On the Trail West

Between 1847 and 1869, when the last rail was laid completing the intercontinental railroad, scores of men, women and children hit the trials heading west to begin a life. It was the 19th century pursuit of the American dream.

Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 is an online exhibit sponsored by the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. It features the overland diaries and letters of those that risked it all to find a new life in the west. The exhibit includes 49 diaries in their entirety, over 40 maps and over 80 photographs and illustrations. Also included are the complete texts of 7 guide books that were published for those who wandered westward.

"Stories of persistence and pain, birth and death, God and gold, trail dust and debris, learning, love, and laughter, and even trail tedium can be found in these original "on the trail" accounts."

Here is an excerpt from the diary of Gordon C. Cone dated May 16th, 1849 :

a man was shot in a quarrel in the Street today- Accidents from the careless useing of fire arms are of frequent occurings; and it is not to be wondered at among so many drunkards, and blockheads. Selling out at private , and public sale, is all the go- Some are sick, some are discouraged, some are out of funds, and I know of some that have not perseverence enough to take them to California , and are ready to "mount" some of the hobbies, that they too may have an excuse to go back home

The Cholera is among some of the emigrants, and many of them it is reported, have died-
It is a great misfortune to many of extreem nervousness, and those that are addicted to drinking, that they are out on this journey, as the Cholera is sure to find them, and it generaly goes hard with them. The Deaths by Cholera on some of the Steam Boats that come up the river are truly alarming- On one Boat forty have died, and on an other nearly double that number- but few Boats arrive that have not lost more, or less

The next time I need a humility check or feel the urge to complain about the state of things around me I just might visit one of these diaries for a little perspective. We got it so easy.

The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats

This online exhibition is quite simply remarkable. Based on the National Library of Ireland's Yeats exhibition (which runs through the end of this year), the interface (broadband recommended; Flash required) simulates the experience of walking through the actual exhibition: explore display cases, wander through the various rooms, watch videos, etc. The library holds the largest and most important collection of Yeats manuscripts in the world and many of these are are on display, along with letters, rare editions of the poet's works, and the like.

[Via]

Expand the Public Domain : Release the 'Orphans'

UPDATE : May 20th - Lawrence Lessing has a must read op-ed on the issue in the New York Times titled "Little Orphan Artworks"
**************************************************************************

In the copyright world 'orphans' refer to all the books, films, pieces of art etc. that are banished to the storage rooms of museums and libraries across the country because their creators cannot be found.

There are literally millions of items that go unprocessed because the places that house the material are afraid of being sued. With potential fines upward of $150,000 per item it is safe to say they will go unprocessed for a long time unless the copyright law changes. The digitization train is simply passing them by. A measurable part of our material culture is locked away for fear of litigation. Most institutions have conducted exhaustive searches to try track down the owners, but for pretty much all of these orphans the owners cannot be found.

Both the Senate and the House have introduced legislation that address this travesty. Both are considerate of each party and provide for compensation if the owner ever turns up.

Julie Mellby at Princeton University's Graphic Arts blog posts a copy of the letter she sent in support of H.R. 5889 : The Orphan Works Act of 2008. It's a good one and points out some of the not so good restrictions that infest the resolution.

There is a sane solution.

Let's keep the pork and politics out of it and do what is necessary to guarantee the public free access to this treasure trove of material culture while supporting, if they are ever found, the creators.


pdf of the The Orphan Works Act of 2008
Post at O'Reilly's Tools of Change blog with some good links

The Library of Congress Hits the Jackpot on Flickr

No one saw this coming.

The plan was simple enough. The Library of Congress teamed with Flickr for a pilot project called The Commons, which basically consisted of LOC opening a Flickr account and uploading a little over 3,000 images (the LOC houses 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials!)

The goal was to address two of the major challenges the library faces:
1. "how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and
2. "how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity."

The result was astonishing and could arguably be one of the greatest cultural achievements to date in the young world of social networking.

Here's what happened within two days:

• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited
• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• About 1.1 million total views on our account

In their wildest dreams no one at either the LOC or Flickr expected this kind of public response.

"Frankly, none of us could quite fathom how fantastic the response to the pilot has been." is how they put it at Flickr's blog.

