...It's just that his reasons and philosophy aren't well represented if you don't read the full text of the article rather than just the soundbites. Did anyone get as far as this quote?
"But there is an enormous new educational potential in the Internet that the Library of Congress has been systematically helping the nation develop in the last decade. We are attempting to extend the basic democratic principle of free access to knowledge embedded in our library tradition into cyberspace through our National Digital Library/American Memory program and summer institutes that we have been holding for teachers from all over America. Unlike television, which basically imposes a bumper car of emotions on passive spectators, the Internet requires a train of thought that activates minds to pursue their own directions through an interactive process."
Not exactly the remarks of a Luddite. Librarians, especially those responsible for special collections like the LOC, face a number of challenges that the general public never thinks about. One of which, as a few other writers have noted, is preservation. Books are pretty hardy instruments. They can last for hundreds of years at an institution where they are well cared for. But many of the other items held by the LOC (maps, audio recordings, film clips) are on much more unstable media. This is where the library is focusing it's digitization efforts. And rightly so. Most of the books at the LOC can be found from other sources, but many of the non-book items are unique and have never been available to the general public.
Regarding *ML vs. plaintext, that's exactly the point. XML/SGML/HTML is plaintext--but with added metadata about the document. A document in Microsoft Word format may or may not be readable in 50 years. Since it's a proprietary format, information stored within the document may be untranslatable. On the other hand, the markup languages store the information about the document in a readable form. as long as the Document Type Description (DTD) exists somewhere the file will be readable as long as the text.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly the remarks of a Luddite. Librarians, especially those responsible for special collections like the LOC, face a number of challenges that the general public never thinks about. One of which, as a few other writers have noted, is preservation. Books are pretty hardy instruments. They can last for hundreds of years at an institution where they are well cared for. But many of the other items held by the LOC (maps, audio recordings, film clips) are on much more unstable media. This is where the library is focusing it's digitization efforts. And rightly so. Most of the books at the LOC can be found from other sources, but many of the non-book items are unique and have never been available to the general public.
Regarding *ML vs. plaintext, that's exactly the point. XML/SGML/HTML is plaintext--but with added metadata about the document. A document in Microsoft Word format may or may not be readable in 50 years. Since it's a proprietary format, information stored within the document may be untranslatable. On the other hand, the markup languages store the information about the document in a readable form. as long as the Document Type Description (DTD) exists somewhere the file will be readable as long as the text.