Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Books Media The Internet United States Technology

Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online 394

Posted by timothy from the how-many-libraries-of-congress-is-that-anyhow dept.
Mark_Uplanguage writes "The idea to scan in all materials available at the U.S. Library of Congress was presented at the Web 2.0 conference this week (as just one of many ideas presented). The proposed cost of $260 million would create a huge benefit to society (well, at least to those who can read English)."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online More

Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online

Comments Filter:

  • Er (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:00AM (#10483832)
    Pardon me for sounding like an eegnoramoose, but isn't at least some of the material in the Library of Congress copyrighted material? Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.

    Can't have that, now can we?
    • Yes, in fact the vast majority of it is copyrighted.

      I can't see how this could be done with any kind of public access to most of the content.

      • Re:Er (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jrockway ( 229604 ) * <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:11AM (#10483918) Homepage Journal
        Interesting concept, though. It's okay if I go to the Library and look it, but not if I look at it online? Why? ( I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time. Online, everyone on Earth can see it at the same time. Oh well. Information wants to be free. Don't want someone to know it? Don't write a book about it! )

        • Re:Er (Score:5, Insightful)

          by slashdot.org ( 321932 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @04:34AM (#10484618) Homepage Journal
          I guess I know the answer; in real life only one person can see it at a time.

          And that's exactly the biggest mistake people keep making; analogies don't work. The stuff we are dealing with is *new*. A library != Internet. There is no analogy.

          I'm not saying that I have a solution to any of this, but I think the first thing people will have to realize is that things have changed in a dramatic way. The traditional way of thinking about IP (or really, information) no longer works.

          There is no simple answer to any of this, and it makes no sense to come up with analogies and try to justify or make judgement based on that.

          Fact of the matter is, all of a sudden it is possible for people to view/copy information pretty much instantly. What we need to realize is that _we_ are the ones that can/will put together the foundation of how to deal with this. No current laws really are suitable. Look at the mess with P2P networks and the music industry. Surely P2P networks _should_ be perfectly legal, but on the other hand if copying music would become so easy that you could listen to any song you'd like, at any given time without paying for it, it's hard to imagine how artists will be paid (and please don't give me the "they'll have to do live performances to make money" bs).

          The people that will be able to figure out what the _real_ answers are to these issues are the ones that will do really well. Think about it. /rant

    • Re:Er (Score:5, Insightful)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:08AM (#10483897) Journal
      Many of the libraries in the country carry copyrighted material. You can walk in and peruse the books at your leisure, for free. Same idea, only you grant access to a lot more people. Scholars routinely pay to get copies of rare items from libraries for research, and every time a query comes in, they have to haul the book out, and run it through a copier. It would be a lot more intelligent to scan once, store it, and make it available on demand.

      The chief benefit? Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on - a big issue, assuming that ANY item ever enters the public domain from now on, the way that they were supposed to. Hell, I'd lay out money for a copy of the Library of Congress on a set of blue-ray DVDs, and so would many large corporations (those that still have research labs, that is), universities and colleges, as well as other organizations and governmental entities around the world.

      • Re:Er (Score:2, Informative)

        by DrMrLordX ( 559371 )
        However, if you have an entire library's contents available in digital format, it's possible to make perfect copies of it an infinite number of times. In contrast, there are restrictions as to how and how often copyrighted materials in a physical library can be run through a copy machine.

        I can't see publishers liking the idea of an online Library of Congress at all. Viewers would be able to make their own e-books at a whim. Not that *I* would mind, but . . .

      • Re:Er (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:52AM (#10484094) Journal
        One of the greatest catastrophes in human history was the burning of the great library at Alexandria, Egypt.

        See, the ancient world had many items of great wisdom, and many of the only copies of these works were contained there. The burning of the great library was the end for countless such works.

        Today, however, our knowledge is much more widely spread. We all owe a tremendous debt to Gutenburg, for his printing press (removable type press, 1436) for making this possible.

