Internet Archive Challenges Google 115
richards1052 writes "The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. It's purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search.
A number of major library systems, including the Boston Public Library and Smithsonian, have refused to sign up with competing ventures by Microsoft and Google because they do not provide for universal access to digitized books. These commercial ventures prohibit books being accessed by competing search engines.
So far, 80 libraries and research institutions have signed on with Open Content Alliance. They must pay for the scanning of their books while Google and Microsoft offset that cost for their participating institutions."
Society lost (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Society lost (Score:5, Funny)
Not true, ones have slightly more mass than zeros, so they weight a tad more than zeroing out that section of your drive!
Note, my source is Dilbert. But it was right about smaller font sizes leading to smaller .doc sizes as well.
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In my day, we just called it porn.
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Re:Society lost (Score:5, Funny)
I don't expect the Spanish Inquisition...
Re:Society lost (Score:4, Insightful)
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Show me this study, I'm curious. Or was it just one thrown in there that seemed like it might fit, and just so happens to further the 'birth control is evil' agenda?
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I might assume that if one parent is stable, loving and kind yet divorced.
This is better then having 2 parents who yell at and hate each other.
it is probably not as good having 2 loving parents. but if you only have a choice between the first two options....
What would you choose?
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It was also common sense that killing a woman was a good test of whether or not she was a witch...
It should be noted that if the person died during an ordeal by water (which I am assuming you are referring to here) he or she was considered a witch. Surviving meant the person was not a witch. So, killing someone in this fashion did not, in fact, prove "whether or not" the person was a witch but instead proved that they were.
Also, there were a lot of other ways of "proving" the guilt of an accused witch. Wikipedia is knowledgeable about such things.
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It isn't that difficult... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, conspiracy theories are usually quite easy to posit. That doesn't mean they have a bit of merit. Get over yourself—you're the majority, and you're not being persecuted in this country. (Yes, there are Christians being persecuted in countries where they're not the majority, and it is genuinely a tr
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Clarification (Score:2)
No, obviously I'm not arguing that.
Not impossible, but very, very difficult. If you think it's happened in this particular case, it's likely partly because you're imagining it and partly because you're susceptible to manipulation—just like some people are easier to hyp
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Re:Society lost (Score:4, Insightful)
The left is against pornography? (Score:2)
OK, so you have a point with Huckleberry Finn (although I'd argue there are far fewer on the left trying to censor Huck Finn than on the right trying to censor Harry Potter). However, in what world is the "left" the
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That addresses the "dangerous" material (Score:2)
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http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/cgi-bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc&state=ca [visi.com]
I'll grant your point that the left generally ignores pornography, but this is a special case. This is (allegedly) pornography in school. Left or
Special case? (Score:2)
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The main point is that you can't shove the whole spectrum of beliefs into two pigeon holes of "left" and "right". I don't see that this is particularly surprising - especially when no one can agree what left/right mean in the first place (technically they refer to economic control, which should be independent of views on censorship - the more relevant scale here is the authoritarian/liberal one, where being pro-censorship is clearly
Nobody... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.....
(Can't believe I'm the first one to respond with that. Of course by now I'm probably not. )
Nobody... (Score:3, Funny)
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
(I couldn't bear to leave you hanging.)
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Re:Society lost (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the quiet library...dusty books part that has me a bit concerned at the moment. My city recently built a brand-new neighborhood "anchor" library within striking distance of my house. That eliminated the need for a tedious drive or bus ride downtown to the main library, the expensive necessity of finding scarce parking, and the tyranny of downtown "business hours." The branch is convenient, has good parking, and is open for people who have to work during the daytime. It's bright and attractive. Endowed with an outdoor "reading garden" for good weather, it will shortly boast an indoor coffee area. It has banks of computers to be allocated to either youngsters or adults, a pretty good periodicals section, and a pretty good reference section. It also manages to cater to our increasing Hispanic population. The kids' section, which takes up half of the main floor, appears to be excellent. There's a huge section of fairly current DVD films. Tables (and to my surprise) comfortable easy chairs are invitingly scattered throughout.
