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Digital Future of the Library of Congress
lesinator writes "On Monday the 28th the US Library of Congress
is holding the eighth lecture in its series on
Managing Knowledge
and Creativity in a Digital Context. Previous speakers include
David Weinberger on blogging,
Brewster Kahle -
founding member
of archive.org and the wayback machine, and
Lawrence Lessig on intellectual
property
and the creative commons. After the lecture questions will be taken from the audience and the internet. C-Span
will be broadcasting the lecture
live at 6:30 PM EST, and also has
archives of previous lectures. Audio archives of previous lecture are available at Audible.com in the Selected Free Media section."
We'll know just how much storage really is required to hold the Library of Congress.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Maybe the fine folks at audio.com might consider making their audio clips available by means other than the Real or MS media players?
I Want To Believe
Ya know, when you do that, you ruin the opportunity to actually make the jokes for the rest of us! ;)
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
What are they thinking! Airing this at 6:30 PM EST! CSpan has just ensured that nobody on the west coast will see this. Or, is that what they are aiming for?
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
How long is it going to take to digitize the entire library?
Anyone have a good approximation? I'd like to know in Burning Libraries of Congress (BLC) please.
I'm guessing somewhere around 10-200 BLC.
Here an interesting talks they might give:
i) What if the Apostles had had technological means to prevent the reproduction of the New Testament?
ii) Would our culture be diminished if the people who rediscovered Beowulf had been unable to decrypt the manuscript?
iii) Is the continual repitition and reworking of myth and fable through the Oral Tradition disrespectful of the content creators who first recorded these stories?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Wow.. thats like the most number of links I have ever seen.. Which one do I click first..
It is amusing that this story follows directly after a story about Microsoft proprietary file formats.
The Library of Congress should insist that all 'publications' be submitted to it in open formats. What good is it if they have something on file that nobody can read! The extreme is that they have to have a licensed copy of every piece of software that ever created a file. If all the formats have to be open then at least historians can cobble together something that can read a file of interest.
With the ip laws as stupid as they are now, we run the real risk of losing the record of our age.
You'd better read this.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"Managing Knowledge and Creativity with DRM"...
Sponsored by Apple and Microsoft!
Not as quiet as if you yelled: /. JUNKY!
Hey Everyone! I'M A
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
The one by Lawrence Lessig is extremely good. I was very surprised.
--JayR
I can never understand why there isn't more acknowledgment of our debt to Project Gutenberg on these issues.
Michael Hart was digitizing books before digitizing books was cool, as far back as 1971, and the Project's efforts have been hugely successful on very little money. Nevertheless, I rarely see any official or media acknowledgment of the Project's efforts. If anyone should be on that panel for their ability to give advice from practical experience and performance in this field, while on a shoestring budget, it would be Hart!
OoO
Please do not publish outside of
With the current wave of outsourcing, privatization, and government use of commercial contractors, I wonder if Amazon or Google don't have a major role to play in the process of cataloging/archiving/serving digital content in the future.
Although LOC could never be replaced by a Google or Amazon, these private companies could provide services that augment or reduce the cost of LOC-like services. For example, if Amazon scans a book, why should LOC scan it too?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
1.)Steal LOC Carmen Sandiego style 2.)???? 3.)Profit 4.)???? 5.)???? 6.)Jail time 7.)???? 8.)President of US
Assuming 10% overhead for indexing, 1.1LOC.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Authorship of the New Testament is not a simple question at all. First off, the Apostles didn't sit down and start collecting the New Testament. That was done hundreds of years later by some chaps in Rome or Turkey who also had political axes to grind. Every few decades or centuries, there's also Yet Another Translation, and in the forward they talk about the prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that went into it. Common belief is that over the centuries there has been so much prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that today's bibles MUST be correct. Yet in spite of all that, I have this feeling that precedent is even stronger in the Bible than in the US legal system, and that we're still carrying the weight of perhaps improper decisions made over a thousand years ago, plus trying to justify them.
