I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
1. Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold" http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
2. National Libraries might have the duty to digitize newspapers but if they don't do it or if they cooperate with toll access companies like the British Library http://newspapers.bl.uk/? The Public Domain belongs to us all!
Klaus Graf http://archiv.twoday.net
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Klaus Graf klausgraf@googlemail.com wrote:
I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
- Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
This is probably true (I've never read that book, but the statement makes sense), but given the option between digitization and burning, or just straight burning, the former is the more attractive. I still can't get my mind around the fact that burning the papers is the first and preferred option here.
--Andrew Whitworth
2008/9/25 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Klaus Graf klausgraf@googlemail.com wrote:
I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
- Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
This is probably true (I've never read that book, but the statement makes sense), but given the option between digitization and burning, or just straight burning, the former is the more attractive. I still can't get my mind around the fact that burning the papers is the first and preferred option here.
It's not so much the preferred option - I doubt they actually *want* to do it - as the only practical option.
If you have no institution willing to take them off your hands, then you can either continue to spend resources on storing a collection no-one wants, or you can free up the space and do something useful with it. Digitisation will free up the space eventually (since you can junk them afterwards), but it's expensive - who's going to pay for it? Will the library have to store them for the next five years whilst they're digitised? Who takes on the ongoing costs of maintaining the digital archive?
It's a truism in the library world that the only time anyone makes a noise about caring about a book is when you try to get rid of it. This seems to be a classic example.
If you want these resources to be preserved, we need to *use them*. Make a point of saying how good it is we have these collections. Find interesting uses for them. Do research, do transcriptions, discuss digitising or opening collections which are currently in storage. This approach, more than anything else, will ensure they get valued; and if they're valued, they're kept.
Only expressing interest when they're going for the skip is perhaps too late to be of any real use.
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
It's not so much the preferred option - I doubt they actually *want* to do it - as the only practical option.
If you have no institution willing to take them off your hands, then you can either continue to spend resources on storing a collection no-one wants, or you can free up the space and do something useful with it. Digitisation will free up the space eventually (since you can junk them afterwards), but it's expensive - who's going to pay for it? Will the library have to store them for the next five years whilst they're digitised? Who takes on the ongoing costs of maintaining the digital archive?
I should have listed more options! Burning is striking as such a symbolic action: You're not just putting them in the trash, or in a recycle bin, you're destroying them at a chemical level so that they can never be reused or reclaimed. Probably won't even generate any electricity from the situation.
A better option (in my estimation) would be to put up a website or some kind of notice: "These papers must go! Pay shipping and we'll send them anywhere. Come by with a truck and we'll give you all you can carry. Within a reasonable time limit, we will do anything to save these papers that isn't a drain on our time or budget". This is different from us finding out through a mailing list that the papers are on their way to the fires.
It's a truism in the library world that the only time anyone makes a noise about caring about a book is when you try to get rid of it. This seems to be a classic example.
I would say that it's hard to care about something you don't know about. I didn't know that this collection of papers even existed until the email telling us about the fire solution. You are right though, knowing that a historical resource exists somewhere is not nearly so positive as knowing that it won't exist anymore is a negative. I personally am driven by the motivation that the people who might care about it the most aren't even born yet, my children who won't have access to these papers, no matter how much my generation has ignored them. Preserving for future generations is a cause that only needs to be taken up for things which are not being well-preserved (or not being preserved any longer).
Unfortunately, since I don't have a big fat checkbook, or any close contacts who do, it's a moot point. Money is the driver of all things, and if Money wills it, the papers will end up in the fire.
--Andrew Whitworth --Andrew Whitworth
It is not that people, and researchers, don't want access to the newspapers, they are not allowed to access them. Even a doctorand that wanted to get access to them to do a study on some of the letters written by Henrik Ibsen was refused to get access, because as they said, "the newspapers are in the store".
Due to restructuring of the norwegian military a lot of space are freed up in the old military compounds. It seems rather special that there are a lot of state-owned storage space nearby and at the same time the university claims they don't have enough storage area.
John
Andrew Gray skrev:
2008/9/25 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Klaus Graf klausgraf@googlemail.com wrote:
I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
- Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
This is probably true (I've never read that book, but the statement makes sense), but given the option between digitization and burning, or just straight burning, the former is the more attractive. I still can't get my mind around the fact that burning the papers is the first and preferred option here.