        It's quite arguable that the dawn of the renaissance stemmed not from Galileo, or Kepler, but from the widespread nature of books in general after the removable type printing press made this possible.

        How many of these works are unique or very rare? I'd consider that a large percentage of these works fall into this category - in which, it would be a wonderful thing to build in some redundancy into the preservation of not only these works, but the wisdom, insight, and humor contained therein!

        Warm up the scanner, says I!

      • Re:Er (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:39AM (#10484229) Homepage Journal
        Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on

        Assuming a large sum of money is spent maintaining the digital versions. Computers lose and destroy data, even good computers fail. So it would require good backups done on a regular basis. File formats tend to change too.

      • Re:Er (Score:3, Funny)

        by mrgreen4242 ( 759594 )
        assuming that ANY item ever enters the public domain from now on

        The ghost of Sonny Bono with haunt you forever, being sure that you know nothing will ever reach the public domain again...

    • Re:Er (Score:2, Troll)

      by Jerf ( 17166 )
      Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.

      Who said anything about "free"?

      Although this would potentially take dialog about the public domain out of obscurity and into the LoC mainstream, and the LoC does have some influence in the copyright debate. Certainly once the data exists, anywhere, it is going to be harder to make the argument that we should just throw it away, no matter what the reason.
    • Hmm, actually from what I heard, the proposal wasn't suggesting that it would all be made free.

      Merely that the contents that could be made free would be, the rest would be up for a price (based on what you need) -- something like a huge searchable database, where you pay for what you access.

      I can't bother looking for it, but I think it's more likely that is the case. Especially considering the point that you brought up.

    • Re:Er (Score:5, Interesting)

      by siriuskase ( 679431 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:30AM (#10484012) Homepage Journal
      This is one more reason that the whole basis behind IP law needs to be reevaluated. Although we do want authors, inventors, and other creative types to be rewarded for their efforts, it is also true that what they create becomes more valuable the more it gets out into the world. Any academic knows that the more a paper gets cited, the more valuable it is. Likewise, the more a book is read, the more likely it will wind up in the canon of culturally significant books.

      Creating primarily for money is shortsighted when a work has the chance to impact the larger culture. Just look at Michael Moore (ooh, isn't he ugly, but that's not the point), he's more interested in people seeing and being influenced by his movies than in getting richer off them. Enough money to be comfortable is great, but then, barriers to free movement of ideas should be relaxed.

    • Re:Er (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sonamchauhan ( 587356 ) <sonamc.gmail@com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:34AM (#10484036) Journal
      Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.

      Can't have that, now can we?

      No, we can't... it not be fair to lots of people whose copyrights haven't yet lapsed.

      But scanning the materials is _still_ a good idea. It allows for automated OCR that allows searching for text _within_ a book (like A9.com does, and as Google plans to do.) The difference is that all books published in the US could be searched.

      It would also make this scenario possible:
      • I walk into a public library
      • On a library computer, I enter keywords that search the new "library of congress book text search database".
      • Based on the results (matching text snippets from _within_ books), I decide to buy two books.
      • I walk to the librarian and pay the purchase price
      • She fires up a local print run on the library's new laser book printer
      • 500 automatically laser-printed-punched-and-bound pages later, I have my new two books.


      Since this process is handled by people trained to respect copyright (i.e. the librarians), it is a win-win for everyone.

      • Pilot Program (Score:3, Insightful)

        by PMuse ( 320639 )
        Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE. Can't have that, now can we?

        No, we can't... it not be fair to lots of people whose copyrights haven't yet lapsed.

        Let us scan only things for which the copyright has lapsed. This has several advantages.
        1. Promotes and makes accessible works that are now free. (Project Gutenberg would be over the moon at a $1MIL grant, let alone $260MIL.)
        2. Provides citizens a cheap method of checking that a copyright has, in fact, expired for debunki
    • There's a Vulcan saying: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
      I would say, scupper copyrights for all volumes owned by LoC.Scan and put every volume on the internet.
      Within few years we would witness a Renaissance of sorts once again in human knowledge and education.

