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.
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
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 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.
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
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....
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.
...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 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?
The National Archives in Kew, London - which administers the UK's public records system - currently archives a selection of British government websites on a weekly basis. Those sites which do not update frequently are archived on a 6 monthly cycle. The UK Government Web Archive can be found here