behind AotW

In contrast to Wednesday’s Library of Congress announcement, the following highlights significant cultural change in not quite seven years. Let me disclaim up front by saying I really appreciate the organizational attitude change apparent since the following was reported, and imply no criticism of the Library or Librarian of Congress.

(April 15, 2000 – Tech Law Journal) The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, gave an address at the National Press Club on Friday, April 14, on the role of the Library of Congress in the Information Age. He harshly criticized the Internet, and stated that the Library will not digitize books. However, the Library has plans to expand its web publication of other materials.

“So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television’s preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing,” said Billington.

Billington said that the Library of Congress has plans to unveil a new web site. “We hope it will realize one of the earliest promises of the Internet: to put the Library of Congress at the fingertips of every boy and girl where they live.”

But then he followed up by stating the “we are not digitizing books, but bringing hitherto little used, specially formatted materials like maps and recordings …” He added that the new web site “is not replacing our traditional print library.”

He said that the Library of Congress now has 28 Million items in its print collection, and 119 Million items in all formats. Its web site currently contains 3 million primary documents, including drafts of the Gettysburg Address, 19th Century baseball cards, and forgotten music.

Billington elaborated on why the Library will not put books online during the question and answer session. “The rationale is two fold. We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out.” He added that the Library is more concerned with “rare pamphlets” than “full books”.

“Secondly, behind this … is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced.”

“There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down,” he said. “There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence.”

“We should be very hesitant … that you are going to get everything you want electronically.”

“You don’t want to be one of those mindless futurists,” said Billington, “who sit in front of a lonely screen.”

“It is isolating. It is a lonely thing.” In contrast, “libraries are places, a community thing.”

“It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen.” He described this as “arrogance” and “hubris”.

He added that while electronic books may succeed commercially, they are “seductive.”

The LoC website now makes available more than 7.5 million digital objects from its American Memory site alone, and the new project looks to add thousands. To be fair, the Library is still not talking about digitizing books generally, but I’d bet Dr. Billington feels slightly differently about the Web–or at least would be embarrased to say some of these things–today.

In a press release Wednesday, the Librarian of Congress announced a fantastic new project to digitize selected books from the collection:

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Library of Congress a $2 million grant for a program to digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a major focus on at-risk “brittle books” and U.S. history volumes.

The project, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will include not only the scanning of volumes, but also the development of suitable page-turner display technology, capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as table of contents, chapters/sections and index …

“ÀúDigitizing American Imprints' will make a major contribution to the collective body of knowledge that is accessible worldwide, further democratizing the information that is a key to functional societies and economies,” Dr. Billington said…

Among the items to be scanned are some of particular interest to Civil War historians including rare regimental histories, memoirs, and diaries as well as selections from the Confederate States of America Collection.

You’ll notice that the LoC will not be charging the public for access to this material, nor was a sell-out “partnership” with a commercial outfit required to obtain the resources to make it possible. This is worth crowing about. Some creative thinking and financing has gone into this effort and it ought to be rewarded.

All hail the Library of Congress and the folks at the Sloan Foundation.

I love Akismet. It’s very good at identifying comment spam and putting it to one side for me to review later. But my needs have been modest: it took more than 8 months for Akismet to trap the first 2,000 spam comments to this blog.

Then some invisible switch was thrown or critical mass reached out there in the dark underworld where these spammers live. In December I began to see between one and three hundred attempts per day, each one eating bandwidth and server resources. I couldn’t keep up, and as they arrived in bursts I saw performance problems.

So I added Bad Behavior to my arsenal. It doesn’t just quarantine spam, it blocks most of it outright – it never hits my server or database. Since I installed Bad Behavior a week ago only 5 spam attempts (out of 1100) got through to Akismet for my attention.

My life is my own again.