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."

Comments

Re:Nice, but how long?

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

Nonsense. I put together solutions with high-speed scanners all the time. Some of our highest-end average 118ipm (Duplex) and have 1000pg ADFs.

Also, you would generally split the load between 4-6 of these scanners for a job this big. The software is automated, and will OCR/Convert/Archive the file is one step.

As a general rule, you can fit 10,000 b/w text pages in 1GB of storage.

Re:The problem I see with Project Gutenberg...

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

(1) Under the old US law, content had to be marked "Copyright" to be copyrighted. Under the present US law, all work is automatically copyrighted the moment it is created, UNLESS the author specifies otherwise. I think this holds true for works since, was it 1987? I forget exactly - but it's been a little while now.

(2) A person who transcribes a book that is in the public domain can CLAIM a copyright on it, but this is not enforceable unless they have changed the text significantly enough for it to be a new work - in which case you probably don't want it anyhow, except possibly as a work of satire or fiction.

Baldur of Asgard

Re:Nice, but how long?

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

Nope, Canon (and others) make Book Scanners with actually flip and scan each page automatically. They can handle all sizes too.

They are very expensive, but cool as hell.