or 286. Even poorest of the poor, if they want to access the Internet, can buy some used 386 box with 4M of RAM ( => capable of running DOS or Linux) with at least 9600bps modem -- I know, I did that in 1994 after arriving here, and I had literally no money then -- it certainly didn't become harder now except that p166's replaced 386dx-25 as the most likely throwavay item. Even the worst school in US with the dumbest technician in the world can find some mac and subscribe to some cheap-ass dialup. And the poorest library still can find 2-3 computers and modems. Heck, a library can put one Linux box and all other boxes can be 286 with NCSA telnet. Someone who wants to get "enterntainment", will be very disappointed by all mentioned solutions, but a person who needs to get some particular book, especially if LoC will make it available in plain text, will find those ways of accessing it through the Internet extremely useful.
So, it's not some "rich elite" that will be able to access digitized books, it's precisely the same set of people, whom libraries are supposed to serve. Library's primary function is not to serve as a place for conversations, waiting, "looking smart" or visiting a public bathroom -- it's to allow people to find and read books, and accessibility through the Internet helps to perform it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I found his comments about the internet rather vaccuous and snotty, but beyond that, the man is in need of a cluestick to the crotch.
As many pointed out above, reading on-line is not the best visual experience - RIGHT NOW. What about advances in technology Mr. Librarian of Congress? Don't you think that starting the digitizing process for books now in preparation for future use might just be a good idea?
I like books - I spent a lot of time in libraries in college; heck, I even worked in a largish public library for four years. But, with the way technology changes - web tablets w/ decent resolution as someone else pointed out - wireless becoming more and more workable - why not start the preparations now for digital access?
Maybe Mr. B has been spending too much time at the crt himself; thus his short-sightedness is explained!
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
And I would have if I'd known that I'd be hit with a hail of gross generalizations. You must be exposed to a different sort of company than I work for.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
the LoC's resources are contrained. if they spend 20% of their money, time, space, on digitizing existing content, they would have 20% fewer resources to apply to the first two priorities.
You assume that resources must somehow be divided and allocated specifically to each 'priority'. Also, you assume that digitizing the content will not have a positive impact on the first two priorities.
Both of these assumptions are false.
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
This is a blanket priority that is fulfilled implicitly by all the other priorities.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire,
Moving the library into a digital format makes acquisition of new materials far easier. No longer do physical books have to be printed, transported, indexed, and tracked.
organize,
Do I need to address the organizational advantages of digital information? Instant content retrieval, plaintext searching, automated indexing, cross-linking across different volumes, remote access, etc., etc.
preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
Paper is a relatively fragile medium. Books that are only a hundred years old are effectively impossible to use. Ongoing maintenance means having to continually reprint material, a process as if not more expensive than digitizing it. Digital information can be copied and backed up an infinite number of times at near zero cost.
Levar hosts Reading Rainbow, an excellent kids' show about reading. ... the theme song is back in my head .... "Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyy! I can go twice as hiiiiiiigh!!"
Oh, no
With the information electronically, we'll print it when we need it--and then toss it. Need it again? print it again, toss it again.
A bound book is less likely to be tossed in this manner.
And, no, I don't think that reading on a screen is viable until we have high contrast, 300+dpi screens.
hawk
I have handled books that were 400 years old or more. Guess what I could read them (Well not the ones that were in Latin). Good quality paper will last a very long time if it someone takes good care of it.
The other problem is that the LoC does not have to rights to digitalize and publish books that are still under copyright.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
A book is small by internet terms, compressed it's probably smaller than this web page...
It's not like the physical books are going away, but I cure as hell am not going to D.C. to read somthing.. it would be cheaper to buy a modem and computer!
Who is Seg Fault, and what is he doing with Kernel Space?
DocBook springs to mind...
But while a flexible format would be handy, I envision some quite revolutionary steps that could be taken by 'leveraging' net project techniques, and chucking the books into revision control systems for open, distributed modification (why not, if it's public domain, it's allowed!) Imagine:
Many, many possibilities... Of course, the future is not "theirs" but ours, and it is our own responsibility for building the foundations for the future we wish.
I've written a Free roleplaying game book (Circe), which is being used with the WorldForge project. One of our adopted goals is to build or assemble all of the tools and processes to be able to do precisely what I've described above (imagine being able to assemble your own set of game rules, customized to the kind of game *you* want to play). We've got the rulebook in CVS in DocBook format already, and are working on features to make it dynamic.
Does this mean now that I can send the contents of the Library of Congress over a 14.4 kbps dialup in one minute? :)
_______
computers://use.urls. People use Networds.
Overall, he missed a tremendous opportunity to shape the electronic future. Instead he is simply standing athwart a tidal wave. He will make the Library of Congress another example of how gevernment doesn't get it when MP3.com or someone other commercial venture starts handing out free e-books.
This whole situation illustrates another point: government does have a role to play in the Internet future. It is not a inevitably libertarian future. But if government keeps screwing up, that is how it will turn out.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Let's pause for a moment and consider what LoC stands for: "Library of Congress". People often forget this, but the entire reason this repository was created, and theoretically the reason it exists now, is to meet the research needs of congress. Taken from their webpage:
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
The Congress is the lawmaking body of the United States. As the repository of a universal collection of human knowledge and the creative work of the American people, the Library has the primary mission to make this material available and to identify, analyze and synthesize the information it contains to make it useful to the lawmakers who are the elected representatives of the American people.
This means that it's really not his decision what goes digital and what doesn't - it's up to congress. We all know how convenient having digitized works online would be, and so do your congressmen, who a.) do a lot of research using the LoC, and b.) have way, way less time than any of us. Once they awaken to the possibility, I'm quite sure that they well either browbeat this guy into submission or legislate it. One snooty government employee isn't going to stand in the way of progress (well, except for Greenspan, but that's a whole other story).
Also, his decree directly contravenes the "third priority" of the Library, also off their webpage:
3. THE THIRD PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make its collections maximally accessible to (in order of priority)
A. the Congress;
B. the U. S. government more broadly;
C. the public.
Maximally accessible! Hullo?
Although I fully agree with what he has to say.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Now, I'm a real bookworm, and spent LOTS of time as a kid in the brick&mortar library flexing the old imagination, and the advent of Hypertext was like a dream come true - there are so many times one is reading a book and come across a footnote that links you to another book, or a certain line makes you think, "hey, that's just like a line in another book - now where was that" so you start to see a body of knowledge as not just a stack of books on shelves but as a real intertwined web of cross linked referances woven into a larger tapestry, lines of influence and schools of thought .... the web was made for publishing research and refrenching and building upon prior research.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
That's why God made Palm Pilots (and TealDoc). Read anywhere, anytime, and even is backlit so you can read in bed without bothering your spouse. Easier to handle then a book as well (one hand grip, one thumbclick to scroll).
Also great for those fast food restraunts, where you don't have to figure out how you are going to hold your book open with your tray without having it flop all over the place everytime you pick up your biggie diet coke!
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Those damn arrogant third worlders, sitting at home all day surfing the web and not socializing with the rest of us. They should just get off their lazy asses and trek over to DC and read a good book for a change. It'll do them good.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
The only way to counter "bad" stuff is with "good" stuff, and if all the stuff he's talked about is bad, then what could be better than to ass whole libraries to the Net?
See? Billington is right!
Everywhere I look, I see sex, sex, sex!
Jay (=
(couldn't resist, sorry)
Yes, and here is where the "arrogant" descriptor becomes useful. Arrogant people buy books they never read.
This librarian appears to be affraid of what might happen to the traditional library when books are available online.
Libraries have been a haven of learning throughout the centuries and there is a social status associated with them. Those who frequent libraries are often considered educated and literate. And it doesn't seem right to call someone "bookworm" who reads online, or downloads books.
Books themselves have cultural significance too. I know people who will buy fancy books to adorn their shelves, yet never read them. Having all of the classics, leatherbound, in your library says something about you.
Perhaps reading online might be considered isolating and lonely to some. I would stop short of arrogant; that is an adjective reserved for short-sighted librarians.
Levar Burton hosted Reading Rainbow before he was ever played Geordi LaForge.
What really worries me--and should worry you, too--is that this numbnut has significant say in what exceptions may be made in the DMCA for matters of fair use.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
If you're a US citizen, go to Congress.org; they have a zipcode-based legislator-finder, with all the necessary contact information. Physical letters or phone calls would probably be better than email (and I intend to use Dialpad to call and make my feelings known), but email is better than nothing.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Finding book, one hour: $20
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Literacy: PRICELESS.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Well, yeah. But this at least would save me the trouble of finding out by actually talking to them.
Me too. Not to mention "find". I could walk into a room and do this:
/usr/local/room -type f -perm 777 -size 7 -exec grep -l "thing for short furry Jewish guys" \{} \;
find
Think how much time (and rejection) that would save!
Alas, 19 years from now, there will be another copyright extension act. And 20 years after that, and 20 years after that,... We wouldn't want take away H. P. Lovecraft's incentive to write stories, would we?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're conflating books with the contents of the Library of Congress. If you ignore the inflammatory presentation of Billington's plans, you'll notice that he says, in effect, that the Library of Congress intends to put all of its unique content online.
In other words, if it was something that you had to go to DC to get access to, it would be online.
He personally doesn't see going to a local library to be big enough of an imposition to outweigh the social benefits of the act, and that's what everyone is harping on.
It's still cheaper than buying a modem and a computer to go to a local library.
If we eliminate public libraries in favor of the Internet, many people will be harmed. His language (which may be taken out of context--note the use of many very short excerpts in the article) doesn't make that point well, but that's what he's thinking.
The Internet is not an intrinsically democratizing institution, though it has great capacity to be.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the discussion is emphasizing where we disagree with Billington than where we agree.
/.ers assert.
/.) parts of his assertions, and not the parts we'd agree with. For example, the article describes what he thinks the problems with the Internet are, but not what he thinks the benefits of the Internet are. We can attempt to infer what he thinks the Internet is good for from his statements, but there's no way of knowing that we'd be right. Obviously he doesn't think that it's not good for anything, though that's the tone of many /. posts.
/. when people argue "Going to a library is more difficult than looking something up on the Web; therefore, there's no value in going to a library."