Then you also get to the issue of what is and isn't in the Bible. Consider "The suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the original New Testament of Jesus the Christ, Complete" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6516 for an example. Would the Apostles have wanted them published, or not? What about "The Forgotten Books of Eden"? Or less/more controversial, how about Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and company - the ones in the Catholic, but not the Protestant Bible? (Perhaps Maccabees is the most historically verifiable book IN the Bible, too.)
By the way, most of the Bible ended up being written down much later - after even US copyrights would have expired. Good thing Steamboat Willie doesn't date back to BC.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It would seem if the LOC is going to have X number of Petabytes on computers...why not have a second copy stored AWAY from DC. If something were to happen to DC at least we would have backup copies of everything...and we probably should have a separate backup location at a third site.
The fact that Project Gutenberg has not consumed huge amounts of money to produce a great amount of value is PRECISELY WHY it does not get more recognition.
The business of charity does not want competition from groups that create better products for less money, as that would put pressure on them to create a reasonable amount of value themselves, without the benefits of cushy offices and hefty salaries.
The business of education also does not want competition from organizations that produce greater value at lower cost, without the benefits of cushy offices and hefty salaries (for the administrators - not the profs).
Plus, Project Gutenberg has focused more on PRODUCING VALUE than on getting publicity and recognition for doing so. And the folks in the media tend to be too lazy and stupid to recognize what is REALLY worth reporting.
Baldur_of_Asgard
DRM and archiving are quite conflicting. But then again, how do you make available information on which you want to retain technical methods of copyright protection?
I think the obvious solution is to archive it in a non-DRM, non-proprietary format, but transcode to a DRM/proprietary format when retrieved, if the content is not in the public domain.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
But how are we going to measure asteroids and meteors now that the larger imperial unit (Libraries of Congress) is going to get smallers? Will we have to fall back to the smaller unit (VW Beetles) for all of them now?
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
That would be the point... I've been a user here since 1999, and while quips and jokes are amusing, memes like "hot grits" and such are really just noise.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Have you ever seen someone's hundred and fifty page thesis, diagrams and all, fit onto a 3.5" floppy? People who wrote their theses in TeX or LaTeX, with a few postscript diagrams. I was impressed by how tiny the code for a real, well-produced book could be.
'Course, the problem is that these representations work if you're entering in the content with that method in the first place.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How do tv shows stand in creative commons?
If a studio or outlet released over the internet a standalone encrypted video file/included player (with commercials), 720x(whatever) digital,...maybe a monthly service charge???TCPA enabled MB's+CPU's/tiers---etc. An odd combination of distributor servers and P2P could seriously offload bandwidth costs, etc..
Problems exist where...
Canada (for example) heavily censors through canadian content quota's and "cultural concerns". Having control over foreign content is a demonstrated concern
Man, you're appealing to malice a lot more than laziness and stupidity, when the latter is a much, much more likely culprit.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The problem is the books are not digitally preserved, but only the discernable content. Book covers of long ago, the crusty pages, the discoloration; all of it is not expressed in the transcribed document. Some secrets are found in the picture elements that can't be expressed by ASCII characters. Books, moreso the oldest, should be preserved as would art. I have some 1800s books on law and there are errata all around the book that was excluded when some jackass thought to transcribe the body content and sell the public domain work on eBay under his/her claim of copyright. Did you hear that? People partially copy a "public domain" book, claim their copyright on the derivitive, and sell the copyright material on eBay as their content. Of course, the first claim made is that the cost is for compensation of the labor to transcribe the material, yet that never prevents a tyrant from claiming the content as their property. According to UNITED STATES, any work not expressing "copyright" and a legible name is void and is to be reclaimed. The problem with the uncatalogued military Crypto-clearance aspiring books held in the Library of Congress is they all exhibit a copyright system much more realistic than what is currently held by UNITED STATES CONGRESS and UNITED STATES; books durring the time of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin for instance alway had a "copyright" on them; someone's name at a printing press. All that UNITED STATES Copyright Act "law", and the prejudice to reclaim works not recognized by that Copyright Act, are repugnant to every script and spirit complementing the Constitution up until the year 1871 to today.
