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International Amateur Scanning League (IASL) to the rescue!
Carl Malamud announced yesterday the inaugural meeting of the International Amateur Scanning League (IASL) (I'm already imagining cool swag!). Malamud is taking FedFlix program to the streets! Fedflix, a joint venture between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org, digitizes NTIS video and makes them available on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and the public.resource.org Stock Footage Library.
Well now a gang of volunteers including members of DC CopyNight and Smithsonian employees working on their own time are going to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and copying over 1,500 DVDs to be uploaded to the net.
Malamud said:
What makes this grassroots digitization effort so remarkable is that it has the full support of the government. Indeed, David Ferriero, the U.S. Archivist, joined me in the initial meeting where we taught volunteers how to rip DVDs!Kudos to Malamud and the IASL! And this makes me think that more libraries and librarians should be doing the same thing for govt documents. Why not set up your own scanning operations in your depository library (Book Liberator or DIY Book Scanner can show you how to digitize on the cheap!) and then deposit those scans into the Internet Archive's US Documents Collection (don't forget to follow FDLP digitization standards!). Scans could also be ingested into FDSys (when they've got that capability working ;-)). So get to it; what are you waiting for?! Continue reading
Malamud calls for a national scan center public works project
Carl Malamud posed this question over on twitter: "What if our national cultural institutions all worked together on a common problem, attracted White House support?" In his post on the O'Reilly blog, "A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project", Malamud scopes out the issues and calls for Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Technical Information Service to come together and make the compelling case for funding a 5-year $500 million effort to create a National Scan Center. Here here Carl!
In the U.S., we face a similar deluge of paperwork that we faced in the 1930s. A huge backlog of paper, microfiche, audio, video, and other materials is located throughout the federal government. Little money has gone from Congress for digitization, and bureaucracies have resorted to a series of questionable private-public partnerships as a way of digitizing their materials. For example, the Government Accountability Office shipped 60 million pages of our Federal Legislative Histories (the record of each law from the initial bill through the hearings and conference reports) off to Thomson West, but didn't even get digital copies back. Another example is the recent failed effort by the Government Printing Office to digitize 60 million pages of the Federal Depository Library Program, an effort they tried to get through as a "zero dollar cost to the government" effort with the private sector. There are no free lunches and there are no "no cost to the government" deals. The costs involve the government effort to supervise the contract, prepare the materials, and ship them, and in both the GAO and GPO cases, the government wasn't getting much back for its effort. What the government and the people usually get is a lien on the public domain, preventing the public from accessing these vital materials. Similar efforts are sprinkled throughout the government. I testified to Congress that I had learned that the National Archives was contemplating a scan of congressional hearings with LexisNexis under similar circumstances, and many may be aware of the questionable deal the Archives cut with Amazon where my favorite online superstore got de facto exclusive rights to 1,899 wonderful pieces of video.Continue reading
UVA puts founding fathers’ papers online! (temporarily :-| )
[UPDATE: I spoke too soon. Seems that these are "early access" documents that "will be removed from this database, to be replaced by the fully edited version in the appropriate digital edition in the Rotunda American Founding Era collection."] Nice work U of Virginia! You can access the papers here. I hope this makes it into the FDLP digitization registry.
More than 200 years after they were written, some 5,000 previously unpublished documents of the founders of the United States — including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison — are at long last available to the public at no cost. The Documents Compass group of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia has spent much of the last year proofreading and transcribing thousands of pages of letters and other papers. The documents are now available online for free at the University of Virginia Press’ digital imprint called Rotunda... ...The online project is a federal pilot study that aims to expand public access to the papers of America’s founders. It is funded by a $250,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is a division of the National Archives.[Thanks Resource Shelf!] Continue reading
US Copyright office no fan of google book settlement
Building on our previous post about today's House hearing on digital books, it appears that Marybeth Peters, head of the US Copyright Office, is not supportive of the google book settlement. In written testimony (PDF) before the House Judiciary Committee, she wrote that the settlement...
“...inappropriately creates something similar to a compulsory license for works, unfairly alters the property interests of millions of rights-holders of out-of-print works without any Congressional oversight and has the capacity to create diplomatic stress for the United States.”For more, see today's Wallstreet Journal blog: "Copyright Office No Fan of Google Books Settlement." Continue reading
September 10: House Hearing on Digital Books
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on "Competition and Commerce in Digital Books" at 10 a.m. tomorrow, September 10. The hearing will be webcast; the link is on the committee's hearings calendar page. ALA has some information available on its site. See: Library Associations submit testimony... and the ALA Google Book Settlement page. Continue reading
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