And Matt Raymond of the Library of Congress responded by saying "I can tell you that the reaction to this two-day-old project has already vastly exceeded our expectations."

This is a watershed event. It is a solid web 2.0 victory and one that just might expand the boundaries of social networking, where people are interacting with places as much as with people.

For the Library of Congress, and all the libraries that are watching how this pilot turns out, it is a brave new world. Now the conversation must include the question - what are we doing to bring our collections to the public? Your collection strategy can longer be solely focused on having people come to you to see what you have or in loaning items to other institutions, museums etc.

The success of this pilot might also have an affect on the Google Book Search model that many libraries are endorsing. Maybe libraries need a more multi-dimensional Web 2.0 approach to their collections, one that encompasses more than just digitizing the contents of their books.


Image from the Bain Collection at the LOC

Fore! Amazing Golf Collection Lands at the University of British Columbia

Meat-packing magnet Sam Martz has given his 4,700+ collection of golf books to UBC.

It is the greatest collection ever assembled on the sport that will be kept intact and available for public perusal. Martz believes he has put together the third-largest collection of golf books in North America, behind the collection of the United States Golf Association and one that is in private hands.

The University of Chicago houses the collection of Arthur W. Schultz which is made up of 1,600 books but according to Ralph Stanton, head of rare books and special collections for UBC, "doesn't come close to the depth of Sam's."

The goal is to catalog and make available online the entire collection.

There is one big problem; however, and that is that there is no extra monies available to process the collection. "Like the python that swallowed the pig, how do you digest all of that?" is how Stanton frames it.

So as great as this news is it is tainted by the reality that it could be years before the collection is fully cataloged and available.

This problem of unprocessed material awaiting the light of day is a significant one and not confined to UBC. Many special collections in university libraries throughout this country are spread so thin that it is an impossible task to properly process the material that is acquired.

I have touched on this issue before when writing about the guy who donated the world's longest diary to Washington State University where it has lived in over 80 boxes since 1996 and has yet to be processed and when I asked the head of special collections when she expects the collections to be processed and available for public viewing she said "after I retire."

Also see my previous post from last March, The "No Information Left Behind" Act, where I suggest that maybe a 1% digital archive tax on all new computers or a tax on universities that spend more money on their athletic programs than on their library programs could be enacted to help fund the processing of these collections.

What I am afraid of and what we don't want to see happen is for potential donors who possess these great collections to bypass the library donation option due to the fact that their collections cannot be properly processed and cared for. Every collection that is ultimately broken up or disposed of elsewhere due to the inability of the library to properly handle it is a net loss for our society as a whole.

Article in the Province
Article in the National Post (pdf)

Happy Birthday 'A Christmas Carol'

Today marks the 164th anniversary of the publication of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens.

First published in 1843 'A Christmas Carol' went on to sell 6,000 copies in 5 days! I am sure that would translate into bestseller numbers today.

Though known as 'A Christmas Carol' the full title of the work is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas and was written by Dickens to raise money to settle some debts.

The University of South Carolina Libraries has an online exhibit celebrating all the Christmas related books and stuff of Dickens. The exhibit is titled The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens & A Christmas Carol

Bancroft puts 'Loyalty Oath' archive online

The 'Loyalty Oath' controversy was the McCarthy-era communist witch-hunt that took place on the Berkeley campus in the late 1940's. It began when "hundreds of University employees refused to sign a special anti-communist oath mandated by the Regents."
Dozens of tenured faculty and staff were fired and the ensuing protests eventually spread to every campus and garnered international attention.

The California Supreme Court struck down the 'loyalty oath' in 1952 and all the the terminated employees were reinstated.

The collection includes 3,500 pages of searchable text, 20 images and 15 audio clips

The book on the subject is The California Loyalty Oath Controversy by UC President Emeritus David P. Gardner who also help fund the project.

Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet:

"The Republican National Committee (RNC) used both signed Loyalty Oaths and spoken Loyalty Pledges as a requirement to attend certain 2004 re-election campaign speeches, a possible first in U.S. election history. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the campaign of George W. Bush routinely required all attendants at its rallies to take what some have called a "loyalty oath". Those who refused to take the oath were not allowed to attend the rally."