He's clearly misguided in his belief that reading a physical book is necessarily better than reading an online book. I'd agree with him that when reading for enjoyment, a physical book beats online text every time. There is something different about flipping pages than scrolling. He discusses the advantages of having a physical book over having digitized text in this article. He doesn't discuss the disadvantages. That doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't know of the disadvantages, as many
It is certainly true that reading a physical book is a more reverent action than digitized text, because a physical book is an entity unto itself. To read part of a book one must pick up the entire book.
The context of reading digitized text read on a computer is much less "reverent" because it is not as a separate entity, but as a mutable part of a larger whole. That which we can change, edit and control is not that which we will have reverence towards. (Unless, perhaps, the process of change is highly formalized, as in Torah study.)
The controllable nature of digitized text, while under certain particular circumstances can be thought of as a disadvantage (the circumstances which Bellington considers in his arguments), is also its great advantage. One can do word analysis of Shakespeare vs. the Bible vs. Chaucer and come to new understandings of language, etc. etc.
That said, let's look at the parts of the article where he talks not about philosophy about action. He says that the Library of Congress will digitize the rare items (pamphlets, maps, etc.) of its collection instead of the books which can be gotten at local libraries.
Wait a second! That makes perfect sense. The Library of Congress has finite resources, and they should be certainly allocated to that which it can uniquely do. Anybody can start digitizing freely available texts, and people are doing so (see the Bartleby project). Only the Library of Congress has the capability to digitize the stuff that only it has a copy of.
Also, he thinks that libraries should be founts of uncensored information. I know that a bunch of you are thinking (because that's what you said) "He's asserting two irrationally opposing viewpoints!" And to a degree, I agree. However, if we look at his arguments, you can see his conceptualization of the issues is consistent (though incomplete).
Here is a (rather incomplete and interpretational) list of his asserted beliefs:
a) someone else can digitize books
b) the Library of Congress has a mission to preserve the "sacred" nature of the printed word.
c) free and uncensored libraries are an absolutely necessary component to the American democracy
d) television promotes social decay
e) the Internet has the power to promote social decay
f) if the same information can be gleaned from the Internet and a public library, Billington (and thus the LoC) would encourage the use of the library
Implicit in these stated beliefs are:
a) the physical and discrete nature of books adds intrinsic value to text
b) the Internet can behave like television
c) participation in democratic institutions builds societal values
d) the Library of Congress has a mission to promote the American democracy
e) community is necessary to a functioning democracy
f) people having a sense of personal humility, in respect to history, is necessary to a functioning democracy
g) the act of going to a library builds community
h) the act of dealing with physical books builds a sense of personal humility in respect to history
From a), b) and f) of his asserted beliefs he concludes the Library of Congress should not digitize books. A perfectly reasonable syllogism.
A basic problem with the article is that it concentrates on the debatable (to
I believe the basic flaw in his beliefs comes from this: he thinks that the LoC has a responsibility to protect the sanctity of books and the mission of public libraries, and the digitizing of books freely available at libraries is antithetical to that responsibility. I don't think it's antithetical, and I hope it's clear what my position is (see PP's 3-5).
However, his fears are realized on
That argument is deeply flawed--if you can't immediately see it, let me replace some of the words:
"Installing Linux is more difficult than buying a computer with Windows installed; therefore, there's no value in installing Linux."
Dissing libraries is just as reactionary as dissing the Internet.
See the above post for that kind of dismissive argument (asserting that libraries are "isolating" and cause "ignorance" and "non-disclosure" is utterly misguided). Libraries and books shouldn't be attacked, they should be celebrated, just as the Internet should be celebrated.
So don't be a hypocrite: don't be as reactionary as Billington. Mindless futurism is just as bad as mindless romanticism.
When Billington celebrates libraries and denigrates the Internet, don't denigrate libraries in response: celebrate them both, and show him and people like him how to do both.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
Of course it will. The books should not be kept on a media like floppies. The books should be stored in a standard format (ASCII, HTML) that will be readable for years on an internet-connected server. When the system the books are on is in danger of becoming obsolete, the librarian can simply FTP the whole shebang over to the next machine. Simple, reliable, and no problem to implement. After all-- my old 386 with a 5 1/4" drive can easily ftp all of its contents to my new machine. The internet is a giant help in avoiding media obsolescence, and the ease of moving the data makes remote backups no problem too.
ASCII isn't going anywhere. It's a 30 (or more) year old WORLD standard. It's not likely to be forgotten. If it is forgotten, it is a simple mapping of characters to codes that could quickly be deciphered, even by an idiot like me, with a table of english character frequencies. HTML is a subset of SGML, and is also not likely to disappear. You said "as long as the language isn't dead"... well, the same defense goes for ASCII and HTML. As long as ASCII and HTML aren't dead, we're fine.
And we don't need to keep proprietary readers. All we need is to keep a quick reference outlining the format. This is the ONLY book the library of congress would really need to keep on hand-- "how to decode the stuff we've digitized".
Most books are not printed in quantity. That is the problem. Those that are will be fine-- but those are only a tiny fraction of the books written and published.
I agree with you that a diversity of formats is better. We should NOT throw out print. I like print. Keeping it digitized also improves reliability. And in the same sense that you can move the data from one machine to the next generation via a network, why not take that time to translate to the current popular format as well? For example-- if ASCII were being replaced entirely with UNICODE (and it will be) I'd simply move it all to the new server and convert it all to UNICODE. No data storage obsolescence, and no data format obsolescence.
And for the record, you Linux box probably has the tools for converting EBCDIC to ASCII already on it. Hardly an "unreadable" format, no matter how unused it has become.
The fact is, I can and often do learn more in a few hours of research on the 'Net than I could in weeks of research at every library within fifty miles of where I live (which is in a metro area, BTW). I can open up email conversations with researchers, cross check sources with other experts, read commentaries, engage in intelligent chat groups on tech subjects, even arrange to participate at in person seminars, etc.
In essense, then I am more engaged and less isolated than a lonely researcher plodding the halls of any library, and if I want to listen to my own favorite MP-3's at 90db, I can do so without wrecking another person's reading experience.
Maybe what this librarian sees is that the place where he works is fast becoming irrelevant except for historical research, and possibly even then.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I'd like to state a contrarian view here, and if it gets flamed (or moderated down) well, so be it. I think it's a Good Thing that this Librarian of Congress is doing what he is doing, though I agree with most all of the community that his reasoning is, shall we say, flawed. The works in the LOC will become digitized, sooner or later, and the entire corpus will not be digitized tomorrow. The digitization must be prioritized, and I cannot fault the choice of doing images and audio works first. The post of Librarian will pass soon enough to one who is online-literate, and the work of digitizing the works of text can proceed from there.
In the mean time, it's good to see someone in a position of such influence give voice to a defence of paper books. A future in which all books are online and none are on paper seems to me to be a bleak future, indeed. I am as eager as anyone to see all information online. But I would hate for that to mean than none is availble offline.
There is a sensual pleasure in turning pages of a book, and a practical pleasure in having words in a form that can be bent, folded and mutilated. And torn and ripped up in anger and thrown away in disgust. No improvement is going to bring that to electronic display.
The online world is a wonderful enhancement to the lives of all who would use it well, but anyone who uses the online world as a substitute for a real life does run the danger of having no real life at all. And a librarian who loses the love of books as they have existed throughout history is a poor librarian indeed.
As long as he isn't seriously getting in the way of progress, I'd rather have a Luddite in charge now than one of those new wired librarians we see who think only of information online, and let the precious works they have under their care rot away.
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
What does air filter boy from Star Trek have to do with this?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
"...there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
No, that's what it's like to be a librarian.
Seriously, is this the dumbest things you've ever heard or what? I don't read for companionship--I do it for pleasure and/or information. So what am I supposed to do? Drive to DC every time I need to look something up at the L of C?
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
The proportion is extremely small (most .005 percent).
WTF??? There are over 90 million americans online, for some reason I think more then 450 of them have good conections. Just beacuse you were a cheapass and baught a $14 winmodem, dosn't mean that people can't download large files over a modem. I've been online at home since '96, and I used to download 24 megabyte files off my 14.4 baud modem without a problem. There are literaly Tens of Millions of people in this contry would be able to benifit from putting these books online. And they could put OCR'd text up along with the PDF files. I'd say that, in the US, only a small majority of people have the problems connecting that you do, not the other way around.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
really.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The exciting thing will come when/if Perseus becomes the locus for classical scholarship, publishing preprints (a la LANL) or e-journals with hyperlinks to source texts.
OTOH, there is a dark side to mindless promoting of e-texts to the exclusion of books:
- Until resolutions improve considerably, reading an electronic book is a poor substitute for the "real thing."
- Even if resolutions approach or surpass ink, not all books will be digitized. Much of our cultural heritage will be accessible only in paper form in institutions such as the library of congress
- Paper is a much better archive form than any electronic storage medium now existing (bit rot, changing media, etc.)
Nicholson Baker published an article in the New Yorker a number of years ago, exposing the e-sins of the SF public library, which literally trashed books while moving to a hip wired new facility which didn't fit all of the holdings of the library. Likewise, Baker explored the loss of paper card catalogs in moving to electronic catalogs. The point is not to be a Luddite, but to understand the limitations of technology as well as the benefits, and have a healthy respect for what paper has been able to do over the past 2500 years.But oneof his arguements is that libraries are more social.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
More social... I live in nyc.. when will i have time to go to THAT library for a good book,eh?
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
While in this account Billington doesn't mention it, there is a bigger issue for the LOC: How long can they expect digital media to last?
We know from experience that acid-free paper lasts for many hundreds of years. But magnetic tape reels and cassettes aren't reliable for more than a half-dozen years, hard disks have bearings and other moving parts that fail over time, and some studies indicate that the plastic in compact disks may deteriorate after fifty years.
And this ignores the formatting issues: Can you find hardware to read your archive of old Sysquest tapes and 5.75" (or 8") floppies today? Will you be able to find CD readers 200 years from now? And if the data's stored as rich text, will anyone be able to find the software? My senior thesis is safely stored on a diskette in Leading Edge Word Processor format. It might as well be in heiroglyphics.
