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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
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.
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.
C-SPAN is clearly concerned with ratings. Didn't you see the stuff they pulled out for Sweeps week? I think it was something like "old guy reading boring text to empty room."
"Managing Knowledge and Creativity with DRM"...
Sponsored by Apple and Microsoft!
Well, I would imagine that unless they have a massive staff and many OCR scanners or automation with REALLY good OCR, this may take a LOONNNG time.
I'm not quite sure about the length of a BLOC, but this is a job for not-quite-manual labor. Each book requires a simple task: Scan page 1, flip page, scan page 2, page 3, flip, ad infinitum.
One way to save on time would be to contact the publshers of any book made after 1985-ish, where you can get electronic copies from the author. Some older books may have been already digitized, but it's still going to take more than 25 years unless there's a massive army working on this.
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.
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.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
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.
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
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
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.