Re: [Foundation-l] 6 reasons we're in another book-burning, period in history
On 10/14/2011 9:17 PM, foundation-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote: However archiving is rather different from what we are dealing with which is more focused on books and other mass market material rather than say old planning application maps and minutes of the union of postal workers 1937. Exactly so. Old mass market material tends to be thrown out when it gets wet, dusty or is in the way, torn up to line drawers, and otherwise casually treated. It is just this sort of treatment that makes a very old mass market work valuable - as it may be the only surviving copy of a large production run. In my family they've tended to regard 100 year old school textbooks as having high value. But what of a 100 year old newspaper? Unless it was of direct concern it is long gone. Newspapers come and go. If that newspaper or the local library kept archival copies they will be on microfilm by now. You'd think that a newspaper morgue would still have original photographs or negatives of events less than 50 years old - but that is rarely the case. Unless something at the time of creation was flagged as having special value it might be thrown out within the year. So (for example) a photo of Sargent Schriver taken in 1954 when he was a member of the Chicago Board of Education might have been published in a local newspaper - but the original negative destroyed within a year or two. Therefore that newspaper could not republish that same photo several years later when he became the first director of the Peace Corps in 1961, much less in his obituary this year (unless they extracted it from the microfilm copy of the published paper). Going forward, this sort of information will potentially have a longer life as digital data storage contains more and more recent history, but the gatekeepers and preservationists will control access to much of that material. A website I helped create in 1995 was captured by the IA in 1996 (and many times since), but that first capture has already been destroyed due to a backup failure. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] 6 reasons we're in another book-burning period in history
I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes. http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all bother doing this. (But an image filter definitely needs money spent on it.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 6 reasons we're in another book-burning period in history
2011/10/14 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes. http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all bother doing this. It depressed me. Thank you for ruining my weekend. But seriously: 1. It's not really news for me: My professors have been talking very angrily about the secret book destruction operations for years and Asaf Bartov, the founder of BYP [1], who now works for the WMF, have been frequently lecturing about this. But Cracked have put it in a very understandable format. 2. Since Cracked is rather popular, this is an opportunity to publicize Wikisource, one of Wikimedia most wonderful endeavors. It is criminally under-publicized now. 3. Is there any project, anywhere, to systematically find books that are going to be irrecoverably destroyed and to digitize them? I'd argue that it's more important to digitize them before the more popular titles, which are less likely to be lost forever. I would also support the WMF investing money in collaborating with libraries doing it. BYP, mentioned above, is doing something like this; it is a bunch of volunteers, working on a shoestring budget in a small country. Is anybody else doing it? [1] http://www.benyehuda.org/e_faq.html -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 6 reasons we're in another book-burning period in history
On 14 October 2011 21:10, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes. http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all bother doing this. Doubtful. Heck to some extent its probably our fault. Why bother holding books on say warships when Wikipedia already provides an unreasonable amount of information about them. So out go the old warship annuals. Except they don't even bother to remove them from the catalog (me bitter?) There is relatively little destruction of actual information going on. As well as a lot of the stuff being fiction the non-fiction stuff is mostly one of multiple copies. The problem is it does cause is that the information is increasingly locked up. Paper archives have for the last decade or so one of the loopholes in payways. With the removal of such archives the paywalls become more controlling. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
