Literature people, go check out the Shakespeare Searched site by Clusty Labs. It is definitely interesting to see people taking stabs at a more sematic web. I also find it interesting that this kind of precise scholarly search is normally the domain of digital library programs at universities. And yet here we have the private sector taking a stab at it…

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Recently, Steve reminded me of a project that is a coproduction of the Universities of Wisconsin and Alabama. The project, Publisher’s Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books, is a digital collection of decorative publisher’s bindings. These bindings, most commonly achieved by a mechanical metal stamping process, range from the gawdy to the elegant.

What I find most appealing about this resource is the Teaching Resources pages, which at last gives us an example of how digital collections can provide “added value” that the analog items can’t supply alone. These brief essays and glossaries are exactly what I want from online collections.
Where I’m skeptical (and this a tentative skepticism) is the extreme specificity of the project’s subject. In reality, how much use will this expensively produced database see? How far reaching is the potential for teaching and scholarship on 19th century trade bindings?

I guess the crux of the question is – using this resource as an example – is such a website worth the institutional funding and people hours required to construct it? Should digital collections attempt to cast a wider net?

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The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division announced a new landmark (or is it a benchmark?): one million images from its collections are now available in digital form, online.

The millioneth image is, Barry will be happy to note, baseball related. The photograph depicts Washington Senators baseball player Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer using a camera during a visit to play the New York Highlanders in April 1911.

This photo comes from the collection of the first syndicated photo news service in the U.S., George Grantham Bain Collection.

Has anyone used any of these massive photo archives for reference or research (Ginger, Toby, Barry)? It strikes me that the sheer amount of visual material is daunting in projects like this. How do we maintain a knowledge of what types of information are available in what places?

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This is a much better analogy for thinking about Google Print that frames the issue as a shift from a “culture of control” to a “culture of exposure” than my previous post on this topic…

The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work?

…

Consider what it would mean, by analogy, if map-makers needed the permission of landowners to create maps. As a property owner, your point would be clear: How can you put my property on your map without my permission? Map-makers, we might say, are clearly exploiting property owners, for profit, when they publish an atlas. And as an individual property owner, you might want more control over how your property appears on a map, and whether it appears at all, as well as the right to demand payment.

…

The critical point is this: Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find. And if we really want to have true, comprehensive book searches, we cannot require that every author’s permission be individually sought out. The book search engines that emerge would be a shadow of the real thing, just as a negotiated map would be a lousy one.

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I just got back from a conference (hopefully, I will post on this soon…) and am catching up on my email, blog and listserv reading. There have been some very interesting comments in the past week or so. Notably, Lessig’s support for Google Print for Libraries and O’Reilly’s framing the project as an “alternative to the obscurity”.

A couple of gears began turning in my head and I wanted to test an analogy with you folks: can we understand what Google is trying to do here by conceiving a person as a search engine or index? Is it possible to think of my old English professor an index of works on modern poetry? She certainly has an imperfect, but nonetheless impressive knowledge of citations within this subject and can recall them at will. If a dissertator studying with her were to query this index this professor would be capable of providing a list of results.

Now if you are willing to follow me this far and allow me bend the lines of distinction between the analog world and its digital counterparts, let’s think about the recent Author’s Guild suit. Could you likewise sue my professor for providing access to certain works? Exactly how and where is the distinction?

(Keep in mind, I am just fleshing out a thought that quickly popped into my head.)

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Yahoo! has announced a new project to digitize and provide access to thousands of books in the libraries of the University of California, the University of Toronto, and other collections. The project, they say, was begun before Google announced its famous plan some time ago. This new digitial library initiative is called – sounding rather like a guerilla resistance movement – the Open Content Alliance.

Yahoo! is boasting that its project, unlike Google’s, will respect copyright laws, and therefore has earned the support of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. Onboard for this collaborative effort are Adobe, Hewlitt-Packard, and other big names (and big wallets).

The program will begin with the scanning of 18,000 American literature books, thereby affirming the fears of European scholars and librarians that these initiatives will privelege the English language (thus re-inscribing the language of an imperial and neo-colonial history). There seems to be hope, though, that the inclusion of Canadian library material will result in the incorporation of French materials, at least. Daniel Greenstein, executive director of the California Digital Library (University of California) says, “The focus of this thing is really open access.” Access, though, always assumes the ability to comprehend the available materials.

Does anyone have thoughts on this new race between Yahoo! and Google?

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Yet another article on the “bookless library” is available for our scrutiny.

I’m beginning to worry about how I’d be classified in this debate. Would I be considered retrograde? I’m as dead-set against “bookless libraries” as I am against cheeseless pizza.

Here’s a grenade for the trenches: do libraries have to do everything undergrads want us to do? They want coffee shops, we give ‘em coffee shops; they want food allowed, we give ‘em food; they want the most high tech computers, we give ‘em ‘puters. Now they say, supposedly, “we don’t ever want to look at a book again.” And we say, “Okay Billy, we’ll get rid of ‘em for you and buy you a nice comfy sofa. Why don’t you grab a nap?”

I don’t think there’s been a time in history when 18 year olds have had as much power to tell us how to run our universities, libraries, book stores. Do we simply have to capitulate to their demands – and if so, why? Shouldn’t they have to meet the demands of their schools?

It’s all very perplexing.

Poet Ron Silliman mentioned this Texas library on his blog, and said this: “As somebody who discovered poetry by wandering around a library just to see what might be there, this is a concept that makes me break out in a rash.” I had that same reaction.

Anyone care to toss back the hand grenade?

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