Archivists hope to catalog UC’s entire library online: About a dozen twentysomethings are creating the library of the future in a small room attached to a colossal University of California book warehouse.
Sitting under black tents that keep out extraneous light, employees of San Francisco-based Internet Archive photograph page after page of books borrowed from the university’s libraries. Nearly all the employees listen to music on headphones to help them through the tedious task in a room as quiet as a library.
“We kind of think of it as a 21st-century Industrial Revolution type of job,” said Scott Miller, operations manager for UC’s Northern Regional Library Facility.
Funded by a coalition of groups that includes universities and companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo, the project is one of two mass-digitization endeavors UC has joined. The other is the Google Library Project, likely the planet’s largest such undertaking.
Bizarre headline
For an article about scanning books at UC’s northern regional storage facility, that headline is truly out of left field. The people doing the scanning aren’t archivists; neither is Bernie Hurley, for that matter. And, of course, what they’re trying to do is make books full-text-searchable online (and, in the case of public domain books, make them viewable online)–not catalog them online, which has already been done.
And since the Open Content Alliance (funny how news stories only say Internet Archive these days, not OCA) is only scanning public-domain books, “all” is off by, oh, 75%–except maybe for the Google side, which this story barely mentions.
The story’s OK. The headline’s something else. Not your fault: It’s right there in the Trib.
Interesting
I agree with Walt; what they’re doing isn’t what we know as archiving, and it serves a different purpose. That doesn’t mean it’s bad by any means, but the article is off.
I find it odd that they’re attempting to avoid copyright laws in other countries. Presumably it’s because they’re going to be distributing the works via the Internet, so the copyright action takes place in other countries, but that’s really a losing game. Copyright laws are different in every country, are constantly changing, and several countries have protections that just don’t exist in the U.S. That’s why “international copyright law” is really reflected in domestic law when copyright treaties are enacted.