It's not so much the preferred option - I doubt they actually *want* to do it - as the only practical option.
If you have no institution willing to take them off your hands, then you can either continue to spend resources on storing a collection no-one wants, or you can free up the space and do something useful with it. Digitisation will free up the space eventually (since you can junk them afterwards), but it's expensive - who's going to pay for it? Will the library have to store them for the next five years whilst they're digitised? Who takes on the ongoing costs of maintaining the digital archive?
It's a truism in the library world that the only time anyone makes a noise about caring about a book is when you try to get rid of it. This seems to be a classic example.
If you want these resources to be preserved, we need to *use them*. Make a point of saying how good it is we have these collections. Find interesting uses for them. Do research, do transcriptions, discuss digitising or opening collections which are currently in storage. This approach, more than anything else, will ensure they get valued; and if they're valued, they're kept.
Only expressing interest when they're going for the skip is perhaps too late to be of any real use.
On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 06:30 +0200, John at Darkstar wrote:
It is not that people, and researchers, don't want access to the newspapers, they are not allowed to access them. Even a doctorand that wanted to get access to them to do a study on some of the letters written by Henrik Ibsen was refused to get access, because as they said, "the newspapers are in the store".
Due to restructuring of the norwegian military a lot of space are freed up in the old military compounds. It seems rather special that there are a lot of state-owned storage space nearby and at the same time the university claims they don't have enough storage area.
John
"We are storing these resources so we can deny people access to it in the future..."
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:30 PM, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
It is not that people, and researchers, don't want access to the newspapers, they are not allowed to access them. Even a doctorand that wanted to get access to them to do a study on some of the letters written by Henrik Ibsen was refused to get access, because as they said, "the newspapers are in the store".
Due to restructuring of the norwegian military a lot of space are freed up in the old military compounds. It seems rather special that there are a lot of state-owned storage space nearby and at the same time the university claims they don't have enough storage area.
Please add your personal knowledge to the collaboration page of the Wikinews report, which has now been translated into Spanish and Cech.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Libricide_plans_on_ice_at_University_of_Oslo
If we obtain a significant amount of new information, I'll write a follow-up story.
-- John V
Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?
This was intended to the French Kabaal, sorry.
And for the one who doesn't understand French, I was asking if there was anyway to estimate the cost of the digitization of those newspaper.
Christophe
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?
This was intended to the French Kabaal, sorry.
And for the one who doesn't understand French, I was asking if there was anyway to estimate the cost of the digitization of those newspaper.
The Colorado State Library gives a rough estimate of $1.25 per page plus overheads (overall indexing, etc)
http://www.oclc.org/news/events/presentations/2006/microfilm_june2006.ppt
A South Dakota project likewise suggests ~$2
http://library.sd.gov/sdnewspaperdigitization/history.htm
Estimates are a bit fuzzy, because most digitisation is not done direct from newspapers (which are bulky and not routinely scanned) but from microfilm, which there's a much better-understood workflow to handle and which imposes a lot less physical overhead.
An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily reduced.
www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspapers.pdf
Cornell quote $5-10,000 for a single year of a daily newspaper (albeit one that only printed during academic terms, so say $10-15,000 for a "real" daily)
http://newspapers.library.cornell.edu/costs.html
On a more upbeat note, doing the research for this I found reference to a pan-Scandinavian newspaper digitisation program called "Tiden" - "...a collaborative project of the Helsinki University Library, the National Library of Sweden, Statsbiblioteket - the Danish State and University Library in Aarhus, and the National Library of Norway for the digitisation of newspapers on microfilm" - but I can't easily find any more details on it, and the website given has vanished. I suspect this may be the project that means no-one wants to digitise this particular collection...
2008/10/2 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily reduced. www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspapers.pdf
How much would just raw scans cost?
- d.
2008/10/2 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2008/10/2 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily reduced. www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspapers.pdf
How much would just raw scans cost?
I suspect on the order of $1-2 a page - the same as the US scans are getting - with the conversion and OCR run as a batch job on the whole set. Goodness only knows who's doing the indexing...
This is outsourcing, anyway - the Irish one seems to be an entirely in-house project, which would presumably explain the high costs.