Excuse me, sir. I think you are lost. I believe the thread you are looking for is here.
Have a nice day, and good karma to you!
I've been a user here since 1999
Let me guess; you're posting from Korea?
The LOC has announced that they are accepting volunteers to digitize texts. Their first volunteer is Earl the night janitor, who has been busily keying in the last 20 years of New York City phone books. He hopes to move on to Chicago soon.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Let's just say that I have seen so many examples that I can only conclude that:
(1) People in many "charitable" organizations and "educational" establishments are quite corrupt; or
(2) People in many "charitable" organizations "educational" establishments are amazingly, astoundingly stupid.
Neither bodes well, but only corruption seems to explain all the facts, especially in the case of the "education" establishment.
Baldur of Asgard
I wonder how long before they merge with the CIA and become the Central Intelligence Corporation...
(It's a joke.)
Are they requiring publishers to submit PDF files for new entries yet? Or files in another open format? Man, I'd hate to see taxpayer's money wasted on doing work that they could avoid doing by simply mandating PDF submissions from publishers.
I can see that some publishers may just say, "oh, my book isn't gonna be in libraries if I don't submit PDF, so much the better, I'll sell more copies". I hope these fellas realize how badly they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Maybe:
(3) People in many charitable organizations are out DOING charity, not talking about it. Kind of like Project Gutenberg.
I suspect it's the (3)s that make charity work, and make people want to keep it alive, but it's the (1)s that make the most noise and draw the most money.
IMHO there's an unfortunately large class of people who specialize in smelling the flow of money, and inserting themselves into that flow. The world would be for the most part better off without them.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
how may Volkswagens are required to hold each Library of Congess and how fast must they drive to achieve decent bandwidth?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Hehe. I'm sitting here thinking about the place that piracy (which isn't a new idea, nor confined to a particular medium) has brought us to. And I'm thinking that one thing those who put out religious material don't have to worry about, is that. What athiest in their right mind would swipe, and widely distribute THAT?
Isn't the Library of Congress' digital collection, especially with respect to music, going to totally screw iTunes and any other online DRM stuff, in order to bring us our library materials?
stuff |
... that as a universal unit of measurement, it's gonna be around for a while.
"By the way, most of the Bible ended up being written down much later - after even US copyrights would have expired. Good thing Steamboat Willie doesn't date back to BC."
Good thing most ranters forget that Disney wasn't the only one supporting the Sonny Bono Act. Can't be looking balanced, can we?
Personally, I think they should not be allowed to compress anything from LOC. This way when they say, it can hold the LOC 20000000 times over it will mean something. Though to be honest, you can never really use it as a measurment of something since the LOC is always growing. Any time those monkeys on the hill rape us, its in there.
Since nearly all typesetting is done electronically these days, I wonder if they shouldn't just have publishers send them the raw typesetting documents in addition to a hardcopy. It wouldn't be much work for the LOC to write (or buy) software to convert all the common typesetting formats into whatever standard format(s) they would like to use internally, and for dispersion to the public.
:)
It would certainly be smarter than scanning them in themselves, or demanding extra work on the publishers part to to convert to a format like PDF that might not be preferable 100 years from now. Heck for all I know they may very well be doing what I said - I know nothing about how the LOC works
I thought that LoC was a measure of information equivalent to 20TB (that should be a Google conversion). Asteriods require a unit of volume and, so, are always be measured in Beetles and Empire State Buildings.
Note that the traditional unit (the 20TB figure above) is only all the text in the LoC in ASCII. It would be MUCH less than it would take to digitize the entire LoC including pictures and film.
Just assume they'll store all that data on the old type punch cards, or those big drums from before I was a fetus. Then, the LoC can retain its position as the largest unit of mass, data, AND volume.
Learn something new.
- The OCR is always correct.
