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SciFi Motherlode Donated to Canadian University
Freshly Exhumed writes: "SciFan aficionados might soon be lining up to study at the University of Calgary due to an
amazing donation: A massive collection of science fiction and pulp magazines spanning the last century has been donated to the University of Calgary which officials say will be a boon for literary and pop culture research. William Gibson had spent many of his 92 years sealing his prized collection in plastic, leaving behind a true motherlode of science fiction writings."
I wonder what material can NOT be used to study the role of women in society and whether the studies already cover enough. Odd that this is what the interviewed professor first thought about. Well, it must be utterly interesting ;)
Actually, a paper book can last for centuries, while digital media is degrading very quickly.
Who's responsible for preserving information if the copyright holder doesn't do it? There's a lot of material generated over the past century that's turning to dust, or has been shoveled into landfills (many MGM props/old negatives were THROWN AWAY by the studio in the 70's to save space...)
With this mania about preventing copies, I can see a day when NOBODY can benefit from when copyright expires on an item, because it's long mouldered away, neglected by it's owner, and locked away from those who would have preserved it. Really, copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period, or else compulsory licensing to libraries and archives should be part of the deal, in order to ensure that the stuff the copyright owner makes money off of today can be enjoyed by the public tommorrow.
After all, the intent of copyright was to ensure the public had access to creative works, but making sure the creator had an incentive (ie, they got paid) to release their work and profit by it. But the key intent is to make sure that the work is acessible to all, so that the public as a whole can benefit. After all, that's why we have libraries, so that the society as a whole can be enriched.
Unfortunately, there are some who believe the exact opposite, that money should come before the public good... and they can afford to hire politicians to write laws that enforce that belief, and the lawyers to make it stick. The irony here is that corporations too were created for the public good.
And it doesn't look like any concrete reform is going to come out of Enron and Worldcom. We really need to address the issue of corporations divorcing themselves from the rest of society, and acting as if they're above the law. Perhaps we need to go back to chartering corporations with specific aims that can benefit the public, by power of the state legislatures again?
The equipment to read digital copies doesn't last for centuries, not even for decades.
Ask those people who had to pay a tonne of money to have their old Wordstar CP/M disks transferred to MS word.
In a century or more most of what we produced digitally will be gone forever.
Agree completely. Books (even on acidic paper) are a lot more robust than many people make out. The much maligned librarian profession have been doing this for many years and are *very* good at it.
That said, it is also possible to do non-destructive scans of material at a very high quality. There are some nice examples at the British Library (the actual place, no idea if it's online). However this, of course, expensive --- so is unlikely to be done in this case. Pity.
Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals).
What type of experiance? The quality of the scans is of course dependent on how carefully they are done. Notice that the National Yiddish Book Center/Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library did just that to a lot of the books, and produced high enough quality scans to make new books from them.
Also, I sometimes scan public-domain books into the computer. I just sent scans of several books to someone with webspace and a preexisting site. If you look at those scans, you may get the impression that the contrast and grayscale was lost. What you probably don't realize, is that those are scaled for the web, at 90 KB for two pages. It's not feasible to put up the original 4 MB scans, and few really care about the difference. I would assume that other projects would be similar; you can get excellent scans if you talk to the person, but they aren't going to waste webspace and bandwidth offering huge high-detail scans to everyone who wanders by.
Am I the only person disturbed by the fact that Gibson was born in 1948, SFFWorld Another Another etc. ?
Also, there is no mention that William Gibson died.
Either, this is another canadian sci-fi enthusiast, with the same name as the William Gibson that wrote Neuromancer, or, Someone's trying to pull a fast one.
fnord.
I wonder if this collector had any particular interest in cyberpunk? William Gibson owning a massive collection of Science Fiction publications. What an irony if it didn't include one of the pioneers of a significant genre of SF - the cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson.
Don't you think you should mention he wasn't William Gibson ?
... :-)
The article could be about a japanese brain surgeon.
Half of us would go "What? The father of cyberpunk got a new job in Japan? Cool
Doh!" anyway...
No sig to see here. Move along.
It would be wonderful if all of the out-of-print items could be scanned and ORDed as they are catalogued, and make available to the public that way, perhaps put online at some point.I don't know what Canadian copyright laws are like, but hopefully they haven't been hit with a Mickey-Mouse-Protection act like America's leaders sold us out with.
Donations like this really make me worry about the coming of the e-book. With e-books there is no ability to give your long horded collection to posterity after death. In fact of the few e-books I have purchased over time I have lost the keys to two of them rendering them inaccessible.
My chief worry is that once a work becomes economically uninteresting to a major publisher it will vanish from the public's ability to read it. True there may be a copy stored in an ill backed up database in a dark room under the stairs but this does little to enhance our culture or enrich the lifes of the average reader unwilling to brave the, "beware of the leopard", signs.
Perhaps we need to resurrect the idea of key escrow only this time implementing it for the citizen's benefit. Perhaps as a condition of selling a copyrighted work the publisher should be forced to deposit the work, along with any appropriate keys with an escrow agency. As copyrights lapse the agency would release the works to the public via a website or whatever miraculous technology replaces the web.
If the government is going to be involved in the guardianship of corporate profits via DMCA etc I would like to see it at least attempt the guardianship of fair use of the cultural heritage we are creating now.
Then again, since CoS's Author Services doesn't *share* their document preservation methodology, how do you know it's not just more CoS hype? My guess is that it doesn't really exist, outside of a few examples to use as lures.
And Irish linen burns quite nicely, thank you.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Well, you should see how humble those guys at Harvard are... :)
But when you put large numbers of like minded geeks together, its sorta natural that they accumulate large collections of geek hardware. For that matter, MIT also has the US's largest circulating anime video collection (you don't have to be a student to borrow) as well as the world's largest model railroad.