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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."
...when he died, I assume this was the other William Gibson.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Some of this stuff will find its way to ibiblio or some other online archive..
According to the article, library officials estimated that $250,000 (in Canadian dollars, I'm assuming) would be needed to clean and restore the material. I think this would be a worthy project to contribute to, especially with the favorable exchange rate.
I've been looking over the UCalagary library site but I couldn't find any explicit donation mechanism. Anyone know who to contact to donate funds to preserve this material?
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)
moox. for a new generation.
Imagine if this was a porn collection.
Probably not, since most things published after 1922 aren't in the public domain, and very little science fiction is that old.
4Literature - Read, write, and discuss your favor
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 ;)
if by "preserve" they mean "digitize" for public consumption, then count me in
moox. for a new generation.
They have a page on donations here, nothing specific about the library but I'm sure you could specify that a donation is for the library.
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?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
The collection is science fiction. Star Wars is a samurai movie, so it probably doesn't qualify. :)
I've been looking forward to the first book of his 'noughties trilogy'. As well as the slow progression (but certainly inevitable!) of Neuromancer and the Zen Differential, based on Count Zero, to the silver screen.
A big sigh of relief, and what a big boon to our understanding of the past's view of the future, it's now when hindsight truly makes the hopes and fears of past people known.
they made me do it
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.
I hope they scan them all and put up a web-library.
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:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
No Amazing Fantasy #15 :(
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.
Hopefully American libraries are better in preserving modern pop culture magazines and comics than European counterparts where they are considered semi-interesting, un-cultural, crap.
I once searched for old issues of a pop [yes, music] magazine only to be told there are no copies left in any of the national libraries. All had been stolen. And, the ones I received were torn and had centerfold posters missing, etc.
Hopefully, Los Americanos can preserve the Donald Duck mentality present in the Western world post-WWII era bewtter than the hopelessly traditional/conventional institutions in Europe like The Vatican, Louvre, etc.
Yep.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It may be off topic, but Forrest J. Ackerman's marvellous collection of books, artwork, and movie memorabilia is currently being auctioned to bits on Ebay.
Apparently Forrey needs some cash to retire. Sure would be nice if a benefactor could step in and preserve the collection intact. Visit the Ackermansion here.
... just so i can be closer to this incredible collection. i'm an avid reader of many genres, but i do admit to enjoying sci-fi more than most. i wonder if i can convince anyone here that i need a sabbatical for, oh say, three or four years to explore the impact of sci-fi literature on the dawn of the 21st century. the amazing stories archive alone will take a couple of months ... what the hell, i'm going to try!
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
Perhaps the 'average Slashdot user' works in the real world and has to handle a variety of *nixes and Microsoft products; as well as other software, electronics, radio, and the like.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
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.
Up here at the University of New Brunswick one of our libraries (www.lib.unb.ca) has a pretty big collection of sci-fi already. It also has a ton of beat lit. -- apparently, both collections are due to the efforts of one English prof in particular who uses the stuff in his classes, but I don't know what kind of pressure he had to exert to get our library admin to buy "non-academic" ... of course, the library in question is at the satellite campus an hour and a half away :(
Don't put salt in your eyes.
All the rights, and bugger all of the responsibilities... the day that corporations became above the law passed a long long time ago....
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
For the most part, the copywrite is owned by the author for his lifespan plus another 70 years after his death. This guarantees that his heirs will also benefit from his work. After that period, the copywrited work is considered public domain.
/.-ers who are fans of science fiction (bet that's most of us), I'd urge you all to make some sort of contribution to continue the preservation of all this hard work. I certainly intend to!
If the work was created as work-for-hire (in other words, a publisher/corporation paid the writer to write that piece) then the copywrite can last for a duration of up to 120 years from the publish date.
So a work-for-hire piece will become public domain sooner than a freelanced piece. Knowing that one's children will benefit from one's hard work and creativity is certainly an incentive to try and create something for the public to enjoy. The more they enjoy it, the more income your family will receive.
I have a lot of old sci-fi paperbacks that I've collected over the past 30 years. Not that I was collecting them, but I was reading them and then sticking them on my bookshelves. Most of the older ones crumble now when I pull them out to read them. So I'm all for digitizing this collection to preserve it! Using proper storage techniques, yes these paper goods can last for centuries. Thank heavens that Mr. Gibson made some effert to do this! But with today's technology, digitizing would be a more permanent solution.
I would recommend digitizing at 4000 dpi (optical) to maximize the image quality. 600 dpi would not be adequate for high end printing, should some publisher wish to print some of the collection. I would think that on a university, there would be enough students who are deep afficianados of science fiction who would be quite dedicated to working towards copying this collection with great care.
Yes, magnetic media fades, but optical media does not. Well, so long as you don't scratch the disk...