If the LOC were to take the trouble to digitize the books, what media and format could they reliable store them on so that they'll still exist for future generations?
Given these constraints, I'd rather not have them spend my tax dollars on the labor-intensive process of scanning, OCRing and correcting text from millions of boosk.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) has been doing this for the last year or so: the project is called Gallica and the collection of texts is now beginning to look respectable.
Unfortunately, most documents are simply scanned and not OCR'ed, so it is nice if you wish to print the book, but not if you want to use it for, e.g. statistical or analytical purposes, or simply to grep text in it.
I have an 1846 edition of Dicken's short stories. It has a wonderful smell old paper; I love the feel of it's incredible embossed spine, the gorgeous end papers, the crackly, crumbly old paper that always makes me a little self conscious of whether my hands are clean or not. I love the idea that it has been passed down through possibly a dozen owners over a century and a half.
I love the noninteractivity of books. Sometimes I want to get lost in an author's world rather than giving into the temptation of hyperlinking off of every other bleeding word. I love to immerse myself in linear time, or linear representations of non-linear conceptions of time. I love to read to my children and to my wife and have them read to me. My wife got through labor by my reading Elizabeth Peters mysteries to her.
I fall asleep every night with a book in my hand. Sometimes its an O'Reilly animal book, sometimes its a volume of old poetry; whatever come to hand on the way to bed.
I love my public library. I love to get lost in the stacks. I love taking my family there. I like sitting in the sunny reading room in a comfy chair. I like going to concerts and lectures and seeing my neigbors and friends there.
That said, this library of congress guy is an completely wrong. Just because A is good doesn't mean B isn't also good.
Technology is a funny thing. A cell phone a few years ago was a status symbol; now its a practical and vital link for many third world people who can't get access to copper land lines. Computers and Internet access a few years ago were only for an affluent. In many underdeveloped places, they may soon become the most affordable way to access the world's intellectual heritage. Putting books on line will enrich libraries and people all over the world.
I love grabbing a book of the Gutenburg site and downloading it to my laptop or reformatting it form my Newton, but you aren't going to get me away from real books any time soon.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
the LoC's resources are contrained. if they spend 20% of their money, time, space, on digitizing existing content, they would have 20% fewer resources to apply to the first two priorities..
But his objections weren't resouce or prioritzation issues. His only objections to digitizing books (in the article) centered around his finding books more asthetically pleasing and sacred than electronic media and his reluctance to endager the role of libraries in The Community. The one resource issue he mentioned, digitizing the fragile and less-accessable items first, makes perfect sense and hasn't been flamed in this forum.
The bottom line is that he was hired to accumulate and maintain works and to distibute them, to the best of his ability, to congress, the govenment and the nation. He was not hired to evangelize books as The One True Media or to encourage socially healthy behavior (i.e. discouraging internet research if he feels that going to the library in person is better for us),.
- bridgette
Oh, really? I don't see particularly much community-oriented activity taking place at most libraries. I don't see that as the purpose of a library at all. To me, a library is an almost sacred place, a "temple of knowledge" if you will. I've been to many libraries over the course of my life, and I've never felt any less lonely than when reading in front of a computer screen.
While the The Library of Congress and many university libraries aren't cornerstones in their communities, your basic, run-of-the-mill neighborhood library does perform some vital social functions, over and above providing books and research assistance.
Some examples are : free computer and internet access, free meeting rooms for local non-profit groups, literacy programs, childrens programs (like readings in the children's sections), memberships to museums, zoos etc. (check out the pass for free admission), a place for retirees to read the paper and socialize, a clean, quiet place for kids to do thier homework, places for the homeless to get out of the cold, local announcement boards. I imagine that a librarian (or anyone who uses thier local library a lot), could come up with a longer list.
One could argue that these functions are not a library's job, but they do need to be done, and libraries are picking up the slack. Unfortuntely, people who could/would benefit form these well-rounded libraries don't know about the great stuff that's available. And what's even more unfortunate, local libraries do lose funding and end up cutting back on hours and services.
However, for a librarian to avoid giving a wider distibition of information, in a lame attmept to defend library budgets, is pathetic and shameful. Fortunately, most librarians are very enthusiastic about the great possibilities for using computers to distribute information.
- bridgette
While it would be expensive, it can be done slowly, and the value to every local library in the US would be immense. And, many people could access from home as well. Moby Dick fits on a floppy, I still have it from when I downloaded it off a 14.4 modem, so I'm not buying the argument that giving hundreds of millions of people people access to the largest library in the world from their homes is elitist. It's elitist to make a policy that keeps smaller branch libraries in poorer or more remote neighborhoods from having the same quality of services and access to information found in better funded libraries.
The notion that it's "arrogant" to expect convenient access to information collected with our tax dollars is the most rabidly elitist thing I've heard from a government official in a long time. It sounds like he'd prefer we all begged at the altar of ILL and waited on 16th century time. Talk about arrogance!
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The thing that caught my eye in the Librarian's comments was the idea of 'reverance' in regards to books. It occurs to me that perhaps he has let his position in the (ornate, even temple-like) Library go to his head. After all, if we are to be properly reverent, doesn't that make him sort of the High Priest of the library? And since when do High Priests want the masses to have free access to the Holy Works?
On a slightly more serious note, I agree that I would not read War and Peace or such books on a screen as a matter of choice...I do like to curl up with a book. But if I am researching a 900 page technical or historical book, then a searchable format would be wonderful. The basic fact is, When in doubt, it is best to go with more access, not less. Hopefully the LOC will go this route before too long.
Don't store the data on floppys or tape, store it on a redundant cluster of HTTP servers backed up by selling copys of it on CD.
If you have 500,000 copys of it on CD on the shelves of computer stores across the country, and that becomes DVD... datacrystal... whatever as the SOTA changes, media reliability and obsolecence become a non-issue, and the work pays for it'sself pretty quick.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
There's a quote from Linus Torvalds that would be appropriate right about now. It goes something like this:
I think that the library of congress would find themselves in a similar situation. And redundancy in supply is good. Even if the LOC is hit by an astroid (or A-Bomb), that won't screw up Metalab too bad.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I look at it the other way around. I think its arogant not to put your stuff online when everyone else is.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I won't bother commenting on this guy's position, I'm sure I'd be preaching to the chorus. But considering that /.ers will use almost any story as an excuse to rant about CSS, patents, or Linux, I'm suprised nobody has pointed out the following:
Mr. Billington, despite all his apparent distaste for technology, is the man responsible for determining if DeCSS is legal or not. He is given that authority by the DMCA, section 1201, subparagraph C. To be specific, DeCSS is assumed to be illegal, unless the Librarian of Congress decides that making it illegal would significantly impact the ability of DVD owners to make "non-infringing use" of their discs. (I.e., play them in Linux.)
To those of you that were enjoying your break from the CSS flame wars, I apologize, but somebody had to bring it up...
MSK
There is little doubt that the Internet is dominated in sheer volume by crap of every description. Pornography, racism, and violence are all present in vast amounts, and we should be concerned about what access to this material does to young people.
All that aside, the Internet is a fabulous creation. Allowing people access to information and the ability to publish information of their own is remarkably enpowering. While we should be aware and concerned about the darker side of this free access, we should seek ways to come to grips with it, rather than just surpress the entire technology, which also supresses the remarkable good that the Internet can provide.
I love books. I own thousands of them. I don't believe that the Internet is a replacement for them, or that the current level of technology makes eBooks a competing technology. Until you can make an e-Book as portable and easy to use, to allow the reader to make his own annotations, and most of all to get good authors to write and publish books in this form, I think I will stick with books for most tasks.
I would have been happier with the LoC just to say that the reason they aren't going to digitize their entire collection is because of the extreme cost, or the issues of copyright law that need to be resolved. To merely say that the Internet is bad, and books are "worthy of reverence" is just silly. There is some very useful and unique stuff on the web, and there is a hell of a lot of romance novels in print. It is too bad that the LoC chose react to the Internet is the most simplistic way, rather than considering the revolution in media that is underway, and how to best use it to serve the needs of the people of the United States.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I still haven't seen a format to beat books for useability of portable print media, I don't think there has been a significant improvement (other than mass production) since Julius Caesar decided to sew some scrolls together and make a "codex."
In fact, a significant number of the books I buy, from O'Reilly and others, contain information that could be pieced together from online sources, if I had the time and the patience.
Will eBooks ever reach a point where they will equal the usability of real books? Maybe, but this Salon article suggests they have a ways to go.
Essentially it is an elitist, anti-democratic argument. People who can't afford to buy real books (and some of the best ones are hard to get, anyone read Hugo's The Man Who Laughed in English translation lately?) would have a big advantage if they could read them online. They'd have to give up the aesthetic appeal and useability of a real book, but they'd have access to the content. I think, underneath it all, the argument made by the Librarian of Congress is a class argument. I.e. if you can't afford, or be able to get ahold of a "real book" you don't deserve to read it. (I bet if I checked my local library, I wouldn't necessarily find some of the great works out there... but I'd find a stack of Halequin Romances big enough to build furniture out of... Certainly not the selection of important books available at the Library of Congress!)
Well, to top it off I'm reminded of Brainiac's quote to Superman when he was asked why he was destroying worlds after he had downloaded all of their knowledge, "The fewer beings that have the knowledge, the more valuable it becomes."
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If all the books are online, in digital form, what will the firemen of the future do? It's pretty hard to torch a distributed network.
Why yes, The analogy makes no sense. Why, I have just as much access to books in the Library of Congress, which stands 2500 miles from where I sit, as I would were its contents electronic.
I find it incredible that someone who runs a library, any library, would be against some form of information transmission. Sure, he can hold the opinion (stupid though it is) that reading online is "isolating" (as if any reading weren't an inherently solitary activity), but to say that because he doesn't like a sort of access, it shouldn't be there? Well, we obviously need someone new running our library of congress. Someone who understands that libraries are about easy access to information, not musty books.
The cake is a pie
I got it for christmas a couple of years ago.
I'll get the name and company and post them here
tonight sometime. I can't remember who produces it off hand.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I don't know what you're talking about. I pity anybody who does all their reading on a computer screen. Unless there's some underground book-pirating scene of which I am unaware, that's a pretty limited amount of information (if there is, though, please email me!).
