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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.
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".