Image from an editorial cartoon in the July 7, 1949 issue of the Daily Californian

The Hands of Google

Asher Moses has a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Book scans reveal Google's handiwork, which introduces us to a new, undiscovered component of the digitization process; the hand scan.

"Digital bookworms reading titles like the 1855 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine and Plato's The Trial and Death of Socrates have been surprised to find large chunks of some pages blocked by manicured paws clad in pink finger condoms."

Rob Shilkin, Google's Australia spokesman, tells us that "in the time since we initially began our scanning, we've vastly improved our scanning technology so that a random finger is automatically brought to our attention long before we return the book back to the shelf."

Scanning 1.0 includes fingers and hands
Scanning 2.0 uses "improved scanning technology to ensure wayward fingers no longer get in the way."
Scanning 3.0 ...


The TechCrunch take

Link to the Gentleman's Magazine with finger intrusion.
Don't you think it's a little weird that the scan for The Gentleman's Magazine begins with a woman's fingers covered in pink finger condoms?

Digitization and the Bookseller

Booksnap

Welcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.

The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.

Once Google's romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?

I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know what information they've acquired.

Outside of libraries booksellers are one of the few repositories for untapped information. There is an enormous amount of unique content stored within the confines of the bookselling trade. From books long out of print to ephemeral items that present core samples of our material culture, there is a treasure trove of content awaiting the light of digitization.

More importantly the active bookseller is acquiring material at an equal or in many cases a faster pace then libraries or institutions and they often handle the material before it lands in these special collections.

The race would seem to be between Google and the first company to bring the cost of quality digitizing technology down so that the independent bookseller can afford it.

Early this year we had the release of the Espresso Book Machine, a $50,000 vending machine that will print and bind you a book in 7 minutes. Impressive but cost prohibitive for most booksellers. Earlier this month the first offering of affordable technology arrived. BookSnap, "the first digital book ripper designed for individual consumers," hit the market. At a price of$1595 (without cameras) it is within reach though as a first generation technology it has some expected limitations.

“We designed the BookSnap for people who have always wanted to digitize their personal libraries but haven’t had a viable way to do it – until now,” said Nick Warnock, president, Atiz Innovation.

The limitations:
-Their horrendous tagline "It's not a scanner. It's a book ripper," clearly they are not coming at this from the book side of things.
-Translates the captured text into PDF format only.
-Booksnap has the ability to capture 500 pages an hour. This sounds impressive until you realize that the page turning process is not automated. Do you have they ability to turn 500 pages an hour?
Here is how it works.

I hope the book trade doesn't wait for the Google monster to descend before the digitization issue is addressed. We should be exploring the possibilities of working with the likes of the Open Content Alliance and the Prelinger Archive to devise strategies to digitally capture the content that moves through the trade.

Of course, the content has to first be digitized for the public good; for the most important part of the process is to preserve our culture's output and provide free access to it. Then, and only then should we monetize the content. I believe both can happen.


Previous Book Patrol post Books: Espresso Style or Another Nail in the Coffin of the New Bookstore

Libraries Resist Google. Is the Tide Turning?

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance said.

Amen.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out...One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.” Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Vote For Openness!

Book scanning stations at the Internet Archive.

Quotes and image above from Katie Hafner's piece in today's New York Times Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books online.

It is a good sign to see this debate reach this level. Awareness is a major ingredient in change and the New York Times is a major ingredient in awareness.

Previous Book Patrol posts:
The Digital Battle for our Literary Heritage
Other Books and Google posts


Image by Ann Johannson.

A Step Closer to a World Digital Library

"Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism" - James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress

The prototype for the World Digital Library was unveiled yesterday to a group of reporters in Paris.

The Library, expected to launch in 2008, is an online initiative created by the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.N. cultural body UNESCO and 5 international partner libraries; Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Library of Egypt, the National Library of Brazil, the National Library of Russia and the Russian State Library

"The international digital library will be free and multilingual, with contributions from around the world, including rare books, films, prints, sound recordings and musical scores."

John Van Oudenaren, a senior adviser for the project says the goal is to create a "high-quality, fluent user experience, no matter what language you are using."

The Library has plenty of support from the for-profit world with Google, Apple and Intel all contributing on some level.

