Internet Archive proposal for mass digitization
Submitted by jrjacobs on Wed, 2009-08-26 08:45.
I had known that the Internet Archive had submitted a response to the GPO's RFP for mass digitization. A friend just sent me the link to the proposal submitted to GPO (embedded below and here's the link to the proposal and supporting documents).
As you can probably guess, we've been pulling for the Archive to get the bid, not least of which because the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library and we've stated on more than one occasion that privatization of public domain government information is a very bad idea. But also, we've been heartened by the quality of the Archive's scans to date, their openness and willingness to be collaborative in their processes and data access and sharing. Those qualities certainly come through in their proposal for mass digitization -- not to mention the fact that they've actually made their proposal public!
While the award has not been officially announced, we really hope that the Archive wins the award. Perhaps GPO will name them as an official depository library and work with them not only on the "legacy" collection (there needs to be a better description of the deep and rich collections of depository libraries than the somewhat pejorative "legacy" :-| ) but on digital deposit of government documents going forward.
--that is all.
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"Valuable print collections" not "legacy"
Thanks for this post, James. It is nice to see openness in contracts, too!
Also, re: your comment about the use of the term "legacy": Although we use the term here on FGI from time to time because it is used so often in the FDLP community, we do not like this use of the term.
As we have noted before, the dictionary definition of the word "legacy" when used as an adjective comes from computer science and denotes "software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use" (New Oxford American Dictionary). It is also used in computer science to mean "outdated" and "undesirable" (Webster's New World College Dictionary).
I don't think that most of us in the community mean to imply that all our print collections are "outdated" or "superseded" or that they should all be treated as if they were. It would not surprise me, however, to find that some library administrators view these collections as "undesirable" and would love to have a good excuse to weed them from their collections. Calling them "legacy collections" helps administrators do just that.
Use of the word "legacy" as an adjective perpetuates that implication. We should all stop using it because it is either inaccurate and misleading, or imprecise, or both.
In its place we should use terms that accurately describe whatever we are discussing at the moment. For example, in place of "legacy collections" we might say "collections without adequate bibliographic records" or "collections of print materials" or "collections without digital equivalents." These are not identical, overlapping concepts, but use of "legacy" for all of them lumps them together and allows sloppy solutions to an ill-defined "problem" to emerge.
Maybe we can say that the world "legacy" when used as an adjective is a legacy (noun) of a simpler, more primitive time when we didn't understand things as well; now we see it as legacy (adj.) terminology: unwanted and outdated.
Treasures
I call them "treasures" instead of "legacy". ;-)
But then again, maybe treasures is not a good term either because all gov info is a treasure!
Collections without digital equivalents
My vote goes for "Collections without digital equivalents." This phrase emphasizes that a substantial amount of government information is NOT digital. It also emphasizes that print collections are not simply redundant.
My only worry is that "Collections without digital equivalents" is somewhat a mouthful and might not catch on. But we could try.
We also need to remember that print and other tangible materials will still be required for the fifth of Americans who are not online. The government shouldn't stop informing millions of Americans simply because they don't prefer electronic information.
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
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