- The documents could be represented in ASCII
- The text is the only part of the document with any value
Of course, your second paragraph shows that clearly those assumptions can't be true -- why would someone pay more for something without an additional benefit?And you wouldn't maintain seperate databases -- pictures aren't searchable. You'd want to use any OCRd (preferably vetted afterwards) as the basis for indexing the images, so that you could help people find more images that might be of interest to them (which you mentioned in the second paragraph). However, I'm not sure what the requirements are that the LOC operates under, so even if they're allowed to do cost recovery or otherwise charge fees.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
sometime before the "finale" Enterprise gets destroyed and they rebuilt it as Enterprise B heh
long time lurker, rare poster
Why the Apocrypha Isn't in the Bible.
Catholics will tell you, "You Protestants are missing part of the Bible. We have the rest of it." This can throw people off, but it no longer has to. These false Catholic additions to the Bible are commonly called the Apocrypha or sometimes the Deuterocanonical books. This is a short treatise on WHY these books are not in the Bible.
What is the Apocrypha anyway?
The Apocrypha is a collection of uninspired, spurious books written by various individuals. The Catholic religion considers these books as scripture just like a Bible-believer believes that our 66 books are the word of God, i.e., Genesis to Revelation. We are going to examine some verses from the Apocrypha later in our discussion.
At the Council of Trent (1546) the Roman Catholic religion pronounced the following apocryphal books sacred. They asserted that the apocryphal books together with unwritten tradition are of God and are to be received and venerated as the Word of God. So now you have the Bible, the Apocrypha and Catholic Tradition as co-equal sources of truth for the Catholic. In reality, the Bible is the last source of truth for Catholics. Catholic doctrine comes primarily from tradition stuck together with a few Bible names. In my reading of Catholic materials, I find notes like this: "You have to keep the Bible in perspective." Catholics do not believe that the Bible is God's complete revelation for man.
The Roman Catholic Apocrypha
Tobit
Judith
Wisdom
Ecclesiasticus
Baruch
First and Second Maccabees
Additions to Esther and Daniel
Apocryphal Books rejected by the Catholic Religion:
First and Second Esdras
Prayer of Manasses
Susanna*
*A reader says: "Susanna is in the Roman Catholic canon. It is Daniel 13."
Why the Apocrypha Isn't in the Bible.
1. Not one of the apocryphal books is written in the Hebrew language, which was alone used by the inspired historians and poets of the Old Testament. All Apocryphal books are in Greek, except one which is extant only in Latin.
2. None of the apocryphal writers laid claim to inspiration.
3. The apocryphal books were never acknowledged as sacred scriptures by the Jews, custodians of the Hebrew scriptures (the apocrypha was written prior to the New Testament). In fact, the Jewish people rejected and destroyed the apocrypha after the overthow of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
4. The apocryphal books were not permitted among the sacred books during the first four centuries of the real Christian church (I'm certainly not talking about the Catholic religion which is not Christian).
5. The Apocrypha contains fabulous statements which not only contradict the "canonical" scriptures but themselves. For example, in the two Books of Maccabees, Antiochus Epiphanes is made to die three different deaths in three different places.
6. The Apocrypha includes doctrines in variance with the Bible, such as prayers for the dead and sinless perfection. The following verses are taken from the Apocrypha translation by Ronald Knox dated 1954:
Basis for the doctrine of purgatory:
2 Maccabees 12:43-45, 2.000 pieces of silver were sent to Jerusalem for a sin-offering...Whereupon he made reconciliation for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin.
Salvation by works:
Ecclesiasticus 3:30, Water will quench a flaming fire, and alms maketh atonement for sin.
Tobit 12:8-9, 17, It is better to give alms than to lay up gold; for alms doth deliver from death, and shall purge away all sin.
Magic:
Tobit 6:5-8, If the Devil, or an evil spirit troubles anyone, they can be driven away by making a smoke of the heart, liver, and gall of a fish...and the Devil will smell it, and flee away, and never come again anymore.
Mary was born sinless (immaculate conception):
The word apocrypha is a Greek word meaning "hidden." This identifies that the origin of the Apocryphal books is unknown, or doubtful. The Greek word pseudepigrapha means "false writing." This identifies that certain books of the apocrypha were considered to be false writings in the first Century.