  • Can't do that. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (reggoh.gip)> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:00AM (#10483834) Journal
    This would violate the publishers' god-given right to milk their "creations" until the heat-death of the Universe.

    • Re:Can't do that. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by craXORjack ( 726120 )
      Yes, the article does say 'all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress.' I think all the books should be scanned. Imagine if a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb there and destroyed the largest library in the world. What a loss that would be. But just because we would have a backup of the data doesn't mean they must allow full access to copyrighted works. They could release DVDs of a subset which includes only information in the Public Domain. It would be a huge boon for Project Gutenberg though each
    • By heat death of the universe, you must mean that whole 70 years after the author's death. I mean, God forbid they or their childern are able to make money off their own creations and ideas.

      Information is a commodity just like any other good or service. I can only imagine your surprize when you realize that the internet hasn't changed that fact.

      • Re:Can't do that. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by operagost ( 62405 )
        You'll find that many here (including me - and I'm one of the most conservative) find that copyright period oppressively long. Just because you wrote one useful book shouldn't entitle you to a generation of monopoly on its art and ideas. The copyright period was once much shorter, and that encouraged derivative works.
        • Just because you wrote one useful book shouldn't entitle you to a generation of monopoly on its art and ideas

          death+70 years would actually be about 4 generations (if you include the author as the first).

      • Re:Can't do that. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 )
        I mean, God forbid they or their childern are able to make money off their own creations and ideas.

        Their children can go out and get their own damned jobs. They would then be making a productive contribution to the economy.

        My grandpa was a farmer who died over 50 years ago. Since I don't get to collect royalties on the corn he grew in the 1930s, I've had to work to produce my own income. Imagine that.

      • Re:Can't do that. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:48AM (#10484083)
        you must mean that whole 70 years after the author's death.

        You must mean currently. But we all know that as soon as anything major (like Steamboat Willy) comes close to coming out of copyright, we'll see Congress extend the term of copyright yet again, thanks to 'encouragement' from Disney.

        Copyright terms are nigh on infinite in fact, if not in law.
      • How did you get on my /.friends-list with an attitude like that?

        The internet has stripped away the convenient medium(s) that used to contain an inherently scarce message that could physically command the price you asked for. The new reality of the situation is that either you think DRM + DMCA can and should be used to keep doing things the old way, by keeping a decades-old instance of information artificially scarce, or you think-- like millions already do --that information is cheap, and the value lies i

      • Information is different, because it is not inherently scarce. Any scarcity it possesses is artificially imposed by the government in an attempt to ensure the profitablility of the creation of new ideas. However, you must remember to balance the benefits of the profability with the costs of this artificial scarcity.

    • Re:Can't do that. (Score:5, Funny)

      by InfiniteWisdom ( 530090 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:38AM (#10484055) Homepage
      until the heat-death of the Universe.

      Hey its still a finite time
      - Walt Disney
    • Personally, I think copyrights are far too long. I think once books go out of print for some number of years they should be put in the public domain. As a collector of 1950s/60s era literature it annoys me to no end that I can't get copies of books from the period except via ebay auctions and overpriced bookstores. These are books that probably will never be reprinted and the publisher is likely to have forgotten about yet they remain protected by copyright law because Disney can't give up a stupid mouse! I

  • well, at least to those who can read English (Score:3, Funny)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:00AM (#10483839) Homepage Journal
    and to those who can't, they can copy and paste the text into a translator.

    So yes, it would benefit society as a whole.

    Grump.
    • they can copy and paste the text into a translator.
      So yes, it would benefit society as a whole.

      Subjecting the world to the Babelfish translator would actually detract from knowledge considering the horrible linguistic bastardizations that people would then take as fact.
    • and to those who can't, they can copy and paste the text into a translator.

      Or a speech synthesizer (assuming the text is available as text and not images) such as festival, if your vision isn't very good - also something you can't do with the dead tree version.

      -jim

    • and to those who can't, they can copy and paste the text into a translator.
      With that who can't, they can reproduce and stick inside their language teacher.

  • For once (Score:2, Funny)

    by theskeptic ( 699213 )
    a Library of Congress jokes will be on topic.

  • Storage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:02AM (#10483846)
    How data much storage would this require? Could someone give it to me in laymen's terms?

  • We need to get our priorities straight (Score:5, Insightful)

    by davmoo ( 63521 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:02AM (#10483849)
    Since Congress and the President can so easily pull out a hundred billion dollars to bomb the hell out of another country, I see no reason we can't come up with a whimpy $260 million for something as worthwhile as this.

    • Re:We need to get our priorities straight (Score:5, Funny)

      by Zoop ( 59907 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:31AM (#10484021)
      Since Congress and the President can so easily pull out a hundred billion dollars to bomb the hell out of another country, I see no reason we can't come up with a whimpy $260 million for something as worthwhile as this.

      I'm sorry, I don't get it. How does your proposal bomb anybody?

      Are you suggesting we should bomb libraries?

      I mean, I see libraries, I see money, but I'm missing the bombs.

      Tell you what, rewrite your proposal with bombs and maybe some cool submunitions and make sure they're Furin libraries, and we'll talk.

  • Units?! (Score:2, Funny)

    by skraps ( 650379 )
    He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space [...]
    Uhh.. "terabyte"? Again with these esoteric units!
    Someone, please.. how much is that in LOC?

  • One of the More interesting projects (Score:5, Interesting)

    by randall_burns ( 108052 ) <randall_burns AT hotmail DOT com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:02AM (#10483857)
    The government has proposed recently. I would also suggest that they put in place requirements that all future material that is to be copyrighted present appropriate copies in machine readable form so this will be cheaper in the future.
    • Tyranny! And don't laugh, I'm serious about this.

      All material is copyrighted at the instant of creation. All of it. You write a love letter to your girlfriend and it's copyrighted. It's all copyrighted! Beyond that, you're requiring them to *present* copies. I'm assuming this is to the LoC.

      You could make a case for this when a copyright is *registered*, but please don't make a blanket statement like that without first engaging brain.

  • Only English? (Score:4, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:03AM (#10483861) Homepage Journal
    well, at least to those who can read English

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the LOC contain all materials registered with the US copyright office? In which case it would have any foreign materials registered for copyright protection.

    • Re:Only English? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by InterGuru ( 50986 )
      Let me correct you. They do not keep all the materials from the copyright office. Some they forward to other appropriate places, such as the National Library of Medicine.

      Their collections policy statement [loc.gov] states that they only keep material specific to their very broad mission statement. This means that they will not keep a copy of a laundry list they received throught the copyright office.

    • I thought it was a swipe at the US educational system. A lot of Americans graduate illiterate.

  • Homeland Security Savings (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:03AM (#10483863)
    The idea to scan in all materials available at the U.S. Library of Congress was presented at the Web 2.0 conference this week (as just one of many ideas presented). The proposed cost of $260 million would create a huge benefit to society

    It would probably pay for itself too since FBI agents would no longer have to travel to libraries to secretly gather records of who borrowed what. They can just use Carnivore to do it instead.

  • The Canadian gun registry cost is exceeding 2 billion dollars and climbing - 1.9 billion of which is probably wasted on corruption, but that 260 million sounds like a lowball.

  • Ametrica! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:07AM (#10483888) Homepage Journal
    Finally, Slashdot can establish that for official purposes:

    1 Library of Congress = $260M

    And the 2004 US Federal budget can be spec'd at 0.000243754522 [google.com] LoC:s (Libraries of Congress per second).
  • OK, 260 millions US$ to scan... $60,000 of space (a terabyte) according to the article... put it online... BANDWITH costs estimates? Oops... forgot about that I guess!

    "Brewster Kahle's idea is to scan as many books as possible and put them online so everyone has access to that huge amount of knowledge."

    The plan IS to put it online, after all...
  • Since the Library of Congress contains mostly copyrighted data, and Amazon is already doing this for profit, this is really just a good way to market Amazon's A9 search engine and the products it sells.
  • well, at least to those who can read English

    How about the whole world who can find any online translation service that goes from English to Local Dialect.

  • The theory of everything (Score:3, Funny)

    by antikarma ( 804155 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:14AM (#10483933)
    At long last, we shall finally know just how much one unit of Libraries of Congress is. This could quite possibly have profound effects on how we understand the universe. For example, for many years we have known that the universe is approximately 42 Libraries of Congress. Now we can fully understand its meaning.

  • Only the first step (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:14AM (#10483937)
    Putting the LoC on-line is only the first step. How long before those Internet book printing stations that can create an entire book for you from an electronic image in a deciminute for $1 tap into this? I'd have to think that this would be good for everyone except B&N who are busy reprinting old classics under their own label right now.
    • Actually, it's not as though everyone has a binding operation under their desks or anything. I don't know about most people, but I for one would prefer to have a high-quality binding of my favorite books. Besides, it's easier to spend hours reading off of paper than it is to read off a CRT or LCD.

  • Halfbaked (Score:3, Funny)

    by n08ody ( 162000 ) <jonusprime@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:19AM (#10483951)
    you've perused the Libray of Congress, but have you perused the Library of Congress Online

  • a real application for internet2 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LuxFX ( 220822 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:31AM (#10484022) Homepage Journal
    Right now, Internet2 can download [wpi.edu] the entire Library of Congress in about 20 seconds.

    I'm not aware of any PIAA for publishers, but somebody is going to have a problem with this. And by the time this actually happens, I bet there will be an Internet4 that can do it all in 20ms.

  • More dotcom hype... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:39AM (#10484057)
    "Despite the hype surrounding the dotcom era, many believe that the vast potential of the net to change society and business remains largely untapped."


    If this is such a wonderful idea why doesn't he get a bunch of artists, musicians and writers to donate their own work to this project and actually prove the concept works?

    I'm tired of all the rhetoric about business models failing and how the web is going to transform the way society learns, works, and entertains themselves. The dotcom era should have taught these so called visionaries one thing, you actually have to have a business plan before you can transform business models.

    If these business models are so full of potential he should start one, with his own intellectual property, and prove that the old economy intellectual property businesses they are extinct. If his ideas work then the dinosaurs of the MPAA and RIAA will either have to adapt to the new economy or die. Forcing them to risk their entire business on a gamble like this is wrong from any perspective.

    • Re:More dotcom hype... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrWa ( 144753 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:35AM (#10484224) Homepage
      If this is such a wonderful idea why doesn't he get a bunch of artists, musicians and writers to donate their own work to this project and actually prove the concept works?

      Work for who? I think you are still confused from the dotcom era still. You must be thinking that "change society and business" means that scanning the entire LoC can make someone money (advertising??)

      The important part in this case is the changing society part of the statement, which is what the vast potential of the net is capable of doing. It won't help you make money based on a bad idea (in fact, it may only help you lose money faster!) but it does have the potential to change the way a society views and deals with information.

      Right now there is a vast amount of knowledge in the LoC that is effectively out of the ordinary citizen's hands. That is not how it should be. If knowledge is power, there is a storehouse of power waiting to be unleashsed by giving everyone access to what is being stockpiled. It won't happen over night, or in a few years, but eventually it will have a ripple effect. Historians lament the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria, but what difference would it have made if only a few could actually use the information that was contained?

  • Fuzzy math on storage reqs (Score:4, Informative)

    by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @01:42AM (#10484067)
    The article claims that the LOC stored as image data would take up 1 TB.

    That's wildly underestimated IMO. The LOC has 26 million books. If we conservatively assume that they each have at least 100 pages, that is 2.6 billion images. That equals 0.03 kb per image. That's some REAL good compression for an image as large as a full page of text.

  • What, you want me to starve to death? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Banner ( 17158 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:02AM (#10484117) Journal
    Oh yeah, put 'em all online. I have a hard enough time already in libraries and book stores! If I could read any book I wanted to (even if they're only the ones already out of copyright) online, I'd probably not leave my computer until I passed out!!

  • Great (Score:3, Funny)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:09AM (#10484140)
    This will be great! You know all those ads that claim such and such can transmit the Library of Congress in so and so seconds?

    Now we'll be able to test their notions!

  • Library of Congress Transfer Rates (Score:3, Funny)

    by xombo ( 628858 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:23AM (#10484189)
    Isn't the size of the Library of Congress what people used to use as a quantifier for the speed of high-bandwidth connections? I remember several years ago that companies would brag that they can transfer the entire Library of Congress to England or wherever in less than 2 seconds and what have you. I suppose a statement like that would indicate that there are already digital versions of the Library of Congress out there somewhere meaning it will take virtually nothing dollar-wise to put it online (since I guess it's been flowing back and forth for years).

  • this makes news? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:25AM (#10484202)
    Maybe im the odd duck here but somehow waay back in early net days..the 90's i thought that this was such an obvious application of internet technology that it must be part of the original design purposes for the internet (darpanet and all that funding of course)

    So the only surprise to me is that were just now hearing a proposal to do this??? sheesh, if i hadnt thought it so completely obvious to every netizen at those old public library terminals i wouda lost so much seep making it happen!!!

    so now who's going to do it? and while its limboing through congress can we just put together a consortium to visit thie library we aready own with our digital camera's and OCR the thing into existence... how many of us woud need to donate our gmail 1g accounts to store it all?

  • Now I have a real problem... (Score:3, Funny)

    by HellYeahAutomaton ( 815542 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @02:39AM (#10484228)
    I just downloaded the LoC.ps.tgz from the local WPI Internet2 tap using gnutella and my printer just ran out of ink....

  • "260 million" (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by DogDude ( 805747 )
    Compared to the $200 billion to kill and maim tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people in the name of "terrorism", $260 million to create essentially, a Library of Alexandria is a fucking bargain.

  • Human's Book Pool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 12357bd ( 686909 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:07AM (#10484298)

    Not only the Library of Congress of the Unites States of America, we should also scan every big library in the world to create a pool of human work to freely share and preserve.

  • hmmm.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Atrax ( 249401 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @05:37AM (#10484824) Homepage Journal
    well, at least to those who can read English

    So that leaves out most Americans. Thanks from the rest of the world!

    (tongue firmly in cheek)

  • Better Access for Everyone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by azemon ( 820662 ) <art@zemCURIEon.name minus physicist> on Sunday October 10, 2004 @10:01AM (#10485645) Homepage

    What a cool idea and, even "if" the dollar estimate is too low, who cares? $260M is chump change for our gov't.

    Right now, the only way to access the stuff in LoC is to go there in person. Anyone can do it but you have to travel to WashDC and pass through security and so forth to get into the LoC public reading room. Then you have to ask the librarian to pretty-please bring you the book that you want.

    Now imagine that you can access any item in the LoC by simply entering the building and using a public kiosk with a browser. LoC's software would only permit use within the copyright so that is OK. But you don't have to mess with as much security because LoC isn't handing over the physical book.

    Now imagine that, from any web browser, you can access any book in the LoC for which the copyright has expired. I like that idea!

    My opinion... skip the buy on the next couple of cruise missiles and digitize LoC's books instead.

    Oh yeah, before I forget, LoC already has tons of seriously neat stuff online. My favorite is this collection [loc.gov] of tons photos from Russia. These were taken between about 1907 and 1915! I don't know about you, but I never dreamed that I would see color photos that are almost 100 years old.

    Cheers,
    -- Art Z.

    • Project Gutenberg (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cpghost ( 719344 )

      Now imagine that, from any web browser, you can access any book in the LoC for which the copyright has expired. I like that idea!

      That's the idea of Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.net]. It's been around for quite some time now, and everybody is free to join their distributed proofreading network!

  • Does the money estimate add up? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sbaker ( 47485 ) * on Sunday October 10, 2004 @11:45AM (#10486116) Homepage
    According to the LOC website, they have 119 million items in the library.

    They tell us that there are:

    4.5 million maps.
    14 million 'images' ...so I guess we assume the rest are books and newspapers.

    So in round numbers, let's say there are 50 million books and 50 million newspapers, periodicals, comic books, etc.

    $260 million to scan all that stuff? $2.60 per book or newspaper? That seems a little unlikely. The book would have to be carried off the shelf to the scanning machine, mounted in the machine (which would clearly have to turn the pages and scan and index them 100% automatically), the title and such would probably have to be typed in manually, then the book carried back to the shelf and placed back in the correct place.

    I find it hard to believe that a machine for scanning newspapers could be devised that could turn the pages automatically...but even without that, the project is still possible. At minimum wage, you'd need to pay people to scan a complete newspaper in maybe 20 minutes.

    Then some significant fraction of the collection would probably be too fragile for the automatic page turning machines...the cost of hand-scanning those would be FAR more than the bulk of the books. Some books would be *so* fragile and valuable that scanning them would be a considerable expense.

    Then there is the cost of the storage media. Suppose those 100 million books and newspapers had just 100 pages each on average. To get a readable image of the page you're going to need to scan at maybe 2000 x 2000 resolution. So we'll have something like 10^16 pixels, let's be generous and allow 100:1 compression ratios - and one byte per pixel. So we have 1000 terabytes. That's a lot - but to put it in context, it's only about a fifth of the amount
    that Google is estimated to have in their main cluster. Goggle spent $250 mil to buy that - so maybe only 20% of the LOC's budget needs to be for storage.

    OCR'ing and indexing all that data would be an incredibly valuable thing - the extra storage is trivial and the cost can be low if you aren't in a hurry to get the project done. Just stick a few thousand PC's in a room and wait!

    Dunno - $260 mil sounds like a low end estimate to me - but it seems do-able.

  • www.loc.gov (Score:4, Informative)

    by pNutz ( 45478 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:35PM (#10487397)
    Of course this instantly deteriorates into a discussion about the shameful state of IP and copyright laws, the need to pool all human knowledge, and how crappy the US budget deficit is.

    If you go to the LOC's site, you'll notice American Memory on the front page.

    American Memory is where you can get a good portion of the public domain stuff (books, letters from immigrants to their families back home, photos of civil war enlistees, audio, Edison-era short movies) for free in a low-quality format. Archival quality copies and custom scans/recordings are available for $$$. Almost any work in the LOC can be scanned on request (3 week waiting time or so); this is how they manage to continue adding scans to their collection without requiring public or private funding. It's underfunded as it is and needs more bandwidth.

    This idiot in the article's proposal is completely unrealistic. Books can contain 100,000 to 5,000,000 characters. That's 100k-5Mb per book, times 26,000,000 books. That's not including the images and illustrations in some of these works. Many of the texts have value beyond the words they contain. We may be talking about image scanning the pages to preserve the look of the type, paper, and images. Archival TIFFs, since that's what the LOC uses.

    The article also mentions $60 thousand to 'store' this data (per month?, per year?, just once???, what about access?, searching?, redundant backups?). Another unrealistic number, even working off of the 1TB estimate.

Slashdot Top Deals

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

Close