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Bookmobile Day 1: Free? What does “free” mean?
James Jacobs, Sarah Washburn from Techsoup and I (Shinjoung Yeo) are currently on a tour around CA driving the Internet Archive's bookmobile for 2 weeks and visiting 10 rural libraries in Northern California. Please stop back here or at Sarah's blog for pictures and updates of our adventures.
Our first stop today was the Placer County Library in Auburn, CA. After having breakfast at Awful annie's in Auburn's old town (it's not awful at all so you should check it out!) we drove to the library. Delightfully all the staff were excited and waiting for us to see the Bookmobile. Everyone was extremeley curious about the technology that we're carrrying to download, print, bind, cut and make books (especially satellite on the top of the bookmobile which is not quite working but is well-used for a prop :-) ) and how we're able to make books on a fly.
As any well-trained bookmobilista knows, the first thing you need is power, so we pulled up to the front of the library and finally found a plug by pulling our power cord through the bookdrop. You never know how book drop box can be used when the bookmobile's in town!
Despite being a little remote from Auburn's downtown area, the library was very lively and heavily-used by community members. As soon as we set up the table around 10am, there was a steady stream of people stopping by and asking us questions. Surprising (or *not* so surprising in living in capitialist society!) one of the most common questions that we were asked was what we were selling. We told them that we were not selling anything but promoting free public domain books which are freely available to everyone at archive.org. One person, obviously still a little confused about our intentions, asked again if we were selling machines ( referring to our heavy duty cutter, bookbinding machines we use to demonstrate how to make a book). We told the person no (kindly), but he persisted and asked if we were selling software. It was not just one person asking questions like this, but more than 50% who dropped by asked similar questions. Maybe we should have put a tip jar out; that may have alleviated their cognitive dissonence :-)
We noticed that some people couldn't grasp the concept of FREE. Just free with no "but" and no ginsu steak knives. It makes you wonder. I think we are all well-trained in our market-oriented society to think that there are producers and consumers and there seems to be no room for FREE between them.
While we were promoting FREE public domain books it might be our chance to educate our community about what should be "FREE" - free books, free library, free health care, free eductation, free government documents(!) ....
Here are some photos from our first day and you will see some government documents as well.
Tomorrow we will be setting up the bookmobile in the town of Quincy, California [pop.4,300, 90% White].
Please check back for progress reports and photos. We'll be on the road until September 15, 2007. We'd love to hear your comments on our trip.
Continue readingBPE 2007 – Brewster Kahle
As I mentioned in my previous posting on the 2007 Best Practices Exchange, we had two keynote speakers.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was our second keynote and was an inspiration for those of us trying to be good custodians of electronic government information. Brewster told us that our generation had the opportunity to build "Universal Access to All Knowledge" that will be "Free to All." He then worked his way through different kinds of tangible media to demonstrate how they could be digitized cheaply and easily. He waived away copyright concerns, which I accepted since he was talking in terms of technology.
I found Brewster most convincing about digitizing audio and video. He estimated that it would take roughly 20-40 million dollars to digitize existing analog audio and noted that the Internet Archive already had 100,000 items in over 100 collections. Moving images could be scanned at the rate of $200/hr and video for $15/hr.
I found him the least convincing about digitizing text, even though he seemingly spent the most effort on it.
Briefly, he stated that the Library of Congress held 28 million books containing about 28TB of data. At the current cost of hard disk storage, just $60,000 would be enough to store all 28 million books. The Internet Archive has been able to make great strides in digitizing equipment and Brewster said that they can digitize 12,000 books a month at a cost of $30/book. He stated that at those costs, the entire LC collection could be scanned for approximately $800,000,000, a very reasonable figure.
However, he failed to mention that at a rate of 12,000 books a month, it would take a little over 194 years to digitize 28 million books. That figure might have been in the back of Brewster's mind because he stated that although $800 million would be enough to digitize all of the Library of Congress, digitizing one million books might be enough to significantly advance knowledge. This figure could be accomplished in as little as seven years and aside from social/political concerns is very doable.
About those concerns, Brewster faced them head on after taking us through the technology. He quoted someone as saying that "technology is easy, people are hard!" He talked about the Internet Archives work in fighting the seemingly
unlimited extensions of copyright and their efforts bringing orphan works into the public domain. He framed the issue as one of whether the future should be public or private; open or proprietary. Perhaps the right phrase, Brewster suggested is "public or perish." He certainly won't get an argument from us folks at Free Government Information on that.
A few other items from his talk:
- The $100 laptop is real. Well, it's $175, but it is real and has a very clear readout. Brewster passed around a laptop with a children's e-book on it. You paged through it with buttons.
- The Internet Archive has developed a bookbinding machine that can print books fro $0.01/page or a 300 page book for $3.00. We saw slides of the machine in action in the developing world. We saw a finished product and it seemed like a decent binding.
- A library at the University of Illinois is scanning items from their microfilm collection at the rate of 10-30 reels a day. Internet Archive provided the scanning equipment free and the library provides staffing.
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