All of the works with a publishing date prior to 1923 could be immediately posted to the internet for access. Works after 1923, permission would be needed from the copywrite holders to be posted digitally, depending on the state of the copywrite. Chances are, with a lot of the older works, permission could be had fairly easily. There are times when the children of the artist are sufficiently well off that they don't need the income, or they would like to see their parent's name become known again, and release some or all of the works to public domain.
Last, I'd like to point out the shear volume of work and dedication that Mr. Gibson had put into his collection! Finding periodicals that have gone out of print (comic books and the like) is NOT easy! In the article, the brief mention of the traveling Mr. Gibson did should give one an idea of what was involved with this. On top of that, he loved the genre enough to preserve it as best he could. Condsider how we are going to benefit from his work! A nod should also go to his son, Andrew Gibson for making the donation. Just as his father preserved the hard work of many writers and artists, Andrew Gibson has preserved the hard work of his father.
To the both of you, I'd like to say thank you. To my fellow
Whew! This water sure is cold!
All words curiously out of sync with lip movement.
Light saber duel rages through area until, with a single slice, Luke's hand is chopped off.
Darth Vader: My sword has tasted blood and is sated.
Luke: I can't even commit Seppuko. My honor is tainted.
Darth Vader: Obi Wan lied to you. I am your father.
Luke: Nooooooo.
Darth Vader: Not that I'd admit that to anyone else after your shameful defeat.
Luke jumps off edge.
It would explain Obi Wan. We got the whole ancestral spirit thing going there.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
"William Gibson had spent many of his 92 years sealing his prized collection in plastic" Wow! Now THATS dedication!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
% Suddenly, the Comic Book Guy crashes through the skylight on the ... the Collector.
... remove ... my ... breastplate!
% type of electromagnet you might see suspended from a crane. He is
% dressed as
Collector: Behold, I am the Collector, and I have come to add
you to my collection.
[turns on a magnet, which attracts Lucy's
breastplate. She sails up to the magnet, where she
is trapped]
Lawless: Must
[unties the straps holding it on. Below, everyone
in the audience produces a camera]
Maybe later. [reties straps]
-- "Treehouse of Horror X"
From BABF01
M@
Krispy Cream is people
At 35,000 volumes, that donation certainly makes the Calgary collection larger than the MIT Science Fiction Society's collection. The MITSFS Collection has approximately 25,000 volumes, and is growing. I guess when the Gibson Donation is processed and shelved, it would take away the MITSFS's status as the world's largest open-shelved science fiction collection.
The size of the Gibson Donation is quite astonishing. The MITSFS Collection supposedly has 90% of all english-language science fiction ever published, and we have deals with the publishing companies to get a copy of every new SF book that comes out - often before the bookstores get them. I guess the Calgary donation has a lot of stuff that we totally overlooked (the Saturday Evening Post stuff), or else a lot of foreign language stuff (MITSFS isn't so strong on Japanese science fiction manga, for instance). If anybody is ever up in Cambridge, check the opening times, and stop by.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
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.
U of Calgary has a great press release @
http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/news/gibson/
with photos of the collection and more. it's really cool, actually.
~ kjrose
The movie Hackers :
Oh no ! Somebody hack the Gibson !
-Linux is SO fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
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.
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.
my collection 1200+ books contains 20-30% of really bad writting, poor story line or just crappy books ...-
-the kindof what the hell am i reading this for type of book
i wonder what percent of 35000 is low quailty ?
does it come down to quanity vs quality ??
(REF: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Cripes, you must really be confused with the whole George Bush thing going on in Washington, DC not the state.
Nice handle, Dix... :-D
Freedom: "I won't!"
Bad things can happen to plastic (and the things sealed in it) over time. The first order of business should probably be to get the stuff out of whatever it's in and into something with good archival properties.
Librarians, of course, already know this.
Mind the Gap
it would be very cool to have the note cards mentioned linked with the digital archive. it's a shame that the possibilities of the web are being sacrificed to selfish concerns. i imagine that the new tenth circle to hell will house hillary and her friends. rot baby!
I just hope they take better care of Gibson's collection than UCSC took of the stuff Heinlen donated to them. Last time I looked, they still had his pre-Campbell Astoundings in the open stacks!
