Slashdot Mirror
U.S. to Digitize All Tangible Gov't. Publications
CETS writes "The U.S. Government Printing Office is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP. See specific article for more detail."
Having a collective base of all government documents online is indeed a noble goal , perhaps consideration could be made to include digitalisation of all Literary works which have fallen into the public domain.
Marilyn vos Savant (I believe it was Von Savant)wrote about the entire collection of the worlds literature being contained on just 2 discs , it would be nice to think that we are one step closer to having something of that ilk easily accessible even if it is just for government records at the moments.
Hopefully within the next 50 years we shall see actually see paper go the way of the Dodo and which would certainly be rather grand from an ecological stand point considering how expensive printed publishing can be (storage space , ecological impact , and ink)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Too bad many of them have been reclassified in order to keep people ignorant, er, I mean, protect us from terrorists.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Unlikely. The written text still exists so the process of erasing history would have to include destroying them and all existing copies as well.
Will the US government choose an open standard to allow everyone access to the documents? Or will we have to put up with bloated .docs?
I saw a movie on cable about the future, ALL knowledge was stored on a single computer in Belgium. There were no more printed materials, it was evil to kill trees and the computer made knowledge available, at will.
The guy had to look up something about some shady government plot and as he began to dig into the computer banks, he began to notice big holes in history, big holes in time. The computer was deleting records to cover up crimes committed by big shots at the top.
The more he dug in, the more things vaporized.
And being it was the sole repository of knowledge in the universe, well, that was that..
The name of the computer? Yep. You guessed it.
The Beast.
I can not for the life of me remember what that movie was named and I've never seen it again since the early 80's.. Did it self-terminate also??
IMO, I would much rather have printed books in my hand, I can pick up a book and find something in seconds, I can spend endless hours trying to find something on the computer. Besides, reading from a screen is just not a very pleasant experience, compared to a book in hand.
Ummm, no. It's no doubt that certain persons can't seem to think anything without a conspiracy theory. Get a life
Now how about they open up all of those government databases that you now need Lexis/Nexis to search? How about they finally create a site that lets me search what my tax dollars pay for in the first place?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?