The National library and the University library at UiO is not the same. Some of the newspapers in Norway are digitizing the old archives, and I could check out the cost tomorrow. As I recall they had a discussion, and I think they both discussed digitizing from microfilm and from real scans. Parts of one of those collections already existed on microfilm. Interesting enough, several newspapers are digitizing their collections. John
Andrew Gray skrev:
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?
This was intended to the French Kabaal, sorry.
And for the one who doesn't understand French, I was asking if there was anyway to estimate the cost of the digitization of those newspaper.
The Colorado State Library gives a rough estimate of $1.25 per page plus overheads (overall indexing, etc)
http://www.oclc.org/news/events/presentations/2006/microfilm_june2006.ppt
A South Dakota project likewise suggests ~$2
http://library.sd.gov/sdnewspaperdigitization/history.htm
Estimates are a bit fuzzy, because most digitisation is not done direct from newspapers (which are bulky and not routinely scanned) but from microfilm, which there's a much better-understood workflow to handle and which imposes a lot less physical overhead.
An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily reduced.
www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspapers.pdf
Cornell quote $5-10,000 for a single year of a daily newspaper (albeit one that only printed during academic terms, so say $10-15,000 for a "real" daily)
http://newspapers.library.cornell.edu/costs.html
On a more upbeat note, doing the research for this I found reference to a pan-Scandinavian newspaper digitisation program called "Tiden" - "...a collaborative project of the Helsinki University Library, the National Library of Sweden, Statsbiblioteket - the Danish State and University Library in Aarhus, and the National Library of Norway for the digitisation of newspapers on microfilm" - but I can't easily find any more details on it, and the website given has vanished. I suspect this may be the project that means no-one wants to digitise this particular collection...
do you think in a direction of putting a dedicated point on this years fundraiser page and give a dedicated accoiunt + contact person for this?
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:
2008/10/2 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:
Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation d'une telle collection ?
This was intended to the French Kabaal, sorry.
And for the one who doesn't understand French, I was asking if there was anyway to estimate the cost of the digitization of those newspaper.
Christophe _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2008/9/25 Klaus Graf klausgraf@googlemail.com:
I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
- Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
I sympathise greatly with his viewpoint, but I wouldn't go so far as to say his book clearly "shows" anything beyond that he is passionate on the subject. It's a polemic, not an analysis; I gave up reading it half-way through because I was becoming frustrated with the one-sided approach.
- National Libraries might have the duty to digitize newspapers but
if they don't do it or if they cooperate with toll access companies like the British Library http://newspapers.bl.uk/? The Public Domain belongs to us all!
The budgets of libraries, especially big institutions, are shrinking continually. We can't just say "oh, they should do this, they should do that" - the money has to come from somewhere.
Digitisation isn't cheap; cataloguing and indexing of digitised material isn't cheap. If these institutions don't get additional funds from somewhere for the explicit purpose of digitisation, then they'll *only* be able to do it as a commercial venture like that, or as some kind of partnership program (as with Google &c).
Klaus Graf wrote:
I fully disagree with Schlottmann.
- Nicholas Baker has shown in its book "Double Fold"
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/doublefold that microfilms are not a substitution for the original newspapers. And digitization isn't, too.
- National Libraries might have the duty to digitize newspapers but
if they don't do it or if they cooperate with toll access companies like the British Library http://newspapers.bl.uk/? The Public Domain belongs to us all!
Of course, scans and microfilms are no substitute for the originals, but the one dimension that hasn't yet been mentioned in this thread is that newspapers are printed on newsprint, a highly acidic cheap grade of paper. It's expected that once a newspaper has been read it will be discarded. Under those circumstances there is no need to print on high quality paper or with pH neutral inks. Even if you keep this in storage it may very well be that when someone finally wants to use it it will just crumble in his hands when he tries to pick it up. Deacidification at that point will not reverse the damage; it will only buffer the acids and keep things from getting worse. Preserving it then may require expert archival techniques normally reserved for the most valuable of documents, such as page-by-page encapsulation.
I agree with National Libraries having the duty to digitize, but I think that the breadth of the task is overwhelming even for a well funded library. Unless and until they are willing to trust amateurs to do most of the work it will be an impossible task.
Ec
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