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02 Apr 08

Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/...071105fa_fact_grafton - Preview

bibliothèque_numérique book digital_collection digital_library google_books lecture mediology médiologie reading

Without leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press
The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
13 more annotations...
- s early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts.
- Six hundred years later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
- With electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius would have found natural.
- Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
- the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were filmed, and which remained in obscurity.
- It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,”
- The cataloguing data that identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
- If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million
- The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.
- Specialist engines like Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
- And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks.
- these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
- For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

28 Feb 08

biblio-fr - Re : Gallica 2 (2 messages)

listes.cru.fr/...msg00271.html - Preview

digital_libraries gallica google_books

En conclusion : techniquement parlant, ces deux systèmes me semblent

complémentaires, en quelque sorte ; quant aux contenus, ils sont, là aussi,

difficilement comparables. Je ne dirai certainement pas de l'un ou de

l'autre que c'est un irrécupérable naufragé. Il est vrai que j'en attends

beaucoup plus de Gallica (et d'Eureopana) - du fait de l'accès intégral aux

contenus.

25 Nov 07

Des bibliothèques rejettent les propositions de mise en ligne de leurs livres - Tour de Toile du BBF

blogbbf.enssib.fr/?2007/10/24/204-les-bibliotheques-rejettent-les-propositions-de-mise-en-ligne-de-leurs-livres - Preview

bibliothèque_numérique contrat digital_library google google_books microsoft

La principale objection à un contrat avec Google ou Microsoft est la clause qui l’accompagne, stipulant que les bibliothèques ne peuvent autoriser les autres moteurs de recherche à référencer les ouvrages numérisés par ces entreprises. La crainte est forte également qu’une entreprise quelconque en vienne à dominer le marché de la numérisation des œuvres, et puisse exploiter cette position dominante à des fins lucratives.

13 Nov 07

La république des livres » Blog Archive » Google encouragé par la Ministre de la Culture

passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/...-par-la-ministre-de-la-culture - Preview

bne google google_books

“La Ministre a manifesté son intention d’accélérer le calendrier de la constitution du “patrimoine numérique français” et a demandé à Google, leader mondial des technologies de moteurs de recherche, de formuler prochainement ses suggestions voir ses recommandations à l’attention du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication pour augmenter la visibilité du patrimoine culturel français sur l’Internet”

10 Nov 06

tiers livre, le blog|journal : où en sont les pionniers du Net

www.tierslivre.net/...spip.php - Preview

bne digital_libraries google_books

J’en parle aujourd’hui, parce que (le très révolutionnaire) Google proclame sa volonté de numérisation massive des fonds patrimoniaux, la France via président de la République ou ministre de la Culture en parle tout d’un coup comme s’ils s’étaient préoccupés à un moment quelconque de nous soutenir, dans ces jours du tout début de l’Internet et qu’il s’agissait d’une véritable chaîne humaine, d’un travail de fourmis du clavier : travail que nous n’avons jamais cessé, sans jamais d’aide ni subsides.