If it can be done on an international level one must wonder why it isn't being be done on a national level? Where is the united approach to get academic libraries in this country to create a digital archive of its rare books, films, prints, sound recordings and musical scores that is free and multilingual?

International Tribune article on the prototype unveiling
2005 Washington Post article on the creation of the World Digital Library
The quote above taken from the 2005 OpEd in the Washington Post by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, A Library for the New World

The Google Quandary: Book Search or Text Search?

Apart from the text does Google Book Search really have anything to do with the life of a book?

I am not so sure.

As Paul Duguid points out in his illuminating piece Inheritence and loss? A brief survey of Google Books:

"Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books."

Using Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as his book of choice Duguid exposes some major quality control issues inherent in Google's digitization process. From missing pages to poorly scanned pages to the complete absence of vital data (like lack of volume numbers or edition) the reliability of the project itself is now questionable at best.

Here are some other gems from the piece:

-"transferring any complex communicative artifacts between generations of technology is always likely to be more problematic than automatic."

-the "newer form is always in danger of a kind of patricide, destroying in the process the resources it hope to inherit."

-"With each scanned page, Google Books’ Library Project, by its quantity if not necessarily by its quality, makes the possibility of a better alternative unlikely. The Project may then become the library of the future, whatever its quality, by default."

Aside from the quality issues the entire material culture of the book is discarded. Google is an information monster whose only concern is content. We get only text and no context. We lose too much.

As you can imagine the piece has stirred up some debate. Most notably from Patrick Leary, the editor of the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) listserv and author of the article Googling the Victorians (pdf), who disses Druguid calling his effort "perversely wrongheaded" and "silly." Leary sticks to the pros of the Google Book Search as a research tool and tosses Druguid argument out the window.
Druguid's piece has little to do with the benefits of the increased availability of content for the researcher and Leary's comments seem inappropriate and somewhat angry. Coming from someone so involved in book history is a bit baffling.

Peter Brantley at O'Reily Radar shares the exchange that took place between Druguid and Leary. The post as well as the comments are a must read for anyone interested in this issue.

Google Book Search: A Report From the "Google Five"

The first five libraries that jumped on the Google digital book train took time at the recent ALA Annual Conference to weigh in on how things are going. The Google Five are the libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford and the New York Public Library.

Though all five said that they were "pleased with the progress" they also acknowledged that there have been some issues, which range from books being damaged to questions about the quality of searches being performed. One library had someone complain because some of the scans have thumbs visible! And over at Oxford's Bodleian Library they have a 1% problem. One percent of their books have uncut pages, meaning that they've never been opened, making them unscanable.

The damaged books issue has to raise some bright red flags. These guys are not scanning trade hardbacks or mass market paperbacks, they are scanning much of the choice material held in the special collections of these institutions. Any damage is a significant event.

Dale Flecker of Harvard University library says that they were "filtering out a lot of works that are not physically up to being scanned." Noting that there have been problems dealing with the brittle paper of many of the works and with some of the bindings. And remember, this deal allows Google to take possession of these treasures and actually remove the books from the library and take them to their scanning facility.

What has always struck me as worrisome about this part of the agreement is that here they have given Google permission to take these artifacts to their house when they won't permit their students or the scholars who intimately know these works a chance to check them out.

The tools of the technology, in this case the scanning machine, that were developed to help bring these book treasures to our desktop are now also involved in the selection process. It's limitations are deciding what gets digitized.



Library Journal piece on the "Google Five" from their Academic Newswire

The Hunt Is On In the U.K.

The public libraries of the United Kingdom are on a treasure hunt.

The goal:

To find the coolest item in their collection that has yet to be digitized and enter it into a contest being run by the British Library.

The contest is sponsored by the British Library with financial support coming from Microsoft.

If a particular library doesn't feel they have anything worthy they can they include "local partners such as museums, archives, churches or stately homes" to come up with their submission.

Finalists will be "invited to a high-profile awards ceremony at the British Library."

There will be one winner for each part of the Kingdom; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The winning items will be "digitized, converted into Turning the Pages 2.0 format and hosted online by the British Library for three years."