I've only actually read one book online cover-to-cover (metaphorically speaking, of course), but I've used a few more than that. Having a searchable text, or being able to look up a quote you remember in a book without running down to the library, or being able to copy a few pages or a chapter verbatim (for whatever reason) without typing them out are, regardless of the current quality of computer displays, very valuable tools, available far less frequently than I would like. Not to mention the expense of books -- which by any standard of human decency should be sold at most at cost, considering their value to society. Making information available to more people, even if it means printing on pulp or shitty CRTs, can be nothing but noble and beneficial. You don't have to enjoy either (pulp or CRTs) to realize that. So I guess I just can't understand Billington's position.
My favorite CD is contains 500 of the greatest works of literature known to man. Including religious texts, shakespeare, tolstoy, twain, many many great authors from all over the world.
Instead of taking up 5 bookshelves it takes up 1 slot in my CD book. I love to browse through it and read shakespeare. It does have its annoying side though, hard to get comfy in bed with the monitor on my chest, strains my eyes after 4 or 5 hours of reading, but it's definately worth it to have so much information at my fingertips.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
> The LoC is very open to citizens. So much so, some very valuable books/manuscrips have walked out of the LoC.
This is one more reason the books should be on-line. Anyone should be free to look and copy the books on-line, but the only way you get to physically look at the books, is if you travel to the LoC.
How can anyone with even the tiniest love of literature be against preservation and access to books, especially books that belong to the taxpayers?
In the end, after the world's books have gone digital this interview will be a bigger laugh than it is now. If he's so anti-online content what's this interview doing on a webserver, is he trying to make me feel lonely, sad, and arrogant?
Which is more 'mindless', 'isolating', 'lonely' and 'arrogant': travelling to Washington to read paper books in an environment where anything you want to share has to be meticulously copied in one form or another, or cutting and pasting quotes with links so that everyone reading it can see the full context for themselves. Furthermore, the Internet in all of its forms encourages interaction between the reader and the writer: comments, corrections, additions. I've learned more from the replies to my comments on Slashdot in any given month than from any single book I've read.
... yet. I own paper copies of The Hacker Crackdown, The New Hacker's Dictionary and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. When I want to quote them in comments on Slashdot or in e-mail to friends, I don't want to type the quotes every time. And I want to be able to refer them to something closer than the nearest library or bookstore to read a copy for themselves. If my friends are as much like me as I think they are, they do far too much of their reading at hours when libraries aren't open.
I don't read books in electronic form very much. The hardware isn't as comfortable and convenient as traditional paper books
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
At least it wasn't when I went to Washington five years ago. You could enter the building, which is very beautiful, and you could go on a guided tour, but what you could not do is what you'd expect to do in a normal library: get a book of the shelf, sit down somewhere, and read it. The stacks are very restricted.
So if you thought this guy had an elitist, exclusionary attitude before, now you know it's even worse than you thought!
Oh well, if these jokers won't digitize the public domain books in their collection, at least I will. I've got all of volume one of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea," and all of volume one and three hundred pages of volume two of Marx and Engels's Capital scanned in and cleaned up as ready-to-print pages. If I ever get caught up on my work I'll started cleaning up the OCR output files - this weekend I hope. Free free freeee! I love public domain books! Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Digitizing the contents of the Library of Congress (which, incidentally, does not get copies of every book printed) would be an absolutely immense job. Even if they restricted the scope of the project to only books in the public domain, it would still be a vast project, which would require a very large budget, that the Library of Congress has not got. (The 1999 budget for the Library of Congress, which includes the expenses of the U.S. Copyright Office, was $296-million.) Such a task, being very labor intensive, would also take many years, maybe even decades. Even assuming such an extravagant project were funded tomorrow, which would be great but which is extremely unlikely considering the priorities of Congress, by the time the LOC got the program organized and started publishing data, a few years would have passed, and by that time you could expect a lot more people, worldwide, to have enough bandwidth that downloading a multi-megabyte .PDF file would not be especially difficult.
Also keep in mind that a single pop song in .MP3 format is several megabytes. By comparison, Sams "Teach yourself Linux in 24 Hours," a six hundred page book, is a 14MB .PDF. So an entire book in .PDF format is the equivalent of maybe ten or fifteen minutes of minutes of music. Think how popular .MP3s are; anyone with enough bandwidth to get .MP3s off the net has enough bandwidth to get whole books in .PDF format.
In text format, it only gets better. Here are two directory listings off my PC:
04/08/00 01:05p 2,513,894 07_she_said_she_said.mp3
08/15/94 12:23p 5,582,655 shaks12.txt
10/22/96 08:22a 2,251,136 shaks12.zip
That first is one single song, two minutes and thirty-seven seconds long. The next two contain the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
(PS: I ripped that entirely legal .MP3 myself, from my own legitimate, commercial copy of the CD, so fuck you, Valenti.)
Cheaper if and only if your time is free.
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Finding book, one hour: $20
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
A real computer and ISP can be had as cheaply as $40/month. An appliance and ISP will cost you $30/month (cost depreciated over one year). The local phone bill we'll estimate at $40. Finding the book will take 15 minutes, at a cost of $5. If I visit the library twice a month, I'd save money by being able to retreive the digital copy from home. Plus the book I want is never 'out', I never have to contend with the weather, bus schedules, the Dewey Decimal system, or the specimens of human drek one encounters on public transportation.
But that isn't the case here. Con someone into getting you permission to use the Library of Congress (priceless). Replace the bus fare each way with a $340 zero-notice plane ticket to DC and the three hours with three days. Add one night of hotel in DC at $60. Now the cost went from $80 to $1200. Plus you only get a few hours to actually READ the book.
.sig: Now legally binding!
2000 A.D.
Library of Congress Will Not Digitize Books
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- James Billington, Library of Congress
1000 B.C.
Library of Egypt Will Not Bind Scrolls
"There is a difference unrolling papyrus and turning pages," he said. "There is something about a scroll that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- Ramenhotep of Alexandria
3000 B.C.
Library of Sumeria Will Not Write From Clay Tablets
"There is a difference lifting a tablet and unrolling papyrus," he said. "There is something about a clay tablet that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- Asurbanipal of Nineveh
Does this
Try putting a pricetag on that.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is rather surprising.
;o), using this understandable fear as a rationale for rejecting digitization altogether is plain nonsense.
Digitization is a massive trend all over the world. Just have a look at the home page of Bibliotheca Univeralis Project (affiliated to the G7). Among other things, you can see that almost every big national library has set up some kind of digitization project, including the LoC.
The most impressive effort to date seems to be the Gallica server at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France : 15 million pages on line, most of them as images or PDF documents (I'm sure you all dreamed of reading a XVth century bible in Middle French, didn't you ?). All documents that are copyright-free are publicly available.
I didn't check the LoC project, but the name (American Memory) sounds rather self-explaining.
Digitization is not the future : it is the present. As usual, computer scientists have paved the way (on-line papers, etc.) have paved the way, but the rest of the world are catching on.
Although Mr Billington's comments about the importance of the physical support do make sense (if you techno-junkies don't understand this, just trust me: they do
There needs not be any opposition between computers and good old paper codex. They simply are different tools for different purposes, not to mention the fact that transition from electronic to physical form is a common task even among technologically oriented people (ever heard about those little boxes they call "printers" ?)
Thomas
PS: My opinion: the real reason is, they don't want to spend money in it (alt: they don't have any money to spend in it). What do you think ?
I'd much rather have my virtual news reader babe read them to me. That'd be much less arrogant, mindless and lonely. Oh... wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It seems ironic to say the internet isolates people even more in a forum like /. And I can't think of anything more isolating than reading a book, especially in a library, as least in the libraries I've frequented. I don't think making these books available online would kill off paper books at all. Rather, think of the benefits to people who otherwise would not have been able to use this material. I would love to have the contents of the Library of Congress available for searching, especially as a student. I think the issue is that the internet levels the playing field in terms of information sharing, much the same way the printing press did. Even if you can't afford that thousand dollar set of World Book encyclopedias, you can get a cheap computer for less and browse the Encyclopedia Britannica for free. The technology is not becoming "borg-like," but rather is giving everyone the same access to the same information. Isn't that the purpose of a library, to make information accessable to the public at large? Now that the "public" consists of a global community connected by computer network, only the scope has changed. The internet does not conflict with the library's basic mission, to share information.
This is hapenning to University Librarians everywhere. With the advent of online journals, less and less of the former regulars are humping their butts into the library and spending hours asking those interesting research questions and chatting with the librarians about quality of the collections etc. More and more researchers are turning to online sources as the research is faster and most good universities have immense collections of online journals. Combined with web based searching available to university researchers (Medline, Web of Science, Chemical Abstracts, lexus-nexis(sp?), google etc.) the library and the librarian are losin their edge and worthfulness to the community of researchers. Their are getting lonely and what is their reaction you ask? The internet is evil, there's nothing quite like cuddling up to good book, I will not be making that information available online......
Can you blame them?
no sig.
Not exactly the remarks of a Luddite. Librarians, especially those responsible for special collections like the LOC, face a number of challenges that the general public never thinks about. One of which, as a few other writers have noted, is preservation. Books are pretty hardy instruments. They can last for hundreds of years at an institution where they are well cared for. But many of the other items held by the LOC (maps, audio recordings, film clips) are on much more unstable media. This is where the library is focusing it's digitization efforts. And rightly so. Most of the books at the LOC can be found from other sources, but many of the non-book items are unique and have never been available to the general public.
One of our projects in my Systems class was to design a computer system for the library of Congress. The observation made was that there was too much data to simply make backups, so you'd need a real-time mirroring solution. Also, if a Fire, earthquake, meteor etc., hits one of the computer installations, you don't want to lose all of the information. I bet that most of the really good LoC stuff is far beneath the ground, in case of nuclear war.
The solution was to have 5 or more sites, and effectively replicate new data as entered throughout the system, etc. It was a surprisingly hairy problem.
I am certain that people in Congress are deciding how to digitize the LoC, and then they will send the LoC it's orders, who is then responsible for insuring massive cost overruns to beef up their budget. That's how this government works.
