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Carnegie Mellon's Digital Library Exceeds 1.5 Million Books
cashman73 writes "Most Slashdot readers are probably familiar with Google's book scanning project, a collaboration with several major universities to digitize works of literature, art, and science. But Google may have been beat to the punch this time -- about a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a project to scan books into digital format, to be made available online. Today, according to new reports, they now have a collection of 1.5 million books, the equivalent of a typical university library, available online."
Traditional libraries are long dead in a pretty significant percentage of the US. I live in a fairly large city, and it's pretty much useless for anything but the level of book one would expect high school students to need. No real database access, no journals, very little in the way of primary sources for anything. It's all novels, magazines, newspapers, "subject X for dummies", and out of date encyclopedias. The wireless access there has been useful at times, but that's about it. You don't get a good library without a public willing to put in the requisite money, and fewer and fewer people are.
Everything will be taken away from you.
In case you haven't noticed, the economies of India and China are booming...in large part because of the offshoring/outsourcing from more developed countries. The wages and employment opportunities only get better in India and China due to projects like this.
Copyright law in the US started out pretty reasonable - 20 years from the date of registration. Walt Disney spent alot of money and lobbied the government for another 20 year period. Before this could expire, they lobbied to have copyright terms extended to the life of the author plus 20 years. As a result of the Sonny Bonno act, it was expanded to the life of the author plus 75 years. (NOTE: this is a very brief approximation of US copyright law history - it was actually somewhat more complex than this and with several more twists and turns). See here for a detailed explanation.
The functional result of this lobbying is that no US copyrighted work created since 1923 has lapsed into the public domain (unless the owner screwed up by not renewing the copyright at the appropriate juncture).
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
You are mistaken, and for this you should be glad. It often takes several years for masterpieces to be recognized as such, so it shouldn't surprise you that nothing you like has been acclaimed. I'm not a high culture joe myself, so please don't be offended, but today's high culture may be incomprehensible to you because you aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate it. If you grow up watching Fantasia, it is easier to enjoy Stravinski. As for originality, the tale is in the telling. People of years past lived and died much as we do, a bit more fresh air and hard work maybe but basically the same. Basically. They were us first, what are you going to do? Culturally we are far, far ahead of the 1907 crowd. Your image of 1899 is almost certainly based on the western upper class (listening to Wagner) rather than the teeming western poor (listening to minstrel shows) or the uncountable colonized listening to whips, maxim guns, pickaxes and sermons.
Also worth asking, are you willing to learn 2000+ year old greek to read Euclid or for Euler learn Latin (the language in of scholarship in his time)? One reason that we have and use more modern math textbooks is changes in language and notation over time. Also it is often the case that the original proof is far from the best that has been found since there is now more structure developed in later works that allows either condensing or a novel approach. If you limit yourself to pre-1900 works, you throw out the vast majority of Graph Theory losing all contributions by Erdos, Kuratowski, Tutte, Ramsey, etc. Sorry, there are areas of math that need at least up to the 1950's to get major theorems.
If someone comes up and says, "oh, this book clearly proves my point" then you can easily come back with, "Interesting. What does it say?" And you're off again, arguing the truth against real facts. Don't let them escape by saying, "oh, it's complicated." Respond, "it's ok, I have time. Please explain."
The point is, make your goal to find out the truth, and you will always win. Don't defend ideas anymore once you know them to be false. Switch over as soon as you know you are wrong, and you will always be right. Not to mention switching drives your opponent batty.
Qxe4
If you really want access, then you have to pay up and/or take the extra time to find somewhere you can get them for free.
First, in my field (astrophysics) most articles are now e-printed or at least opened up after a few years. ApJ (Astrophysical Journal) has unrestricted access to all articles older than 3 years and all articles older than 1996 are available at a free NASA/Harvard site (ADS). So basically, unless you want the absolute latest articles (which for most things you don't need) you can get them for free (and even then usually through arxiv). And if you need the latest article then, as you said, pay the fee and buy it.
Second, if you need some kind of technical book, talk to the librarians. Most of them will try to help and you can usually get it for free (or a small fee) through an inter-library loan. It might take a few weeks, but you can definitely do it without even leaving the library.
Third, take a look at the universities near you. Most allow open access to the stacks and computers. You can spend a whole day reading a book or using the university computers to access journals without paying anything. Some even allow borrowing privileges for free or for a fee. Take a look at Columbia in New York City or UCLA.
So yes, public libraries don't have journals. They're far from dead though, because they don't serve that need. If you really want those sort of things, then you need to go out there and get access yourself.