This is a pretty clever marketing strategy for both Microsoft and the British Library as it provides maximum exposure while providing an opportunity to feature their recently unveiled Turning the Pages 2.0 technology.

They are guaranteed A-list material to show off the technology with minimum expense.

Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to see the digitized versions of the winning books but the real contest should be in trying to find a way for these public institutions to digitize and make available to the public a much greater portion of their holdings.

British Library announcement
Article in the Belfast Telegraph on the contest

Previous Book Patrol post on the Turning the Pages 2.0 technology

Google, The Big Ten and Digital Escrow

In on fell swoop Google has significantly increased the number of libraries they have under contract and has introduced a new species of digitization; digital escrow.

By corralling the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of the libraries of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago, Goggle brings the number of partner libraries to 25 and add over 78,000,000 potential items to their digi-mix.

Some of terms of the agreement:
-The CIC makes at least a 10,000,000 volume commitment.
-Google "reserves final discretion over which Available Content it will Digitize."
-Google shall own all rights to their copy and can use it at their discretion.
-Google will digitize both in-copyright and out-of-copyright material. The out of copyright material will be readily available to the CIC and the public.

and the kicker- Google will hold the in-copyright material in digital escrow until either they get permission from the copyright holder or the material enters the public domain.

In other words, they will scan them, hold them and when they can monetize them they will share them.

I still don't see how this benefits the general public but I do see how this new twist possibly influenced Simon & Schuster in their recent author contract alterations. If the publishers don't start hanging on to digital rights they will all eventually revert to Google.

Links:

The agreement

List of some of the CIC collection hi-spots

Peter Brantley's post "Monetizing Libraries." Brantley is the director of the Digital Library Federation

Publisher's Weekly article "Google Scanning Deal Details Provoke Controversy"

The Reflective Librarian has a comparison of Google Book Search and Microsoft's Live Search

Book Patrol past Google posts

The EPA Library Crisis Returns

On April 26th Congress sent a letter to the EPA to check in on them. They wanted to follow up and make sure that they are complying with their "commitment not to close any additional EPA libraries and not to dispose of any additional EPA materials"

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a non-profit national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals and the premier watchdog group on this issue, issued a press release on May 2 titled "EPA Quietly Resumes Dismantling Library System,"
They cite an 'interim policies' document released by the EPA on April 10th which lays out procedures and processes for the continued dispersing of material.

The timing of this document is impeccable. The 90-day moratorium on library closures and material dispersal agreed to by the EPA ended on April 12th.

To be fair we should also mention that the document also warns librarians that “Although it may be tempting to dispose of library materials quickly, the loss of important and unique materials could have serious future consequences if the Agency cannot document scientific findings or enforcement actions.”

There are; however, still some major holes in the plan.

The most glaring being that once an item is digitized it is ok to be dispersed.

Knowing the digital track record of this administration (the electronic voting irregularities of the last couple of elections for one) I would think it unwise to get rid of the hard copy and rely exclusively on a digitized version.

As our Librarian of Congress James H. Billington testified "we will need to make sure digitization is stable and cannot be altered"

The Office of Enforcement and Compliance (OECA) of the EPA also has some issues with the way things are going. Their major concern being the effect these policies will have on prosecuting the major polluters of our world.

I would suggest that until further notice if the EPA libraries want to dispose of something they should contact me and I will arrange for somebody to come and pick it up.

Then when the smoke clears all will not be lost.

Past Book Patrol posts:
February 2007 Head of ALA Testifies Before Congress Regarding EPA Library Closures
December 2006 Save the Libraries-Save the Earth- NOW

Google the Bookseller

It was bound to happen.

Word from the London Book Fair is that Google is going into the book business. By year's end they will launch two book related initiatives that will further alter the book landscape.

What's in store:

A book rental program that will let you rent the content of a book on a weekly basis.

and

A book retail program that will allow users lifetime access to the texts they purchase.

They are not attaching the cursed e-book tag to either project.

Michael Cairnes, who was at the Google sessions at the London Book Fair, has the scoop in his blog post titled "Google Lending Books" which includes his follow up with Google on these initiatives.

This is the missing piece to the puzzle.

Their aggressive approach to libraries and their books begins to make sense. They are scanning books at warp speed, 30,000 a week just at the University of Michigan.