I mean, if the LoC picks a good format, they can ask publishers to submit it to them electronically for archival purposes. They can probably get the past 5-8 years (when did computers replace typesetting in publishing?), but we are talking what, 200+ years of stuff that isn't available in digital form? That's a pretty big deal.
There needs to be a format, ASCII text won't necessarily cut it, although the bulk of the data is simply.
Don't forget the copyright details. Copyrights owned by a person last what, 50 years after their death with corporate copyrights lasting 75 years? I would suggest that the majority (where majority => >51%) of their collection is still protected by copyright. You can borrow a copy of their book, but can you borrow their digital copy? We're still working this out in the courts and state and federal legislatures, so it is a little early for the LoC to weigh in...
So why only only maps and sound recordings? Isn't that kind of the same drek he complains about early in the article?
And, if the Internet is "largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," as he says, then why doesn't he want to change all that by digitizing the Library's holdings???
is he a hypocrit, or just plain stupid??
or, maybe he realized what a pain in the ass digitizing the entire Library would be?
sig not found
I apologize for my use of agism. You are right. That was something I debated about for a brief moment. For lack of time (well, you know how it is at Slashdot sometimes), a better example, as well as common sense, I did it anyway. Your point is completely valid. Thank you for pointing it out to me.
If you are a little more paranoid (like I am), you may realize that if there were apocalyptic events here on earth, and a large percentage of people were to die off, the Internet is not likely to be around, neither will the equipment that can read digital data (remember the Time Machine?). I think that in addition to digital electronic backup of all of humanity's collective accumulate knowledge, we should also have non-perishable hardcopies created and stored at strategic locations around the world. I don't know what material to use, necessarily. Maybe plastic or something, you know, because it's non-biodegradable.
I've only actually read one book online cover-to-cover (metaphorically speaking, of course), but I've used a few more than that. Having a searchable text, or being able to look up a quote you remember in a book without running down to the library, or being able to copy a few pages or a chapter verbatim (for whatever reason) without typing them out are, regardless of the current quality of computer displays, very valuable tools, available far less frequently than I would like. Not to mention the expense of books -- which by any standard of human decency should be sold at most at cost, considering their value to society. Making information available to more people, even if it means printing on pulp or shitty CRTs, can be nothing but noble and beneficial. You don't have to enjoy either (pulp or CRTs) to realize that. So I guess I just can't understand Billington's position.
The time to digitize books in bulk is not quite yet, but isn't far away. We need faster scanners and gentle automated page-turners. (Automated page-turners exist, but you don't want to use them on archival material.) Specialized book scanners do exist, with autofocus and book spine curvature correction, but they're relatively new items. And completely unsupervised OCR isn't quite here yet. Right now, you can scan in books, but it's not cheap to do it in volume. Give it a few more years.
There are other benefits to digitizing these books as well. Can you imagine the Star Trek like database the Internet would become if every printed word were searchable from AltaVista.com! Beats the crap out of the dewey decimal system if you ask me.
?
Mr Billington should pay a visit to the video library located in Toronto where books, magazins, video, audio materials are being digitized even at this very moment to preserve the materials for the future generations and in fact to make materials more accessible to general public by eventually moving the databases on-line.
I personally believe that at some all materials, not just books, magazines, video films, audio tapes will be digitized and stored in MULTIPLE PLACES on MANY BACKUPS so that it will be harder for the humanity to loose all our priceless collections. Materials do not even have to be converted into text if Mr. Billington prefers scan copy of rare books can be stored as images for the following generations to be able to appreciate our affection to the printed material. Art pieces also must be stored digitally.
In fact I would like to see all our information to be stored on some micro storage devices that will use heavy elements to preserve information for millions of years and send space probes with all that information in different directions into space (all our scientific advances, art pieces, legends; all information could be dispersed into space so if someone finds it, we could have a chat session with them. Or if our civilization does not survive, at least a memory of it would.
You can't handle the truth.
Hmmm...'arrogant'? Oh well...the government has always been a bit slow to catch up with the technology curve. Give 'em a few years (and perhaps a new librarian) and I think we'll see that opinion change. It's also entirely possible that the LOC can't get the funding for such a project. Can you imagine the amount of $$ that putting ALL of the books in the LOC online? would cost? Even if you only did the copyright-expired books, that would still cost some major funds...
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
Since I didn't notice it posted elsewhere, let me point out an abridged version of an address Billington made in 1994: Electronic Content and Civilization's Discontent . It is relevant to the article at hand, and might be of interest. It's fairly short, too.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Y'know, I was going to rip into this over the hill fool. Then I read the article. Too bad his comments were edited down and chopped. I would have liked to hear more of what he said, just so I felt sure I understood his posistion. He's pointing out that libraries are focal points of the physical world community and that we should be reluctant to give traditional libraries up. He's also saying that the Internet has a very short history compared to print. There's some serious questions about the longevity of material in digital format. First, there's the question of how to read the format a bit down the road, then there's issues of the media decay. For instance, a well kept book written on acid free--better yet hemp--paper, will last over a hundred years. A CD will undergo chemical changes that render the plastic opaque within twenty years. Then there's the issue of what happens to the availablity of virtual works. Take for example the Hornet server. Anyone form the demo/tracking scene a few years back remembers this place. It was host to some of the most original music and art on the net. Fans and artists simply assumed it would be around forever. Then one day, the guy running it came to a point where he couldn't continue to do so--I don't know the details. Poof! An unique archive of artisic works is gone just like that. I think Billington is concerned with these issues and is resisting change for its own sake.
That said, I still think he's wrong. I don't know if we're all gonna be curling up with our favorite CRT to read the latest Stephen King anytime soon. Waitaminute.... Anyway, whether or not the age of the virtual novel is upon us, the net is an ideal place to distribute reference materials; the kinda materials where we turn pages to look for the fact we want to find. I also think that the web could easily replace coffee table book for that matter. As for the issue of preservation, Billington ignore the fact that preserving works for posterity is an active process that societies take because they value the result. Look back in history: One of the reason we have so many books from antiquity is that monks transcribed them from the originals and made copies by hand, and later by press. Digital media doesn't change this fact. It may even make the process of transcription easier. So, I think Billington needs to get with the times.
I think that the Librarian's main point has more to do with effective use of limited resources and the desire to protect the *local* public libraries, not the LOC. I'll admit that I'm not up-to-date on the latest in scanning technology, but how many man-hours would it take to produce a on-line text? Princeton University took *months* to scan its card catalog (cards with a variety of typefaces, non-standard formatting, etc.), and did not use OCR, but rather has an image of each card (i.e., no full-text searching is available). Given the problems involved and resources consumed in this process, perhaps it is better for the LOC to focus on one-of-a-kind items first, as the Librarian suggested. Also, keep in mind that the community public library is a *free* source of information - it does not require a PC and paid subscription to an ISP to access. In fact, libraries also provide access to the net (see his comments on filtering - "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries ... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." Furthermore, in public libraries "there is an inherent adversity to censorship.") If the LOC renders the public library obsolete to 50-75% of the public, the remainder, whether they are too poor or technically illiterate, will suffer. I'm not saying that I agree with his decision, only that the issues involved are more subtle than they first appear.
Computers are great for disseminating information, but lousy when it comes to what most people consider traditional book reading. Let's face it--you can't curl up on a couch on a rainy day with your 750MHz mini-tower and 19" monitor. And even if you could, why put the unnecessary strain on your eyes?
Personally, I'll wait till I can buy a decent-sized tablet reader that's less than half an inch thick, has a wireless connection to my in-home LAN, can download any document and has a great screen that I can read in sunlight.
Until then, kudos to Billington for waiting when everyone else is running like rabid rabbits towards whatever technological fad is in vogue this year. When the time is right, we'll have the Library of Congress accessible over the Internet. Till then, I'll take it easy on my eyes.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Is most of cyberspace filled with commercialism? Sure. Are most sites not particularly uplifiting or eddifying? Well, maybe... I can certainly concede the possibility.
Are most books uplifting or eddifying? Not by a long shot. You might think I would invoke the shelves of your typical mega-mart bookstore. I don't. I invoke the shelves of the Library of Congress itself. Much -- maybe almost all -- of what the printing press has produced is bilge. But it also has produced Dickens, and Joyce, and Garcia-Marquez(sp?).
I asked, quite reasonably, where in Billington's worldview did he place SETI@home or the others? He decries the mindless of the Net, its alleged focus on sex and sensationalism, but he somehow doesn't see the huge number of sites that are oddball, or lovingly maintained, or simply useful. He sees the blinking lights and is entranced, and then complains that those with clear sight do not join him in the fantasy.
Also quoth the poster:
He shows integrity through condemnation of a medium he doesn't understand, to justify a metaphor that works against him, while undermining the primary purpose of his organization? Wow, I'd love to see your definition of "integrity". Perhaps I am just self-delusional, but I don't see where my integrity was compromised, but I see quite clearly where his might be.The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
What isn't clear to me is how Billington's attitude does anything toward improving the medium. Is it OK to say, "Oh, boo hoo, the people on the Net are mindless troglodytes obsessed with sex and money -- they should be pursuing culture!", and to then decide by "principle" to make that culture available? How does it hurt the LOC to put its works online? How can adding materials which you claim to be "good" be bad for such an awful medium as the Net?
Sorry, I still don't see how violating his mission gives Billington integrity, intellectual or otherwise.
I thought I was done, but then this caught my eye:
Just as soon as you name five things published between 1450 and 1480 that "equal" Ulysses. After all, the Net is only about thirty years old. On the other hand, I see sites such as World Hunger Watch, CNN Online, and yes, even SETI@Home as meritorious. Is there a "literature" of the Net yet? Well, probably none you'd accept as such -- but it's a young medium and it's got growth potential. And that still doesn't answer why you'd want to avoid leavening it with real literature.The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The commercial Net might be doing those things. (OK, there's no "might" about it.) But wherein that denunciation is SET@home, or Project Gutenberg, or World Hunger Watch? It's easy to say that letting everyone communicate leads to a lot of noise from riff-raff. But that's part and parcel of the new dynamism enabled by a new mode of communication.
