Slashdot Mirror
British Library Starts Email Archive
sushi writes "Australian IT is reporting
that 'The British Library is creating an archive to store the emails of the nation's top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages.' A spokeswoman says it welcomes emails from prominent people in all walks of life.
"We want people with a canon of work behind them," she says. The article also talks of the need to read data from (now) obsolete computing platforms..."
As the first post, I welcome my mail to be submitted to this archive...
ok, who let that one through? :)
Iran has endorsed
I could send them my punch card reader. I still keep some of my best pr0n on those cards.
Just have Google give everyone a GMail account. Then not only can you store all of their political and scientific mail, they can get targeted advertisements about who to vote for and for whats new in science
One good thing about digital archieve is the possibility to use text-to-speech software to read those emails to people with sight problems.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
A British author with a "canon of work" behind him? This guy better be on the list.
Store all my emails? um... no thanks? please?
Put Gmail password in escrow with pointer in will.
Brits are reading your emails. SHOCK AND AWE!!
Dear Tony
It doesn't matter. we're not going into Eyeraq
for the Weapons. We're after the oil....
George
>Dear George
>
>Do we really have the evidence to go to war in
>the middle east? I only ask becuase our
>intelligence people aren't really sure enough.
>
>Could it be that we're making a mistake?
>
>RSVP
>
>Tony
>>>Light is a wave! I can prove it.
>> No its not, light is a particle! I can prove it
> You ninny!
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Then I thought of the Salmon of Doubt, the book of the scraps of electronic data found on Douglas Adams HDD. But his emails?
Yes letters can be well penned, but is every author going to vainly CC: their emails to a library?
Should they be digitally signed? Oh lawks, Micheal Jackson just emailed me and asked if he could use my toilet [goonies]
Seems dumb to me. Email is such a throw-away medium.
If Shakespeares SMS's were saved, would be citing:
2 b r !2b tat s da qsn, wthr ts noblr n da mnd to sffr da slngs n arws f owtragos frtne,r 2 tk rms agnst a c f trbls n bi opresing, nd dem.
Email is for email. Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I was visiting a special collections recently and they had letters from Kipling, T.E Lawrence and Einstein. There is nothing quite like the feeling of touching such documents (with white gloves of course). Reading an email of someone, like Feynman, would not be as interesting as a letter. Nevertheless, I am glad that they are doing this, it is better then not having such information. But something is lost when its not on paper.
Write a letter to mom.
For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.
--
Try Nuggets , our mobile search engine. Search for answers to your questions via SMS, across the UK.
I'm sure this is something that laywers have wet dreams over.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
George W. Bush, of course, esp. wrt the illegal war in Iraq.
Oh, canon, not cannon. Never mind.
My computing platform is so extrom, while yours is an obsolute piece of jenk.
Obsolute: adj.; to be completely and absolutely obselete
Extrom: please see "sense of humor"
Jenk: n.; some guy I used to know that worked at the pharmacy, it probably wasn't his real name
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
We can finally get proof that bill gates is knowingly running a monopoly. Steve: so billy what do you want to do today. Bill: plot to take over the world... wohahahah (sig) wohahahahahah Steve: billy that is what we do every night though.. Bill: whacks steve on the head. shudd up and keep lobbying against evil open source. It's stevey, stevey and the brain (gates). (END SIG)!
Ambient [Servlet Based Webapp Engine]
I think it would be better to accept emails from everyone. It is more interesting to see the emails of a great scientist before he/she became one, instead of after it.
I think this could be quite valuable indeed. Another thing that I would love to see is to have an index for scientific papers such as the excellent Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ coupled with a moderated discussion forum like the one here at slashdot for discussion of the strong/weak points of each scientific paper. If well done, I think this would be a huge benefit to the research community.
"We have one machine, belonging to evolutionary biologist James Lovelock, for which we don't have a power supply cable."
I'm sending them a spare power cable of mine. Very hard to come by these days with all those modern wireless computers.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Now the british government has an excuse for making ISPs keep those gigabytes of internet traffic records on all their users...
The problem is more general, it is not only limited to emails.
As digital storage becomes more popular, someday we will lose valuable historical data and information because we will be unable to read the digital code of some device.
If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.
There is a period in human history called "dark ages" (before the middle ages) because the historians know very little about it and we have found nearly no writings from that era. see: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Dark_Ages
Oh, ha ha.
Sleep is futile.
Steve, Did I leave my copy of GTA Vice City round at your house last night? I got a bit too wasted and can't find it at my place. See ya, Paul Davies
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
I wish they'd listed more of the hardware they're having problems getting hold of or getting working. I found this about the Atlas, and I actually remember the Sinclair ZX-80. Sure enough, as the site says they're sometimes sold on e-bay. Someone want to tell the library to get their bid in?