Google has become part of the DNA of information. It would seem a logical next step to corner the library market. They are homes to our written heritage, storehouses of knowledge and information. And Google needs information. The Google Monster is hungry.

Last month's article by Eric Morath at the Detroit News on Google's scanning of the University of Michigan's 7 million volume library touched on this.

"In Google's view, even the wide expanse of the Internet can't compare to the amount of knowledge stored in books. So searching and retrieving results from written works is a natural outgrowth of Google's root technology.

Forget all the fuss you hear like "Google's altruistic motive for the project is to make the books available to those who may not have easy access to them."

When you hear Allan Adler, the American Association of Publishers' (AAP) vice president for legal and government affairs say "There's no doubt whatsoever that it's to Google's financial benefit to do this" you can be sure that altruism as been thrown out the window. The AAP is the political action committee for the publishing world and mix that with Google's billions of dollars and you have poisonous potential.

"Google argues that the limited amount of information it displays ultimately benefits holders of the copyright because it encourages searchers to seek out the book." Those snippets and limited views that they throw at you now become teasers. You got to pay to play.
This is why I argue for public funds and not for profit companies to undertake the digitization of our cultural heritage. This is exactly why.

Has anyone heard the word author mentioned anywhere in all this? Copyright and publishers are everywhere.

In addition to adding another layer of complexity to the term bookseller, the meaning of out-of-print will soon change too. Out-of-print will no longer mean unavailable. It will mean unavailable in book form.

Until Google gets in the print on demand business.

Then what happens when they start buying the publishers?

This is serious stuff.

Links

Robert Townsend at the American Historical Association blog Google Books: What's Not to Like

Jill E. Grog and Beth Ashmore's article at Information Today Google Book Search Libraries and Their Digital Copies. Includes a list of what libraries are digitizing everything and which ones are only digitizing material in the public domain.

Past Book Patrol posts:
on the AAP and their "Caught Reading" campaign
The First Cracks in Google's Attempt to Digitize the World

Side By Side. Finally

For the first time, after who knows how many thousands of years, the sacred texts of the world's three monastic faiths, Judiasm, Christianilty and Islam have been gathered together for an exhibition at the British Library.

The exhibit Sacred: Discover What We Share: The World's Greatest Collection of Jewish, Christian and Muslim Holy Books brings together the rarest sacred texts in existence.

Highlights include:
A tattered copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls and
A"Qur'an commissioned for a 14th-century Mongol ruler of modern Iran who was born a shaman, baptised a Christian, and converted first to Buddhism, then Sunni and finally Shia Islam."

There is a significant online component to the exhibit that features videos, podcasts and interactive maps. There are also 8 texts in the exhibit that are available to view using the newly released "Turning The Pages" technology

Graham Shaw, the lead curator, says of the exhibit "We were determined not to create faith zones, but to show these wonderful manuscripts side by side, and demonstrate how much we share"

Maybe one day we can all live that way.



Guardian article on the exhibit



Images:
Above: St.Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels
Below: Sultan Baybar's Qur'an from the British Library

The First Cracks in Google's Attempt to Digitize the World

Peter Brantley is the director of strategic technology for academic information systems at the University of California, one of the premier libraries that have entered into a relationship with Google to digitize their holdings.

Here is some of what he had to say about the initiative:

-it was mistake
-The goal is undeniably grand, and good.
The means have left much to be desired.
-We poisoned our hand before we played it
-For the love of selfish confidence, we spoke neither our fortune nor our misgivings with our neighbors or our friends
-In our selfishness, and wrapped in the fears we were given, we re-wrote and redefined our aims, misplaced our responsibilities, allowed the light and glory of the ideal to suffuse its glow over the bargain’s deficits
-The deals are not fair. We were taken advantage of. We are asked to be grateful for something wondrous where we could have achieved more for ourselves and demanded more from others
-There are bigger things yet to lose, and the losing, we have learned, is easy.