Earlier in the article, Billington states that libraries are no longer the preserve of the elite and the royalty. Yet he then condemns popular expression on the Net. It seems that Mr. Billington is not willing to venture out into the big, bad Net to see what's actually going on. He's content to sit back and sniffle at the rabble. Sounds pretty elitist to me, in all the wrong ways.
Remember, at the time, lots of intellectuals derided Shakespeare's play as "simple mass entertainment" and lamented the fact that the printing press opened up books to the masses.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Internet may have been popularized by chat rooms and pornography, but not everyone uses chat and porn. I think the Library of Congress, which is nearly synonomous with the magnificient Library of Alexandria, should be available to all people. The millions of minds captured in its works should be accessible to anyone, anytime. Now, if you want to browse through the archives, you have to go to Washington DC, and wait until the library opens. Many people cannot afford a trip to Washington DC. He mentions that "Previously, only kings and an elite few had access to libraries" but I do not see how this is much different than today. Now, only those with wealth can go to the largest library in the world.
I can easily see a digitized version of the Library of Congress becoming the most important information site on the web. As Billington said, the Reformation was powered by the printing press, but the Internet is a fundemental part of the next revolution. The Internet will either make democracy accessible to all the world, or will turn America into the next Stalinist Russia, or Nazi Germany. Why should all of us students and persuers of knowledge be restricted by Billington's hatred of computers? Just because he does not like reading things off the web, does not mean that I should be denied that right. I would rather read something on my monitor than never have the chance to read it at all.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
But it can be. Put the texts into SGML so that they can later be transferred to HTML, XML, or whatever the flavor of the decade is for ML's as long as they are a derivative of SGML. By setting a standard that is a parent of the more common ones used today, you can then insure long term viability for the data. By having redundant servers that are mirrors of the main one in (presumably) DC, you can help maintain stability both in terms of handling load and error correction. If you really want to go nuts with this, put one inside NORAD, just in case. Lastly, you could make it so that the servers can only be accesed from servers in public libraries, and asssign/fund local scanning of documents so that you have a distributed effort that is staffed by volunteers. Additionaly, youwuold ahve a service node in most towns and or high schools and colleges.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/
So let me see if I've got this right...
1) One guy decides he has a personal problem with using the web to transfer info, so now no one will be able to access the LofC texts online.
2) Some people agree with him because they *currently* don't have access/have low bandwidth.
3) Other people agree that we should wait because technology keeps changing.
Maybe it's just me, but it none of this seems to be reason enough to deny anyone the option of accessing that info online. Some people will never like reading online, some of us don't mind waiting for something we really want/need - others have good bandwidth - bandwidth will improve, technology is always changing - waiting for the "perfect" solution menas never having anything. Plus, by having the info online, more than 1 person can use it at the same time.
And considering how long it takes the govn't to do anything, starting now can only be a good thing.
Eldritch Press is one of those sites that voluntarily scans books and publishes them free online. If the LOC won't, we will.
Indeed, the LOC American Memory Project has a fine collection of baseball cards. They were donated by Carl Sandburg, the Chicago poet. (See some in the online edition of Ring Lardner's baseball stories.) But LOC can't put all of Sandburg's POEMS online, because the LOC allowed Congress to lock up their copyrights for another 20 years. So Eldritch Press is suing to overturn the copyright term extension. See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/ and help out!
This Librarian is the official Congress chose to decide what fair use educators could make of digital products when we embark on online distance education. One can only hope that he reads our online comments and decides this issue fairly.
LOC is also digitizing books in the Making of America Project. My only objection to that is that the books are presented in poor page images, not in digitized text. Thus they cannot be read by a blind reader, nor can computers search for words. Yet the LOC is going to spend more money to record voice digitally for the blind in a separate project.
Today, the LOC every day is presented with much more new digital products such as TV programs than it collects printed books. As far as I know, the LOC has no means of archiving them (much less the entire Internet) and no plans to do so. Consequently, and because the LOC is compliant with Congress, the tool of big business and established publishers, these 'pay-per-view' products will likely evaporate from our culture.
The Librarian is right to say the LOC has a role in providing content over the Internet to schools. If not the LOC, then who? Take one example: students in the U.S. commonly are required to read 'The Scarlet Letter.' What would students find on the Internet if it were not for the Bartleby Project, Eldritch Press, or Project Gutenberg? They would find links to a site put up by a Disney branch that created a film version starring Demi Moore, that included enough nudity that few high school students could see it. But after the film became a commercial failure, the site disappeared from Internet memory. Even if it were still on the web, the film version is far from the book--the plot was completely changed to pander to today's politically correct viewers.
The LOC can play a great role in achieving the grand goal of a global public library that is free to all over the web and that contains the important parts of our culture. But it can't do that unless our national laws permit it, and it can't even begin to do so when media giant corporations assert control over every aspect of our digital culture. So let's change the world ourselves! Fight the copyright term extension, the DMCA, and other such repression! Scan books yourself and help them survive.
One final point: for some reason I couldn't add this comment to /. with Netscape on Linux as long as the ibook.com ad was at the top of the page (so I'm using w3m). I'm sure there is no connection, right!
I am obviously in the minority here, but I can't help but agree with our librarian friend. As a lover of books I can't help but be concerned over 'digitization.' Mr. Billington is resisting the seemingly overwhelming push towards a society of technology. What we are in danger of doing is exactly what we have accused others of for so long: repressing valid dissent. 'Digitizing' books is just one more step towards a world where you never have to leave your house, or even whatever room you access the internet from. If the internet is meant to be a 'community' it is a community unlike any other in history (not necessarily a good thing). In fact, it is hard to call millions of isolated individuals a community at all. Preserving books is one thing. I can't see any reason why this should not be done. But making the printed word obsolete would be a tragedy. So what if we have 'search' capabilities! This merely adds to the 'hastiness' of the world. I would much rather preserve the tradition and authenticity of literature than have it consumed by the 'Borg-like' force of technology. Mr. Billington should be congratulated for doing his job well against the popular wave of our times. Call him reactionary if you will, but that can often be great praise.
>Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access
>to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are [...]
Good point, but you need some confirming details. Allow me to supply them.
At one time, *anyone* could access the records in the Library of Congress. IIRC, until the late 1940's high school students in DC or the surrounding areas could go there & do their homework. But due to lack of space, & demand on services, the LoC has had to gradually limit access to only members of Congress & to serious researchers.
I'm not sure how the LoC determines who is a ``serious researcher", but when I used the British Library 16 years ago (when it was still housed within the British Museum), the requirement for a pass was a letter from a professor, teacher or minister. I assume the LoC would require an equivalent set of references -- which would be something of a barrier for the average asocial geek who might not know anyone with those credentials.
But remember, limiting access is not always a bad thing. Books & other documents get stolen, damaged or lost -- although in the case of the LoC, the two cases that I remember off the top of my head were by recognized, credentialed authorities. And the rule of thumb for public libraries is that the average book will last 20 check-outs before it is so worn that it must either be rebound or replaced.
Now compare these costs & limits of physical access to having an electronic copy -- either plain ascii test, or a standard, cross-platform format like JPEG or PNG -- available for use either online or for the token cost of copying to media. Mr Billington is clearly myopic about how digitizing his collection will make his job easier & more effective.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
claiming that those new-fangled 'automobiles' will never replace the good old horse & buggy...
Of course, printed books *DO* have their charm, but going digital offers so much more - one advantage is that machine readable data is SEARCHABLE, and I love being able to have a computer slog thru tons of data looking for what I want to find. He should be thinking "books on demand".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
But his argument for not putting books online - even books with expired copyrights - is that there is something 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' about reading online."
And someday not so long from now he'll die, and progress will go on without him.
So he'd rather withhold something that'd improve it. Gee, that's smart.
I'm pretty fond of books, too, and I doubt I'll ever go completely digital with my reading. But for some things and for some purposes, digital access is better -- faster, more flexible, more accessible.
[shrug] Mr. Billington does not have the final say. Eventually there will be someone in that job who will understand.
Well, this is only a minor setback. Of course books are going to be digitized; it's not a matter of if but when.
.tex file, and then a beautifully typeset .dvi or .pdf . . . or just as easily generating HTML. Heck, you could have embedded hyperlinks all over the place. Ahh, the possibilities!
I've been wondering, however . . . what would be the best long-term stable format for book-encoding? I imagine it would be some flavor of SGML (IIRC, long-term library data storage is its raison d'etre). But, which particular flavor? Does a suitable one already exist? Are there DTD's and stylesheets available?
Unlike the approach Project Gutenberg has taken (ASCII text ONLY) this has definite potential. Imagine taking an SGML-encoded book, running it through Jade with the appropriate stylesheet, and generating a
iSKUNK!
I agree, don't replace them. But certainly, add them as an online resource. Quick searches through a single book would be nice. AND, digitizing the ones they have permission to as well as those with expired copyrights would make life cheaper AND a lot faster for everyone. Heck, charge a nickel for every bookd downloaded. It should cover the costs incured... unless they are running nt. Maybe if they ran a beowulf cluster using bsd machines... ;>
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The key phrase is: Billington elaborated on why the Library will not put books online during the question and answer session.
The question and answer session is not part of the transcript posted to the LoC web page you cite above.
I doubt anyone here really believes this can be done instantly, but if they do, I'd agree that they are being childish. However, Mr. Billington is very clear that he does not want to place everything on the net, period. I agree with many of the other posters, that it will happen eventually, with or without his endorsement.
His comments strike me as being uneducated (about the internet).
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
<rant> That poor, disillusioned man. Someone help him. Someone explain to him the difference between reading stuff on a monitor and long term digital storage. Someone exlpain to him the difference in size between 100,000 physical books and 100,000 books on optical media. Someone explain to him how much simpler it is to reproduce and redistribute the same books to every schoolkid in America if they are in a digital format. Someone explain to him how many trees will be saved if we don't have to have a printed copy of all 26 million books that are in the LOC. Someone explain to him how books available on demand is hundreds of times more convenient than a single copy of a book shared among dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of interested readers.
