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

Here's an idea related to audio archiving

[filmmaker]

Maybe the fine folks at audio.com might consider making their audio clips available by means other than the Real or MS media players?

Dammit!

[dteichman2]

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?

Some ideas

[gowen]

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?

Re:Some ideas

[Scrameustache]

i) What if the Apostles had had technological means to prevent the reproduction of the New Testament?

Main Entry: apostle
Pronunciation: &-'pä-s&l
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French & Old English; Old French apostle & Old English apostol, both from Late Latin apostolus, from Greek apostolos, from apostellein to send away, from apo- + stellein to send
1 : one sent on a mission: as a : one of an authoritative New Testament group sent out to preach the gospel and made up especially of Christ's 12 original disciples and Paul b : the first prominent Christian missionary to a region or group

They wouldn't have prevented the distribution of the story their mission it was to distribute, that's for sure.

Re:At last!

[cmburns69]

While it's an interesting question, it really depends on how you want to store the contents of each book.

Would you store each page of each book as an image? As flat ASCII text (except of pictures and diagrams, of course!)? What kind of indexing would you do? Basic indexing of book names? Full-text indexing of the contents? All that storage adds up!

In summary, the library of congress (depending on the method used) could probably fit into something ranging from a couple of gigabytes to a couple of petabytes.

That's the right idea .. carry it further

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That's the right idea .. carry it further

[Anonymous Coward]

"...What good is it if they have something on file that nobody can read!..."

I wouldn't say nobody. The paying members of a private club would be able to read it.

Re:That's the right idea .. carry it further

[John Seminal]

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!

Why even have it on any digital media. I want the original records. Screw having computerized copies. This is the nations library, where a copy of everything in its' original form must be.

I have no problem with the card catalogue system. Some things should not change. If someone wants to open the "Digital Library of Congress" then go for it. But leave the original as-is. I can only imagine someone wanting to digitize the Great Library in Alexandria back 2000 years ago that resulted in the great fire. HA! We screw ourselves again.

Outsource parts of LOC to Google or Amazon?

[G4from128k]

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?

DRM and archiving are so diametrically opposed...

[PornMaster]

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.

Re:At last!

[aboyko]

A couple of gigabytes?! Only if you burn it first. There's something like 10^8 books, nevermind the other stuff. How do you compress any given book into 100 bytes?

The "20 TB" figure comes from the smallest possible measure, treating the flat books as ASCII text. Even just considering current digital content, it's also inaccurately small by >1 order of magnitude.

It's a really really really big library.

Yes, and yet...no.

[oneiros27]

You're making a large number of assumptions in your first paragraph:

1. The OCR is always correct.
2. The documents could be represented in ASCII
3. 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.