He went on to proclaim that it is not to late to "re-write the rules for the future...for us – libraries, museums, and non-profit presses – to reassert the validity of our aims, our missions, and our expectations"

Clearly this is far from a match made in heaven. One can only imagine the response to this from the Google monster and the university's administration. Five days later Brantley chimed in again. His need this time was to clarify his stance a bit. He did the Google isn't evil routine and stated that his "primary intent in the post is to suggest disappointment with libraries (not with Google). I felt that there was much to be gained -- and I still feel very strongly so -- from union, collaboration, and sharing among libraries of the immense issues raised by this effort"

This brings us to another recent related development that needs some attention.

On Tuesday James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, testified before the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Legislative Branch . He urged Congress to restore the $47 million cut from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The $47 million represents almost 50% of the total budget for the program. The $47 million does not include $37 million in matching funds that would be lost due to the cuts.

One of the new NDIIPP projects affected by the cuts was Preserving Creative America "an effort to work with private industry to archive creative content such as "digital film, music, photography, other forms of pictorial art and even video games."
also Billington reported that the Library of Congress "is progressing in its initiative to build a World Digital Library (WDL)." This is the program the just received the a $3 million grant from Google to start the project."

Billington acknowledges that searchers can find a "flood of information" on Google but he goes on to say that at the Library of Congress:

"Our goal is to integrate the best available electronic information into the knowledge, judgment and wisdom contained in books and in the minds of our curators so that Congress and the American people continue getting the same authentic, reliable information and knowledge that have been the hallmark of the Library since its inception in 1800."

Here is a link to the Senators on the subcommittee. Contact them.

Previous Posts:
Digital Battle For Our Literary Heritage
More on the Digital Battle for Our Literary Heritage


Thanks to Open Access for the Brantley lead and to Rare Book News for the lead on the Billington testimony

The "No Information Left Behind" Act

With the debate over the digitization of our cultural heritage in full swing it's time to propose the "No Information Left Behind" Act.

With lack of funding being the biggest hurdle many institutions face we need to get creative in coming up with ways to fund these endeavors. Our government must get more involved. We simply cannot leave it to the private sector. There are too many variables and potential pitfalls with having the digital rights of so many cultural artifacts in the hands of private companies. They may mean well now but things can change in a hurry in the private sector. What if one day Google is bought by a Chinese company? Would all the digitized material on protest and freedom of expression be censored?

Katie Hafner's article that appeared in the NYT last week "History, Digitized (and Abridged)" is a little off the mark when addressing this issue. It is a bit of a stretch to say "important pieces of history...are at risk of disappearing...are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes"
Will there not be any scholars left in this new digitized world who still do research the old fashioned way by traveling to the archive of choice and digging in? They will still need to physically travel to get the information they desire or look to other sources. As James J. Hastings of the National Archive points out "If researchers conclude that the only valuable records they need are those that are online they will be missing major parts of the story"

We can never achieve total digitization. There will always be information and knowledge that exists outside your computer. It is starting to sound eerily like the current situation we are in where a majority of our population gets all their news from watching the 6 o'clock news or one particular cable channel. To truly be informed you will always need input from more than one source. Let's not forget the internet is a tool not the end all when it comes to acquiring information. This is why the "No Information Left Behind" Act will also including funding to cover the travel expenses of scholars.

Another issue needs to be addressed as well. Beside the challenges libraries and special collections face regarding digitizing their holdings they also face a monumental task given the current funding issues of actually processing all the material they have in the first place. As I said before there is much of our literary and cultural heritage that sits in boxes in libraries all over this country waiting to be processed let alone digitized.

And the last hurdle that will prevent us from reaching the goal are our copyright laws. The legal noose that is wrapped around so much of our cultural content must be cut or at least loosened. Why can't all copyrights expire when the creator (or last of the creators) of the work dies?
Unfortunately the big media companies that own so much of our content are not going to give up easily. The meltdown has started for sure but the there is plenty of fight in them.

How does one fund the "No Information Left Behind" Act?

A couple of possibilities are:

-Assess a 1% digital archive tax on all new computers
-A tax on universities that spend more money on their athletic programs than on their library programs.
(these options assume that none of the zillions of dollars that are being wasted in Iraq are available to use to preserve our cultural heritage here at home)


Previous posts:
The Digital Battle for our Literary Heritage
More on The Digital Battle for our Literary Heritage
if:book post
Dan Cohen, author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, post
CNet article from Oct 05 "Google's battle over library books."