I guess the problem is that with all the beautiful amenities, there's actually not much room for books. To be fair, they are just starting out, and their holdings will certainly increase. I'm just not sure where they will locate a collection that's much larger. I would divide my reading into "work-related," "feel like I ought to read it," and "just for pleasure." It's not easy to find new or interesting titles in any of those areas. They're trying, but there's just not enough space.
I've resolved that, to an extent, with a nifty little Mac utility called "Library Books." By entering my online access information, plus the library's catalog system (iBistro/Sirsi), I suddenly have complete, convenient access to the entire city and state library system. I can browse, search, and reserve. I could do all of that simply by going to the library's main Website and logging in, but the utility does me little favors like alerting me to the arrival of reserved titles and putting a big, red star up on days when books are due. It's a convenience that makes online browsing just a bit easier.
I've thrown myself into the new anchor library, in tandem with the simplified online access of the Library Books utility. I've become an evangelist, of sorts, for requesting and reserving books. It's amazing the number of people who don't know you can do that. The sheer square footage required to hold a large collection isn't feasible for neighborhood libraries, and I feel as though this sort of system gives one the best of both worlds. No yellow markers, though . . .
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However, scholarly work in journals is already paid for by the public through grants, so its only a matter of time for unscrupulous left leaning students of major institutions worldwide to make their ids and passwords to EZProxy servers available on so called free literature sites so that anybody in the world can access these common resources of mankind.
Also, if more people were interested in books than music, it's conceivable that some terrible people would put many types of
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fwiw I did install OJS just to say I did it and I could've started publishing my own journal within a day if I had
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> This world is coming to one where companies will be fighting to keep us locked in our houses.
Dude, PDF is `portable`, right? And they're on your laptop? And you can search for stuff instantly, and not just hope the index is up to it. So you can get your work done more quickly and spend more time outside, away from libraries (which in my experience smell
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Easy, because many public libraries are becoming nothing more than places where people go to check their e-mail. Of course a nice university library is something completely different, but the small town public library is pretty much giving up on those bulky paper things. Why buy new books when you can offer poor people a place to get on-line (and get a bunch of grants)?
My local library only buys 10% of the books that it bought 8 years ago.
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I'll bet the collection at your local library is better than you think, when you compensate for the books that can be requested from other libraries in the network.
Digital has its advantages (Score:2, Insightful)
Storage: I just moved, and I moved three bookcases full of books. That sucked. If those were all digital, I'd have hauled my computer from A t
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That's precisely why I've got pirated copies of the Harry Potter series on my laptop (JK Rowling is against ebook versions of her books, so there aren't legit ebook editions). There's a Meetup group in my area, and we often want to refer back to a specific page. Sometimes a few of my fellow nuts are able to find it in their meatspace versions faster than I can look in finder on my Mac, but it sure is convenient.
The same goes for Lord [flyingmoose.org]
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I'm with you, I much prefer reading stuff on paper. I'm just not convinced that it will hold true in years to come.
I don't see
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Project Gutenberg... (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]
Several authors use older releases as bait to tempt you to buy more recent books.
Project Gutenberg is concerned mostly with old, out of copyright books, author usually long dead. Many of these books would be unavailable otherwise.
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Relevant Link (Score:3, Interesting)
A Better Link (Score:5, Informative)
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Way to go! (Score:2)
Re:Way to go! (Score:5, Interesting)
In particular, if you accept that free exchange of ideas will promote intellectual progress, then is it not also reasonable to suggest that free exchange of artistic content will promote cultural progress? This is the central notion that Lawrence Lessig advocates: that overly restricting the distribution, reuse, and remixing of art and entertainment will inherently stifle culture. (Note that Lessig does not advocate wanton infringement nor abolition of copyright: merely a 'sane' balance between the rights of content creators and the rights of content users.)
With respect to this current initiative, it would appear that they intend to scan and index books that are oriented towards information, as well as those oriented towards entertainment. In my opinion, this is a good thing. There is much that people can learn and grow by having easier access to ideas, where "ideas" means both informational sources, as well as artistic sources.
