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."

Comments

digitize?

[Hadlock]

so um.... they're gonna scan/digitize it all, right? having a hard copy is nice and all, but i'd rather see all of these volumes of sci fi gone to the knife, and scanned in, at say, 600 dpi, and then OCR'd.

from what it sounds like in the article, they're going to catolouge this and stick it on a shelf for people to read... like the article mentions, pulp fiction sci fi was meant to be thrown away...those books will only last a few precious years of handling before they're lost forever.

i've seen a few book digitizing devices, but i've never seen them in wide use at libraries....does the library of congress digitize their library? is there anyway to access/query it? a book only lasts forever, as does a digital copy and the means to read the digital copy, but an obscure dusty book on a dusty shelf out of reach halfway across the country from me isn't going to help me much on my college thesis (or 10,000 other people who might need to access exerpts of the book for some reason or another)

Re:digitize?

[Nick Barnes]

those books will only last a few precious years of handling before they're lost forever.

This is almost certainly not the case. The idea that books turn to dust on the shelves is largely false. Even books printed on quite acidic paper will probably last for centuries (with typical research library handling frequency) if they are well looked after. If they are cut up and fed into scanners, they will then be thrown away. 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). Also lost would be all the historical value inherent in the books as physical objects and in the collection as a whole.

The "slow fires" were invented by technocrat library managers as propaganda to generate funds for "preservation" projects. These huge projects have given the managers much power and prestige while destroying millions of volumes of irreplaceable books and newspapers. Read Double Fold (Nicholson Baker, Amazon) for much more on this subject.

Re:digitize?

[torpor]

The Church of Scientology has some pretty impressive technology which they developed for preservation of L. Ron Hubbards materials - too bad they don't commercialize their techniques, because they're quite advanced.

All of the audio material is stamped on titanium records guaranteed to last 1,000's of years, for example, and they even developed a paper for their printed material which is fireproof, acidproof, bugproof, and supposed to last 10's of thousands of years. Some sort of blend of Irish linen or something - very high quality stuff.

Say what you will about CoS, but Author Services has been doing a pretty good job of preserving the stuff they want to preserve.

They could commercialize their techniques and make a fortune.

Re:role of women...

[silentbozo]

Well, you can take a look at how trends in society have affected literature. I remember picking up a copy of The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle and finding that this newer edition had totally removed all references to the word "negro", since the original text might offend some younger readers (the Gutenberg linked above has the original, I think.)

I recently read a book by Ben Bova (The Watchmen), a re-release of a pair of novels originally written in the 60's, where he specifically says in the 1994 foreword that he did NOT alter the original text, and hence you would find women referred to generically as "girls".

The Merril Collection

[_J_]

A similar donation was made in 1970 by Judith Merril to the Toronto Public Library. It's a reference library so they don't lend books(bastards).

A contemporary of Asimov, Leiber, Pohl and others she donated around 5000 items. The collection is now about 57000 items; Novels, Anthologies, Essays and more. What's really neat about the whole thing is that it's housed in a standard Toronto public library and anyone can use their services.

anyway...
J:)

Re:Since He Was 95...

[EEEthan]

But who IS this other, older and yet sci-fi loving William Gibson???

I for one am not ready to count out the idea that time travel was involved and that this is the cyberpunk author William Gibson. I think that the age of some of the pieces in the collection supports that theory as well.

As we all know, the sci-fi writers of the 20th century are, in the future, remembered as pre-cogs, and for that reason, they are sometimes retrieved by time dredge by interested parties in the distant future. Phil Dick tells us that this happened on one occasion to Poul Andersen. It seems conceivable that this happened to Gibson, but he was returned to a different time, either accidentally or for some purpose -- perhaps to amass this very sci-fi collection.

But why ??? What forces are at work here ?

This will be a boon to SciFi-in-OED researchers

[vaxer]

I've been helping to research science fiction terms like 'little green men' for the OED, and I can only gasp and drool and wait for UCalgary's army of cataloging librarians to make the collection accessible to the public.

This will be a great source of information on how and when science fiction words came into use in English, and if I had a sabbatical-type job, I'd have just found what I wanted to do with my next sabbatical.

We still need help, by the way, so please help the Oxford English Dictionary learn more about science fiction and fandom.