Linux and OSS to Aid the Library of Congress

flakeman2 writes with a link to Linux.com article about Linux's new role at the Library of Congress. The national archive of books is looking to begin an ambitious digitization project, aimed at getting some rare and crumbling documents into the public record online. These will include "Civil War and genealogical documents, technical and artistic works concerning photography, scores of books, and the 850 titles written, printed, edited, or published by Benjamin Franklin. According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which developed the digitizing technology, open source software will play an 'absolutely critical' role in getting the job done. The main component is Scribe, a combination of hardware and free software. 'Scribe is a book-scanning system that takes high-quality images of books and then does a set of manipulations, gets them in optical character recognition and compressed, so you can get beautiful, printable versions of the book that are also searchable,' says Kahle." Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

Re:All copyrighted works should be held

[vivaoporto]

"At the same time, unless congress wants to hold and distribute material of questionable moral quality, the copyright law could be amended to limit the protections of copyright to those works that do actually further the arts and the sciences as defined in the constitution."

Uh-uh. Let's repeat the same errors from the past, keeping what the current generation deems "of excelent moral quality", and censoring everything else, just like some works of Michelangelo were. People must to remember, what is of questionable moral quality for some is perfectly acceptable (and even desirable) for others, specially when the benefit of time is give, and that's the idea of archiving for posterity.

Re:All copyrighted works should be held

[jimicus]

At the same time, unless congress wants to hold and distribute material of questionable moral quality,

Stop right there.

When the purpose of your organisation is, to put it in very simple terms, "catalogue everything", you can't start making exceptions on moral grounds on the simple basis that what constitutes "questionable moral quality" today may be totally different tomorrow. Furthermore, who gets to define "questionable moral quality"? The closest anyone's ever come to creating such a definition is to say "Well, I can't actually come up with a concrete definition but I knows it when I sees it".