Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
Kyzia said some of it should get to ibiblio, and since some of it is from the 19th century, that's eminently reasonable. That "very little science fiction" includes authors like Jules Verne, whose stuff is already available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. And while we're visiting the 19th century, though the article doesn't mention him, also freely available are the works of H.G. Wells.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
This is often brought up and is quite misleading.
Sure, your CD-ROM drive won't last the 100 years they claim the disks will, but it's a documented format and people could easily build a reader if they felt the need. Hell, with a really high-resolution scan you could read the data directly. And that's with CDs, something hard to preserve.
Xerox (and others) have been working on a printed storage medium, where data is represented by little left or right leaning slashes and encoded with enough error-checking and redundancy that you can recover the data from any piece of paper large enough to hold it. (Put 1/8th of a page of data together and any 1/8th of a page contains all of it.)
The Xerox method was actually intended for digital watermarks, so that links to the original document would allow people to find it from an old printed copy, and so embed author info, etc, in every page of the document and have it look, to the naked eye, like a uniform light-gray background.
You could do something like this fairly easily with the intent being to save the data. The storage was fairly impressive, 15k per page or something, and you could use a simple self-documenting compression to cram a lot onto each page. Print these out as your "fall of technology" backup and store properly. Any self-respecting geek could write a reader in very little time. For extra insurance, print a few pages of human-readable text describing the procedure and offering psuedo-code for decompressing the data.
On the computer, store everything in text-based formats and store it with the appropriate RFCs for the formats for the non-text based data. Even if people forget what XML or HTML are they can still see the original text in there and figure out how to strip that out easily if need be.
This is assuming that people don't copy the data to a new storage medium when updating their computers, and that the whole world forgets how to access common formats.
And yes, I do know of which I speak. I've reverse engineered disk-storage formats from old PCs to allow disk-images to be used as file systems on modern PCs, to extract old files, or for high-level emulators to use.