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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."
They have a freezer full of them in the Gibson orbital villa. The family AI just releases another clone from hibernation as required, and sends him down on the next JAL shuttle. I believe the current Gibson is 3Bill.
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
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.
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.
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