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It's exchange of ideas if you're a musician or a record producer.
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Total scan time? (Score:2)
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Scan My Books (Score:4, Interesting)
If this project is really "open", can I have my own libarary scanned? How much does it cost? I own the rights to copy my own books for my own personal use. Does something make these other "official" libraries eligible to use their full rights to their content in a way that I cannot?
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There are plenty of document scanning services around, I know for low-volume (less than 100k pages) I've priced them out at about $0.08 per page at high resolution. I'm not sure what kind of surcharge you'd pay for them not being able to batch-feed (since you're talking about books).
Or, do what I did and rent a good scanner and pay a couple high school kids a fair wage to do it. Or, offer them piece rate of a nick
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Even HS kids wouldn't work for $0.42:h. This project calls for a scanner with automated pageflipping. If this Open Library project doesn't have that, then I expect that no one does (yet). I'll wait.
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Depends on what country they are in... but the cost of shipping the books to China/India/etc would likely be prohibitive. This is where the scanning services can sometimes be more cost-effective.
:)) and mark pages for scanning later. I do this if I note a particularly interesting magazine article or passage from a book that I want to keep on file. It actually makes me feel like the
Or, you could keep tape flags in your wallet (for me, much more useful than a condom
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Yeah, I've got the same problem. Often times I just want to quote something rather than paraphrase a particular section I remember reading but it takes an hour or so because the included index at the end of the book was sorely lacking for a 900 page book.
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Re:Scan My Books (Score:4, Funny)
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Wondering... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Internet archive beats google cache atleast 10-0. (Score:1)
Internet archive is an excellent service. Best of luck!
After all.. (Score:1, Interesting)
False Dichotomy? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a story about this in The New York Times [nytimes.com] this morning (free reg required). It begins:
The opposition between the Open Content Alliance and Google may not be as much as it seems at first glance. From the NYT article:
It looks like Google will digitize the collection for free in exchange for exclusive rights to offering searches of the digital data, but the libraries don't give up rights to have someone else digitize the stuff again and do with it as they see fit. So they can go with Google for now if they want and the O.C.A. later as they have the resources. This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't know what the deal Microsoft is offering looks like, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much more restrictive.
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Hmm...so I apparently missed page 2 of the article. :-)
Microsoft is part of the O.C.A., except that, "A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft's." Sort of an "embrace and extend" approach?
Jokes aside, this does seem to be a bit more of an open approach than Google's.
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"Of course we're happy our competiton is starting great new projects that compete with us in ways we are not able! Competition is good! Yadda, yadda, yadda..."
People, in less than 2 years, Google and Microsoft will be indistinguishable, both being IP whores (and I'm not just talking about network addresses...) driven by mercenary stockholders interested in nothing but cash, raping and pillaging the Interweb
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I agree that no matter what they'll try to spin it to minimize the conflict, but the important question here is what are the facts of the matter? It sounds as if the facts are that one is perfectly free to work with both Google and the O.C.A. (based on the quotes in the article from other parties besides Google). This seems like a fairly reasonable arrangement to me; you have the option to get things scanned for free by Google but with restrictions and/or for a fee by O.C.A. without those restrictions.
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Rainbow's End (Score:1)
What about copyright? (Score:2)
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The Open Content Alliance plans to digitize expired copyrights of 1922 and before. Then Boston Library Consortium (34 million expired copyright books) is seeking to digitize later dated in-copyright but out of print books.
Google's approach for in-copyright is close to that of various on-line Journals. A reader can only read a few pages of a copyright
Do we really have to scan them? (Score:2)
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Other countries (Score:2)
I hope libraries in other countries will be included as well. Please start with Sweden. :-)
ahh (Score:1)
Challenges google? (Score:2)
We speak of open access (Score:2)
Indeed they should (Score:1)
Indeed - they don't care about readability for anyone but their little office. Try disabeling fontsize in msie6 and you have a stamp sized window to read the messages in.
It used to be good before Google ruined it.