Someone please take out their cluestick and hit him hard. Someone remove him and put someone knowledgable in his place, before he reduces the LOC to a useless graveyard of dead trees and corroding media.</rant>
Please don't misunderstand me -- I understand why the LOC exists, I understand why we need to preserve books, I understand the value of preserving rare and unusual works. I don't understand the closed-minded attitute toward a little technological innovation.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Well, there is some merit to this. For instance, every person too poor to own a computer has access to the public library.
So this begs the question: are we going to slowly phase out public libraries and phase in public computer labs to allow free access to all?
Anthony
And keeping all of the books locked up in a library isn't isolating and arrogant?
Democracy based on ignorance and non-disclosure doesn't work.
Regardless of how lonely or impersonal it is, the real point is information access. Isn't the point of the LoC the preservation of knowledge for the public? Is there a better way to share that information with the widest possible audience then electronically?
These folks are living on a different planet...
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
It doesn't seem important whether or not reading books on a computer (or via another reader) in some digital form is comfortable, normal, non-arrogant or whatever. The real issue here is the preservation of these great books! If these books are allowed to continue decaying as they are now, we will eventually lose the works of the great authors from generations before us. I know that the library takes great care of its books, preserving them carefully in a controlled environment. But NOTHING can prevent these books from eventually decaying. Digitization makes nearly instantaneous backup and transfer of these works possible, and will enable sustainable non-degrading storage of these books. I am not asking for the books to be made available online. In the case of books whose copyrights have not expired, this may present all sorts of thorny copyright issues. All I would ask is that they archive their books electronically, and make regular offsite backups to several secure locations around the country. In the event of a fire, earthquake, or the eventual sad decay of one of our nation's treaures, we would at least have a digital copy for future generations to use. I suggest that everyone write to the librarian to support this, and if you're feeling even more ambitious, support a project like Project Gutenberg that is taking this task upon itself to preserve our heritage.
Worship this hard copy! Printers worked day and night, bakkinaday, to make this information available! Um, hello, it's about the information, not the format. I'm sure few authors cared more about the text formatting of their books than about how many people received the author's ideas.
"It is isolating. It is a lonely thing." In contrast, "libraries are places, a community thing."
No, the 'net is a community thing, too. And much more so than a library, IMO. The net certainly provokes more social interaction than scouring for books at a library does.
"behind this ... is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced."
Why not? What is so wrong with downloading a book, and printing a hard copy if you so desire? How is this so different from reading a regular book? Ah, I see. LOC has some political issues with publishers, who are the ones that stand to lose the most if people cease to purchase printed media. Gotcha.
"It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen."
Um, newsflash, it's not an illusion.
I don't give a rat's fried patoot whether Mr. Billington thinks that reading on a screen isn't as much fun as reading dead trees. Frankly, he may well be right - but I'd rather read a screen than nothing at all, which is what I can presently read from the Library of Congress.
Overshadowed in this, however, is the very real fact that it costs a Lot Of Money to digitize all the books. OCR isn't 100%, so anything digitized will also have to be proofread.
The special-format material - the maps, the pamphlets, and what-not, lend themselves much more readily to digitization. No OCR issues, and even stronger issues with regards to how long they can be expected to survive repeated handling.
Dead trees in book form can be expected to survive many hundreds of years. Dead trees in the form of 10-foot-by-10-foot roll-out maps don't hold up nearly as well.
Dead trees in book form are readily translated to ASCII as long as the characters are legible. Dead trees in pamphlet form, with lots of images and other stuff, can be served up as .PNGs or .PDFs, with ASCII text as a side order - from a historian's perspective, the physical layout of the page is important in both the case of books and pamphlets, but almost always much more important in the case of pamphlets.
But I agree that Mr. Billington should drop the Luddism. It doesn't serve him well at all.
You see, only members of Congress can take the books outside of the Library. Everyone else has to photocopy them or read them inside. And believe me, you're not going to find any comfy, quiet reading rooms.
So for most people, downloading the Library's books is the ONLY way to read them. Imagine how much better it would be if researchers and students could download the text of any book (within copyright laws, of course)?
Not only that, but what about the deterioration of the physical books? Handling books over and over again will damage them. I think the Library Of Congress has the duty and responsibility to digitize any books it has that are no longer copyrighted. And they have a lot of catching up to do.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
There is certainly a big advantage to having books in electronic format: searching.
.002 sec? I'd *love* to be able to do quick searches on some books, at least for the quotes. Even better if I can get a page number (page 100 paperback, page 110 hardcover, etc).
C'mon, go find in Snow Crash the part where the Metaverse is introduced for the first time. How long did it take? Was it more than
Other than that, I prefer reading a physical book over an e-book any day. Paper is much nicer on the eyes than an LCD screen.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
This is no different than the Catholic church trying their hardest to keep people first from printing bibles, and then from translating the bible to English. There is nothing sadder than an institution realizing that they are outdated by new ideas and the public's better understanding of old ones. Thankfully, the LoC doesn't have the ability to burn heretics at the stake. So, who else wants to check out some books and fire up the old scanner? I gotcher Reformation right here.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
Actually, digital formats aren't necessarily better for preservation. Printed material can survive for hundreds of years, particularly if good paper is used (and academic librarians pressure publishers to use such papers). Electronic formats can become unreadable in a few years because 1) the physical medium can be unstable (e.g. magnetic tape deteriorates quite quickly), or 2) the medium or data format can become obsolete (e.g. 5.25" floppy disks). Formats can be converted, but this can be an expensive and problematic process; furthermore, if conversion isn't done in a timely manner the window of opportunity may pass. Ten years from now it is going to be damn hard to get the data off those 5.25" floppies (just like its damn hard to get data off those really old 8" floppies today.) Librarians and archivists have of course given these types of issues lots of thought. The consensus seems to be that media readable by the eye (paper, microfilm etc.) are the safest bet for long-term preservation.
This is foolish and reactionary. The only arrogant one here is the Librarian of Congress who feels it is his place to dictate how we should enjoy reading. It not like sitting with your nose buried in a dead tree version is any less lonely and isolated than the web. I think he's just afraid of the Library losing funding once people no longer need to trek all the way to there to get their books they need for research. He's either cluelessly arrogant or irresponsibly fighting to preserve his job at our expense.
When I first saw the abstract to this article, I thought "Well, isolated, lonely, arrogant, that pretty much sums up government bureaucrat in my book". Which I'm sure occurred to everyone.
I am also a government employee with a political background, and this comment needs some clarification before people take it too seriously.
1. The LoC, IMHO, will eventually have to digitize everything. In addition to its regular stacks, of course. If for no other reason than that House and Senate staffs, and CRS (Congressional Research Service) already do much of their research online. I have a feeling that it will languish in the house and senate intranets for a few years, but the LoC serves Congress, and must ultimately answer to members and/or their staffs, who are already using the Web for research-- or be rendered irrelevent. Their budget depends, therefore, on modernizing-- not waiting.
2. This is the opinion of one guy. Ultimately, he must answer to regulatory and institutional pressures. Like many of his ilk, he has a distaste for the unsecure, uncontrolled, wildly growing Internet, and prefers the current state. He would also, I think, appreciate the elegant beauty of the French Visual Telegraph of the turn of the century.
When Newt Gingrich was first elected Speaker of the House, one of the first things he did was put the plaintext of all bills and proceedings of the House on the World Wide Web, the Thomas System (part, BTW of the LOC!). That was before most people had heard of the Web! The Senate isn't going nearly as fast, but while Congress could change parties again, or someone could find a way to slow things down, all it takes is one person with a clue and some pull to permanently modernize the system.
There isn't really much else to say, now that I think about it, other than that it is one man's opinion and that the congressional staffers are going to make that opinion obsolete one way or another.
Priorities
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
3. THE THIRD PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make its collections maximally accessible to (in order of priority)
A. the Congress;
B. the U. S. government more broadly;
C. the public.
He appears to have forgotten the third priority entirely. Digitizing the contents would improve accessibility to all three of the above groups, particularly the third, without compromising either of the first two priorities.
I've seen arrogance in my lifetime. But this guy just about takes the cake. Let's see...
... is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced."
... that you are going to get everything you want electronically."
... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." Furthermore, in public libraries "there is an inherent adversity to censorship."
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
First, the Internet is not television. Must as reactionaries and luddites would love to believe it, it's simply not true. Also, even if this is true, it's nothing more than a problem. What do you do with a problem? You fix it. The only way to counter "bad" stuff is with "good" stuff, and if all the stuff he's talked about is bad, then what could be better than to ass whole libraries to the Net?
"We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out."
Point for Billington's side. If you're going to get your stuff, better to start with the rarer materials. But that doesn't mean to ignore the more common ones.
"Secondly, behind this
Agreed. But online access to books certainly does not replace books. All it does is make the book's contents more widely available.
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
Interesting idea. But a book itself should not be revered. It is the ideas therein that are worthy of reverence. Books have become an important symbol for this reverence, yes. But symbols come and go. Before books ever existed, literature was still revered; I'm willing to bet similar arguments to Billington's were raised when someone first had the idea to print Homer's Iliad. But certainly the literature is still revered, even when its physical form changes.
"We should be very hesitant
"You don't want to be one of those mindless futurists," said Billington, "who sit in front of a lonely screen."
As opposed to... what? Read on...
"It is isolating. It is a lonely thing." In contrast, "libraries are places, a community thing."
Oh, really? I don't see particularly much community-oriented activity taking place at most libraries. I don't see that as the purpose of a library at all. To me, a library is an almost sacred place, a "temple of knowledge" if you will. I've been to many libraries over the course of my life, and I've never felt any less lonely than when reading in front of a computer screen.
"It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen." He described this as "arrogance" and "hubris". He added that while electronic books may succeed commercially, they are "seductive."
I see a more than a little elitism here. Enough that I could well call that statement "arrogance" and "hubris."
He also stated that the Reformation was largely fought with the printing press, and that "media revolutions provoke intense debate."
True. And the Internet is to our age what the printing press was to theirs. A new medium, used to spread knowledge more than ever before. But there's an interesting problem here. The Reformation was a fight against a corrupt religion. Clearly, we are embroiled in a fight that has many interesting parallels to the Reformation. But just what is it that we fight against? I'm not certain. But I think I can guess, and it frightens people like Billington.
