Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online

Posted by timothy on from the how-many-libraries-of-congress-is-that-anyhow dept.

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)."

5 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Er by DrMrLordX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Er by silentbozo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Can't do that. by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 5, Funny

    This would violate the publishers' god-given right to milk their "creations" until the heat-death of the Universe.

  3. Ametrica! by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finally, Slashdot can establish that for official purposes:

    1 Library of Congress = $260M

    And the 2004 US Federal budget can be spec'd at 0.000243754522 LoC:s (Libraries of Congress per second).

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  4. Re:Can't do that-Inheritance. by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.