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Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online
Mark_Uplanguage writes "The idea to scan in all materials available at the U.S. Library of Congress was presented at the Web 2.0 conference this week (as just one of many ideas presented). The proposed cost of $260 million would create a huge benefit to society (well, at least to those who can read English)."
Pardon me for sounding like an eegnoramoose, but isn't at least some of the material in the Library of Congress copyrighted material? Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.
Can't have that, now can we?
Since Congress and the President can so easily pull out a hundred billion dollars to bomb the hell out of another country, I see no reason we can't come up with a whimpy $260 million for something as worthwhile as this.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Putting the LoC on-line is only the first step. How long before those Internet book printing stations that can create an entire book for you from an electronic image in a deciminute for $1 tap into this? I'd have to think that this would be good for everyone except B&N who are busy reprinting old classics under their own label right now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A 0-rated post noted that this type of free access is a big deal to people who make an honest living publishing their creations.
This invokes a big, important question. The rise and flourish of the information age has and will continue to provide unbelievable freedom of access to unbelievable amounts of information. Where and how do we draw the line between the freedom of the consumers and the rights of the creators?
I'm a software developer who loves movies: I'm a creator and a consumer, so I see both sides of this coin. And I think there needs to be a compromise between consumers and creators.
Consumers need to realize that at a certain point, amassing more music, or more books, or more movies, or more whatever, becomes a luxury, not a right. So if the price of music prevents you from having a 10,000 song collection, I'm sorry but, "so sad too bad." That's how it's always been for just about every other purchaseable product. Sometimes you have to sacrifice what you merely want to get what you really desire.
Creators need to understand that the information they produce is a drop in the bucket compared to, for example, the estimated yottabyte (1x10^24 bytes) of information on the Internet. So if you want to make money off your creation, it had better stand out, because there's a lot of noise out there to drown it out. Simply put, if you want to get paid, make something people are willing to pay for.
I might inherit a portion of his farm. But that's a result of money that he saved at the time. I do not collect royalties on the *work* that he did 70 years ago.
If an author or musician wants to leave an inheritance, then they should save the money they make during a reasonable copyright term, and give that to their children. They can leave their typewriters, musical instruments, and other tools of the trade (analagous to a farm) as well.
They might have to actually forego a blowing everything they earn on cocaine and refrain from signing away most of their income on bad contracts to actually achieve this, but then so do the rest of us.
Maybe im the odd duck here but somehow waay back in early net days..the 90's i thought that this was such an obvious application of internet technology that it must be part of the original design purposes for the internet (darpanet and all that funding of course)
So the only surprise to me is that were just now hearing a proposal to do this??? sheesh, if i hadnt thought it so completely obvious to every netizen at those old public library terminals i wouda lost so much seep making it happen!!!
so now who's going to do it? and while its limboing through congress can we just put together a consortium to visit thie library we aready own with our digital camera's and OCR the thing into existence... how many of us woud need to donate our gmail 1g accounts to store it all?
Work for who? I think you are still confused from the dotcom era still. You must be thinking that "change society and business" means that scanning the entire LoC can make someone money (advertising??)
The important part in this case is the changing society part of the statement, which is what the vast potential of the net is capable of doing. It won't help you make money based on a bad idea (in fact, it may only help you lose money faster!) but it does have the potential to change the way a society views and deals with information.
Right now there is a vast amount of knowledge in the LoC that is effectively out of the ordinary citizen's hands. That is not how it should be. If knowledge is power, there is a storehouse of power waiting to be unleashsed by giving everyone access to what is being stockpiled. It won't happen over night, or in a few years, but eventually it will have a ripple effect. Historians lament the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria, but what difference would it have made if only a few could actually use the information that was contained?
Not only the Library of Congress of the Unites States of America, we should also scan every big library in the world to create a pool of human work to freely share and preserve.
What's in a sig?
I'd take you up on that offer, but it would be money wasted as you simply can not do the job for that little money.
The LOC doesn't just contain nice black and white typed texts. There are hand written documents in organic inks on animal hide and poorly constructed paper. There are paintings in every medium you can imagine and there are sound recordings on just about every media ever used: wax tubes, glass disks, wire spools, open reel, 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, etc.
Each of these things needs to be digitized, categorized, indexed and offered in a searchable manner. A printed page, for example, will need to be photographed and transcribed/OCRed.
Much of the work needs to be done on delicate objects that may be destroyed if not handled correctly. If you were to play a wax recording disk with too much pressure, or under the wrong environmental conditions, the disk would shatter in to an irreparable pile of small bits.
What formats will you store them in? What formats will you make them available in?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
As an author, I wonder how much of your valued craft was honed by reading the work of others for education and inspiration. How many books did you buy in elementary school, or high school? Yet that's where you learned your precious language skills you now market.
Knowledge, even the limited knowledge of an author, does not exist in a vacuum. You read, you learn, you practice, then you create. You could not have done this without the beneficence of others who aren't making a dime off the education they provided you.
To unleash the vast amounts of knowledge stored up in the LOC to the world would be one of the single best things this country could do for mankind. One book, one reader my hairy ass. Why not open the floodgates so everyone can benefit?
I understand the motivation of monetary incentives, but I also know a lot of great authors who died penniless. And they were at least brave enough to sign their names to their ideas.