The Old Testament Apocrypha include from 14 to 19 books, depending on the method of counting, which were written in the period of 200 B.C. to 100 A.D. The number of books, the verse numbering and the actual verses themselves vary greatly depending on who prints the Apocrytha. Catholic versions of the Bible include 12 of these, but do not consider 1st & 2nd Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh to be canonical, which is interesting. The Church of England accepts the Apocrypha as "semi-canonical."
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha writings from Bible times:
Old Testament Apocrypha
1.First Esdras,
2.Fourth Ezra,
3.Tobit,
4.Judith,
5.Additions to Esther,
6.The Wisdom of Solomon,
7.Sirach
8.Baruch,
9.Letter of Jeremiah,
10.Prayer of Azariah,
11.Daniel and Susanna,
12.Bel and the Dragon,
13.The Prayer of Manasseh,
14.First Maccabees,
15.Second Maccabees,
16.Third Maccabees,
17.Fourth Maccabees,
18.Psalm 151
Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
1.The Book of Jubilees,
2.The Books of Adam and Eve,
3.Life of Adam and Eve-Slavonic Version
4.A Fragment of the Apocalypse of Moses
5.The Martyrdom of Isaiah
6.First Enoch
7.The Letter of Aristeas
8.The Apocalypse of Adam
9.The Revelation of Esdras
10.The Second Treatise of the Great Seth
11.The Testament of Abraham
Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.
The Book of Tobit.
The Vita of Adam and Eve.
The Wisdom of Solomon
Baruch.
Testament of Abraham.
Testament of the twelve Patriarchs.
The Book of Abraham (discovered by Joseph Smith).
The Book of Judith.
The Revelation of Esdras.
1.Esdras
2.Esdras
First Enoch.
The Slavonic version of the Life of Adam and Eve
The Martyrdom of Isaiah
The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach (Eccleasticus)
The Letter of Aristeas
Azariah
The Letter of Jeremiah
The History of Susannah
Bel and the Dragon
The Prayer of Manasseh
1th Maccabees
2nd Maccabees
3rd Maccabees
4th Maccabees
Fragment- The Apocalypse of Moses.
Some of these books, such as 1st Macabees and Ecclesiasticus, are truly interesting, but that does not mean that they are inspired. There are many valid reasons why the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha cannot be accepted as Scripture.
1. These books were never included in the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament. The Jews never considered them part of their sacred canon. Josephus expressly limited the Hebrew canon to the same material contained the 39 Books we know as the Old Testament. Josephus knew of other Jewish writings down to his time, but he did not regard them as having equal authority with the canonical books.
2. These books, as far as the evidence contained in the New Testament, were never accepted as canonical by Jesus and His apostles. When Jesus made reference to the Scriptures he said:
Luke 24:27
"Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures."
Luke 24:44
"These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."
We know what was contained in the Law of Jesus day we know what was contained in the Prophets and in the Psalms. We have the cannon of the J
Just capture a Portable Networked graphics or JPEG image of all angles of the book and every page and detail. Skip the PDF format because it is copyright for intrusive purposes. All the old books are public domain, so we need to use an image format that can't encroach on public domain content; this is why it should use somthing not PDF, such implicitly as the PNG format.
- Completely documented in sources that are freely and publically available. RFCs and the W3C web site are good examples.
- Unencumbered by patents or other restrictions on independent implementation.
- Readable and writable by multiple tools on multiple operating systems.
Can anyone think of things that should be added to this list, or any clarifications?Then, the LoC can retain its position as the largest unit of mass, data, AND volume.
Nope, I believe that honor is reserved for none other than your mom.
No such thing as Left Over Crack
kaens.blogspot.com
It's an open format. Adobe does not control it, just like they don't control TIFF or PostScript (despite having invented both).
Troll? That's cool. I could comment on how the moderation system has completely derailed since then too, but I wouldn't want to upset anybody :).
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean