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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Who decides what to digitize?
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · Oct 20th, 2008 11:28 pm · 10 votes · no comments made
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| The original British Library reading room, London, UK, by Sifter |
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Digitisation of books if not whole libraries is all the rage nowadays, especially in the U.S. and Europe. There are several initiatives under way but a lot of questions are being posed regarding copyright, the selection process, how to deal with different editions of books, potential over-dependence on online sources and more...
Players
First, who are the players? Google Books is the best-known example. It does not release exact numbers of how many books it has scanned so far but an article in the New York Times put it at over one million by March 2007. My own experiments with Google Book Search lead to an estimated number of at least 6 million currently (e.g., "he" produces 5,820,600 hits). Books no longer under copyright are offered in full while the still-copyrighted ones are only accessible for word search and brief excerpts. A similar Microsoft project closed down in March after having scanned 300,000 books. They were part of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) which started as a reaction to Google's proprietary tendencies. They only scan copyrighted books with permission. For storage, they are allied with the Internet Archive which currently shows that it has close to 520,000 "texts" online. On the Open Library portal of OCA, however, it now states that more than 13.8 million books are included of which only 335,000 are available in full. I'm not sure how to reconcile these three numbers. Just as with Google, a little bit more transparency and clarity would be nice, wouldn't it? There are of course many more "digital library" projects, e.g., at the U.S. Library of Congress, the Million Books Digital Library Project a.k.a. the Universal Digital Library (US-Chinese-Indian). For a comprehensive list, see Wikipedia.
Illusions
The above mentioned New York Times article points out an important caveat:
"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."
I admit that I, just like most people with Internet access, look first to the Internet for any type of information, be it mundane or scholarly. But what about the innumerable small collections out there in the Western world, not to mention the rest of the globe? Even Google in all its technological and financial might cannot even come close to putting everything ever published online. So the question then becomes: who selects, and on what grounds? Money will, like it or not, be the first hurdle for a publication to make it online. As an archaeologist by training, I am naturally aware that a complete record of anything is an illusion. In the past too, choices were constantly made on what books were copied or reproduced and in the process they were often abridged, adapted, "corrected," and altered in many ways more or less subtle. Which edition of a book deserves to have a second life online? Google cannot take over the role of the scholars and librarians who have shaped and still shape the collections of the great research libraries. In a New York Review of Books article, Robert Darnton remarks:
Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speed-up in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them sceptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively - and even how to appreciate old books.
All in all, digital libraries will most certainly become more and more important but physical libraries will remain part of the mix of tools for intellectual development and transfer of knowledge in communities all over the world for a long time to come.
tags: international education library digitization local-context-global-commons digital-library
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