However, he elaborated that "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries
Again, point for Billington's side. Two, actually. The tradition of free public libraries is necessary for a democracy, yes. But how would that be diminished by digitization? In addition to the simple fact that a library can easily adapt to change, there's the fact that not everything that has ever been printed will eventually be online. Consider, for example, the decades of old newspapers now on microfiche. I'd call the chances of these ever being digitized slim to none. There's also a need to keep hard copies of things, both for research purposes and archives; libraries fit this bill well (indeed, this is precisely what they have been doing as long as they have been in existence).
And yes, in public libraries there does seem to be an adversity to censorship. Look all around you at the filtering-software battles carried out by the Reactionary Religious Right, The Lunatic Liberal Left, and Positively Pottering Parents. You'll be very hard-pressed to find a library that actually wants to use filtering software; more often than not they're fighting against the measures which would force them to use censorware.
He said that at the Library of Congress, the focus is to provide "an example of the good." In contrast, if the government gets into "defining the bad, you get onto the slippery slope of defining the bad."
Um... what the hell was that? I think he meant to say that if the government gets into defining the good, it gets onto the slippery slope of defining the bad. However, providing an example of the good is defining the good to some degree (it's a damn weak definition, but it is one). And because good and bad can only be defined in terms of each other, once you define the good you do define the bad.
I do find it interesting, though, that Billington never mentioned copyright in this article. Very strange.
And now, for my own views on the subject (sorry this post is taking so long). First, people here are stating that digitizing books will create unequal access to these works. I disagree; digitization will create more equal access to the Library of Congress' collection. Consider: I come from Virginia. I can go to the Library of Congress and look at the works there, more or less whenever I want (unless, of course, the Library is closed). So can anyone else in the area. Equal access, at least in one region.
But I'm currently at college in Rochester. I cannot go to the Library, and therefore I am cut off from accessing its collection. For no better reason than that I live in a different region. Were the Library's works online, I could at least access the contents of the collection.
No, the digitization of the Library's works won't create equal access. But we're already faced with unequal access. Digitization is a step in the right direction, because physical location will no longer be a barrier to accessing the content (you still can't access the physical works if you can't get to the Library, of course, but access to the content is better than no access at all).
Also, the idea that online access will ever totally replace books is simply absurd. Tell you what, here's a challenge. Go to Project Gutenberg. Pick up their copy of Les Miserables, and without printing it read it all in one pull (stopping only to eat, sleep, and such). I can pretty much guarantee that even if you do succeed, you'll be needing a case of Excedrin and a new pair of eyeballs. You can't simply curl up with a good, long Website the way you can with a book. And for that reason alone, books are here to stay, to say nothing of the other advantages books have over online content.
The two media can coexist. The Net itself cannot replace print media completely. It's not a true replacement for most of the media out there. The reason for this is that the Internet is a distribution medium, like television and radio. It is not a storage medium, like books or CD's, and it's not a very good delivery medium (like movies and books). So books aren't going anywhere; the Librarian of Congress' job is in no danger. But we all have to get rid of the arrogance pervading both the old and new media if we're going to make any progress.
However, as someone who has always lusted after the vast intellectual ocean of the Library of Congress, I've been following his work, not closely, but at least enough to instantly recognize his name...
Anyway, this particular "National Librarian" (a title I find distasteful, and of questionable provenance) is a reform librarian. He's one of the good guys, folks. [Well, at least as far as this office goes -- let's not forget, only twelve men have held the post in 200 years and it didn't open it's doors to the public until almost 1900. It's not a hotbed of change.]
Back in the late 80's I recall being very excited by his intent to increase access to the Library's many collections, and his ideas for updating the Library (including electronic access) I also recall that his publicity has tended to go in cycles -- often beginning with what seemed like a almost Luddite conservative stance (that always disappointed me) and refining and clarifying it in succesive articles and interviews until I had to admit he was pretty sensible (albeit on the conservative end of sensible)
A few times he made some public-pleasing comments that were almost startlingly progressive, but was forced to back down. I have to admit (from my experience in professional organizations) that it is much more painful to have to back off on a promise (due to politics or finance) than it is to be criticized as stodgy for years, and accomplish more than you promised.
Anyway, while I was infuriated by the article linked to this story, I give Billington the benefit of a doubt, based on past experience. He has spent many millions of dollars each year (and raised an equal amount from the private sector) for electronic initiatives, test beds, local library electronic archival/publication projects, and national and intenational 'digital library' initiatives and contests. That may not seem like much, but when you consider how tightly strained the LoC's budget is, it's really pretty good.
"The unleased, unlimited pursuit of truth may be the last frontier and the ultimate proving ground for our American ideal of freedom. In a world of increasing physical restraints and limitations, it is only in the life of the mind and spirit that the horizons of freedom can remain truly infinite. We must rediscover what we should have known all along, that the pursuit of truth is the noblest part of Jefferson's legacy."
- James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress
Here are a few of his writings on the subject of 'digital libraries', while in his current office. They aren't the best ones, but alas, I don't have time to dig up and scan the printed articles I have on file (ironic, eh?):
Some AT&T corporate PR outlining a few of the Library's Digital initiatives
and to be fair, there have been some embarrassing episodes:
__________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
So let me get this straight.
In spite of the fact that making the content of books available online would make the content readable any time, any where, on any screen, by any text-to-speech or braille "reader", promoting literary awareness and diversity on a global scale, reverence of the paper medium is more important?
Don't get me wrong; I like reading books. But I thought a library was place for preserving and disseminating information, to facilitate literary diversity, not a pyro's paradise.
The printing press may have made the public library possible, but it physically cannot make all literary works in existance today available to everyone, everywhere, at anytime.
To presume otherwise is, dare I say it, arrogant.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This is foolish and reactionary. The only arrogant one here is the Librarian of Congress who feels it is his place to dictate how we should enjoy reading. It not like sitting with your nose buried in a dead tree version is any less lonely and isolated than the web. I think he's just afraid of the Library losing funding once people no longer need to trek all the way to there to get their books they need for research. He's either cluelessly arrogant or irresponsibly fighting to preserve his job at our expense.
I just hope for all our sakes that they aren't shirking from digitizing the books even if they aren't going on-line. There are many important books in the library that need to be preserved before they physically decay to the point of uselessness. I hope this person's politics don't get in the way of preserving the past for the future's sake.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
For heavens's sake, people, he's the Librarian of Congress. Write to your Congress-critters and let them know how you feel!
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
By droppping a note to lcweb@loc.gov.
I am:
This is the most short-sighted view I have ever heard, and I am appalled to hear it from our Librarian of Congress.
I have a proper reverance for books. I don't believe most will ever choose to read a book online over a paper incarnation. But that is not the point of putting books online. I believe using this as grounds for not embracing your responsibilities in the information age is simply elitist, arrogant and isolating.
Do you simply wish to keep all of these books for yourself alone? To be shared only with those who can make the journey to your little empire there in Washinton DC? Or would you prefer to open your wonderous assets to every researcher in the world? Every college student writing a paper in their dorm? Every community library with an internet connection? Let every K-12 school in the nation have access to the collected and indexed works of Man? Every school child with a home computer writing a book report? Any person anywhere in the world, US Citizen or not, who can find a way to access the Internet could enjoy the weath of knowledge that you are the curator for. You feel the Internet is just sex, violence and commercialism? Why not make a difference then, by contributing knowledge, wisdom and information?
If this is a matter of money, simpy say so. But don't try to defend this with bull-headed reactionary luddite tripe. It is not your place to tell the world how it should utilize these resources. You are the servant of the Library of Congress, not the master. This week the American people (myself included) graciously and painfully paid every penny of your salary and operating expenses for the next year. Be sure you know who your employer is, and that you serve the needs of your employer, not just your own whims. Perhaps if your goal is not to serve the whole of American people, then the whole of American people should not be asked to fund the Library of Congress any longer.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Tech Law Journal asked Billington if there is any parallel between hostility to the printing press in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries, and hostility to the Internet today. He stated that there is, but that there is also a significant difference. Billinton explained that some of the hostility to the printing press originated because cheap reproduction made books and pamphlets available to more people. Previously, only kings and an elite few had access to libraries. The printing press made the public library possible. Billington stated that in contrast, public libraries are a "political institution" today.
There's one thing wrong with that argument. Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are - so now, it is not discriminating against those who are not royalty or elites, but against those who simply don't have the funds.
This is an unbelievable arrogance on the part of Mr. Billington, along with all the other foolish remarks he's made. The only thing that he said that made sense is that the priority should be on those items would normally not see the light of day or would be hard to access/find.
While we understand how obsolete his mindset is in today's information world, we must also understand that the Internet is, after all, a Fairly New Thing(tm) and that there are tons of people who do not have access or just doesn't "get it" yet. Instead of disparaging Mr. Billington some more, I think we should put more effort into convincing people like him that the future of books is online.
Does anybody know if we can get Mr. Billington as a Slashdot interview? Or at least maybe send him our comments (or send Jon Katz with the printouts like he did with the Pinkertons). What do you think?
Did anyone look at the actual speech text on the LOC site, or just the article linked from here? Cos the two don't match up!!!
Whilst the article says he used the words 'arrogant' and 'hubris', this must not have been part of the same speech transcribed here on the LOC's site. The words simply don't exist in there. Did anyone bother checking sources? Doesn't look like it - I haven't seen anyone else who bothered. So what use is it opening up the library, if no-one's going to use it? Is everyone really lazy and can't be bothered looking at the real thing, just some predigested version?
This shows up a more insidious problem today - revisionism. A journalist has a good chance of getting away with slipping in some extra details if no-one checks his source. Equally an official can get away with fluffing a speech or blowing his tracks completely if the speech is transcribed for the journalists to use. How many journalists were actually physically at the book club meeting? My money's on not very many.
I actually support what the Librarian's doing. His aim is to ignore the books around at the moment, and start with the primary source materials. Get the primary sources available, and you can get your information first-hand, instead of through some reviewer or some press flack. And I'm quite sure that the process will step forwards, getting closer to present-day material, as time goes on. Anyone who wants it all digitised instantly is just being childish - think of the quantity of archives there are! But start from the start and work forwards, and it'll get there in the end.
Grab.