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Why has no one suggested sending them Linus's e-mails? His message in the comp.os.minix newsgroup and discussions with Andrew Taunenbaum are infamous. And e-mails between himself and his lieutenants are also pieces of history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
I'm sure the NSA already has copies of all emails ever written, so the British Library just needs to ask them nicely....
An email to treasure ... :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Would this be the same British Library that was going to archive the whole UK web?
Would it really be so bad if they can't figure out that these shiny disks littering the earth are free AOL subscriptions?
While we're talking about the British Library, it's worth mentioning that they've just redone their catalogue search facility, and it is now excellent (and it works in FireFox). You can search their entire copyright library for free here:
http://catalogue.bl.uk/
You can even use the site to order offprints of articles, book chapters, etc. from their Document Supply Centre. Very, very handy.
all of the +5 insighfull material from the /. archives. If /. comments were counted in the "cannon of work" for an author, some of us have truely extensive output. As for "famous", well, I got my 15 minutes of fame on slashdot....5 seconds at a time and so did you.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I once heard that the British Library wanted to take a 'snapshot of the internet', every week for public records!
...that humans firstly developed techniques to write thoughts down, traversing from oral to written societies. We know of conversations made 400 years ago, because people wrote them down (and stored them somewhere). Nowadays those correspondences are simply lost because your pst file is borked or your hdd crashed. Isn't that a cultural regress? I hope this library will save many interesting mails from vanishing, but I doubt that historians will have better sources in 400 years about the present than what we have about the 17th century.
I don't read replies by ACs.
This concept would be similar to a series of letters by a great person being published as a book.
Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru is one such example.
I'm sure the CIA still keeps archiving every email that Elvis keeps sending
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
This subject touches upon the larger issue of effectively archiving
digital data, period. I have given a lot of thought to this because
I have been keeping a journal since I was 12 (I am 36) and while its
contents will undoubtedly only ever prove important to me, I want it to
be preserved. I still keep a pen-on-paper journal and occasionally spend
a few hours scanning it in to TIFF images and burning them to CD-ROM,
and occasionally backing those up to a data archival site.
I save and archive all of my outgoing email and while a fair amount of
it is 'background noise' it does serve as a reminder of what I've been
doing with my life, the people I've known, my changing viewpoints, and
fills in the gaps that the journal does not cover.
I suppose it all boils down to whether you have anything interesting to
say, regardless of whether it is in ASCII text or a quill dipped in ink
on papyrus.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
who is prominent enough to warrant archiving?
Personally I think I'm great, but will the British Library?
For years a project within the Library of Congress has been saving important sound recordings. Their medium of choice? Cutting records. Okay they don't fit in your iPod and the sound quality is like mp3 with 2bps sampling... but - and here is my point - they can easily and always be accessed even if technology gets hosed and protocols are rendered obsolete. (My dissertation, in fact, is partly obsolete because of the DOS application used to insert all the Hebrew and Greek.)
What if there is a nuclear war... natural disaster that sends us back a few eons... alien attack... you get the idea... will we be able to read this stuff? if it is only stored electronically?
Why is it that in sci-fi movies and shows when people can read the writings of a long dead civilization it is because those buggers used things like books? Why is it that we can still read cuneiform documents on baked clay tablets from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago? I'm all for electronic storage and searches and such - groovy man. But if that is the only way we store this stuff... then one day we might not live to regret it.
I don't have some of the very earliest ones, but I've got my incoming and outgoing mail archived on my HD and backed up, less spam, of course, back to 1997. I still use Eudora Lite 3.05 which can run from removeable media. So down the roads of time, if someone can dig up a box that can run/emulate Windows of any sort from 95 on and read a data CD, they can read my mail. Of course that is ignoring the problems of archivable media lifetime. Punch cards still sound like they would survive best.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I've already started to BCC them on all my correspondence. I hope my wife won't research that archive.
...is, coincidentally, the fellow who runs the Vintage Computer Festival, just mentioned in Slashdot. That would be Sam Ismail, whose private data-recovery company is VintageTech.
Tom Geller
And that would just be today's e-mails. Weekends are so much worse. Thankfully I now enforce a subject-based e-mail policy on my website. If the subject line does not start with one of a few select words, the e-mail is automatically discarded as spam. This works wonders.
> To whom it may concern:
>
> I have encountered a remarkable discovery
> but unfortunately there is not enough room
> in this margin to type it out.