Optical media are great until the vendor decides to kill the product line and you can't get new disks, device drivers or replacement parts for the drives. This has happened to data archives I've worked with. You better hope that someone can find the funding to buy a new system and move all the data from the old system before it dies.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here is the reply I received from the Archives on how to donate $$ for restoration of the collection: Your request for information about donating to restoration of our new collection was passed to me. I must say your offer is really very much appreciated. As you might have read or heard, we are grateful and thrilled to have this important collection, but our work and costs to catalogue and preserve it has just begun. The University can cover some costs, but we depend on donations from concerned and interested people such as yourself in order to do the major work. A donation in any amount will help us ensure that this collection is properly preserved and made accessible for future generations, and you can be proud of contributing to that. You can send a cheque to myself at the address below, and it should be made out to "University of Calgary", then mark on the front somewhere, "Gibson Collection". We will process it and then in due course, we'll send you a tax receipt. If you need any more information, please be sure to contact me at any of the addresses on this email. I will be away for a couple of weeks, but my emails and phone will tell you how to contact my Associate, Lauren Spencer, if you need to. The address for mailing is: Blane Hogue Director of Development, Information Resources Room 750, MacKimmie Library University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W. CALGARY T2N 1N4 Thanks again for your interest. Sincerely, -- Blane Hogue Director of Development, Information Resources University of Calgary
I've always wondered what sort of philanthropic sorts of things I would put my money into if I had an excess of wealth. Just one of those recurring daydreams we all have when sitting at our desks wishing it were lunchtime. So far, I've been unable to put my finger on one thing that just grabs me and shouts, "You must do this!" Helping stop rainforest depletion, buying up unbuilt land around my house and donating it to the regional parks, etc., all seem like obvious good causes, but somehow they just don't touch my soul.
I have now found the calling for my money. The half mil it will take to manage this unparalleled science fiction literature collection is a drop in the bucket to preserve something so important. There are lots of people helping save the rainforests, but until now, who has looked after preserving these words that cannot be replaced? Should they be lost, they will only live in the fading memories of the people who have read them, a la Fahrenheit 451.
As soon as I win the lottery, I'll be writing them a check. I'll probably send them money anyway, but it would be most excellent to fund it all in one fell swoop.
Didn't mean here :-)
... but I'm wandering off topic so I'll shutup now (off topic on /. - shame on me :-)
However, I've been involved in lots of conversations (many with technical people who should know better) of the everything-should-be-digital / its-all-different-now / librarians-know-nothing variety in the past.
There does seem to be a tendency for some people in the technical arena to overlook/underestimate the field. I also think this lack of understanding is one of the reasons you see degrees in librarianship suddenly becoming Information Science, or variations thereof. Which I think is sad. Maybe that's just me.
Cheers,
Adrian
Hi - apologies for previous cut-short post; the man in question was William Robert (Bob) Gibson, a long time resident of Calgary, Alberta. He collected SF & F material, starting in the mid 1920s until he couldn't anymore, some time in 1999 or 2000. He died on Jan 8, 2001. There is lots more information at http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/news/gibson/
It would explain Obi Wan. We got the whole ancestral spirit thing going there.
:)
:)
I hate when I have to explain my jokes. Oh well, guess the knowledge of Lucas's influences isn't as widespread as I'd hoped. Yes, the fact that Star Wars is loosely based on Kurosawa's 1958 movie, Kakushi toride no san akunin, or "The Hidden Fortress", is no secret. Lucas even has an interview on the DVD version of this movie.
Once you know this, then the samurai elements begin to leap out at you: why Jedi fight with swords and wear robes, why Yoda looks like an old zen master, possibly even why Leia wears cinnamon buns on her head.
Of course, going from "SW is loosely based on a samurai movie" to "SW is a samurai movie" is a bit of a stretch. It's the kind of thing that could be considered funny if you're enough of a geek. Which I suppose I am -- I'm just glad that at least one moderator was geeky enough to agree.
"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."
:-} )and may exist only in those copies at this date.
They are not book as a rule. They are PULPS. Magazines printed on paper that would be considered low quality even by newspaper publishers. Add to that the fact that they may have color artwork that used unstable inks/dyes. Add to that that they are already old, 75+ for many. Maybe some were pH buffered by Mr. Gibson as he collected them, maybe not - the treatments are not cheap and add up fast. They will already be fragile. They are not going to take much additional handling.
They shouldn't be cut up to scan, but they need to be scanned ASAP. On the plus side, they don't have book style binding. They should tolerate a fair amount of flattening for a good scan.
They should be more broadly available to be read than these could possibly tolerate. A lot of that old stuff has never been reprinted (some quite desevedly
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
MITSFS has a very limited amount of space.
If you want their collection to grow, so
would they. Enough students asking and they
might get better office space.
Why would you cut them up? Wouldn't you just have an illuminated platform onto which you would put the book, snap a picture, turn the page, etc.? Some software would find the page areas in the pictures and warp them straight in post processing? It seems like you could fairly easily build a system that an intern could operate which would generate a PDF out the other end.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What they really should do is start contacting the fan groups that put on conventions (Like BSFS here in Baltimore). Any of these groups should jump at the chance to do a charity auction to raise money to catalog the William Gibson library. ;}
"Choosy browsers choose