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)."

Comments

Er

[DrMrLordX]

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?

Re:Er

[silentbozo]

Many of the libraries in the country carry copyrighted material. You can walk in and peruse the books at your leisure, for free. Same idea, only you grant access to a lot more people. Scholars routinely pay to get copies of rare items from libraries for research, and every time a query comes in, they have to haul the book out, and run it through a copier. It would be a lot more intelligent to scan once, store it, and make it available on demand.

The chief benefit? Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on - a big issue, assuming that ANY item ever enters the public domain from now on, the way that they were supposed to. Hell, I'd lay out money for a copy of the Library of Congress on a set of blue-ray DVDs, and so would many large corporations (those that still have research labs, that is), universities and colleges, as well as other organizations and governmental entities around the world.

Re:Er

[jrockway]

Interesting concept, though. It's okay if I go to the Library and look it, but not if I look at it online? Why? ( I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time. Online, everyone on Earth can see it at the same time. Oh well. Information wants to be free. Don't want someone to know it? Don't write a book about it! )

Re:Er

[mcrbids]

One of the greatest catastrophes in human history was the burning of the great library at Alexandria, Egypt.

See, the ancient world had many items of great wisdom, and many of the only copies of these works were contained there. The burning of the great library was the end for countless such works.

Today, however, our knowledge is much more widely spread. We all owe a tremendous debt to Gutenburg, for his printing press (removable type press, 1436) for making this possible.

It's quite arguable that the dawn of the renaissance stemmed not from Galileo, or Kepler, but from the widespread nature of books in general after the removable type printing press made this possible.

How many of these works are unique or very rare? I'd consider that a large percentage of these works fall into this category - in which, it would be a wonderful thing to build in some redundancy into the preservation of not only these works, but the wisdom, insight, and humor contained therein!

Warm up the scanner, says I!

Re:Er

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on

Assuming a large sum of money is spent maintaining the digital versions. Computers lose and destroy data, even good computers fail. So it would require good backups done on a regular basis. File formats tend to change too.

Re:Er

[slashdot.org]

I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time.

And that's exactly the biggest mistake people keep making; analogies don't work. The stuff we are dealing with is *new*. A library != Internet. There is no analogy.

I'm not saying that I have a solution to any of this, but I think the first thing people will have to realize is that things have changed in a dramatic way. The traditional way of thinking about IP (or really, information) no longer works.

There is no simple answer to any of this, and it makes no sense to come up with analogies and try to justify or make judgement based on that.

Fact of the matter is, all of a sudden it is possible for people to view/copy information pretty much instantly. What we need to realize is that _we_ are the ones that can/will put together the foundation of how to deal with this. No current laws really are suitable. Look at the mess with P2P networks and the music industry. Surely P2P networks _should_ be perfectly legal, but on the other hand if copying music would become so easy that you could listen to any song you'd like, at any given time without paying for it, it's hard to imagine how artists will be paid (and please don't give me the "they'll have to do live performances to make money" bs).

The people that will be able to figure out what the _real_ answers are to these issues are the ones that will do really well. Think about it. /rant

We need to get our priorities straight

[davmoo]

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.

Re:Can't do that-Inheritance.

[Waffle Iron]

If you get an inheritance? You effectively do.

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.

Re:More dotcom hype...

[MrWa]

If this is such a wonderful idea why doesn't he get a bunch of artists, musicians and writers to donate their own work to this project and actually prove the concept works?

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?

I have to ask...

[Civil_Disobedient]

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.