I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-...
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.
2011/10/14 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-...
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
On 14 October 2011 21:10, David Gerard dgerard@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-...
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 wrote:
On 14 October 2011 21:10, David Gerard dgerard@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-...
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?)
My view is that they should be kept, at least to assist in applying verifiability policies, and if necessary, assessing neutrality. Not every source is online, nor is necessarily going to be, even with increasing digitisation of original sources. Copyright time limits mean that it may be many years before they are eligible for Wikisource, or Commons, and in the meantime, we seem to be limited to online extracts, citations in other works, or the originals. This is particularly true of ephemeral media such as newspapers, although I am aware that the British Library only has issues going back to 1840 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library#Newspapers), but that might be enough for most purposes.
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.
I agree, but we have no way of knowing. However, lots of non-fiction is never going to achieve notability, so that may not be a great loss.
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.
Similarly, state-controlled/funded archives are vulnerable, in the extreme, to manipulation and/or destruction. And in the UK at least, all significant archives (British Library/local libraries/universities) are pretty dependent on public funding. Without a truly independent, privately funded, more or less complete archive of everything, there is always a risk of attrition for one reason or another.
On 15 October 2011 00:49, Phil Nash phnash@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
My view is that they should be kept, at least to assist in applying verifiability policies, and if necessary, assessing neutrality.
I'm not sure that libraries are too worried about Wikipedia's verifiability policies
I agree, but we have no way of knowing.
Of course we do. You don't have to pay that much attention to your local library service to know what is going on.
However, lots of non-fiction is never going to achieve notability, so that may not be a great loss.
Not so. It's precisely the obscure stuff that tends to suffer from the "written down and then forgotten" problem.
Similarly, state-controlled/funded archives are vulnerable, in the extreme, to manipulation and/or destruction. And in the UK at least, all significant archives (British Library/local libraries/universities) are pretty dependent on public funding. Without a truly independent, privately funded, more or less complete archive of everything, there is always a risk of attrition for one reason or another.
Private archives have far worse records. Long term archiving gets seriously expensive if done on any scale. On the plus side the rather temporary nature of private archives means more availability of material through second hand sellers.
Governments tend to be pretty good at keeping archives. They last longer and since they tend to be aware that they need to know what went on even if their population doesn't they do tend to hold an tampered archive somewhere. Shear size also makes serious messing difficult. Shear size does however cause things to be lost. I'm still not sure where the old coal board archives ended up.
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.
Amir E. Aharoni, 14/10/2011 23:01:
- 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.
Well, I think it's worse than what one can understand from that article; but other problems are even worse.
- Since Cracked is rather popular, this is an opportunity to
publicize Wikisource, one of Wikimedia most wonderful endeavors.
I doubt it.
It is criminally under-publicized now.
Sure.
- 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?
http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/ I don't think anyone else could do it currently: you need to think in the scale of millions books. The good news is that the IA needs only few millions dollars for such a project, perhaps they'll be able to replicate it in Europe. Or, let's hope that some public entity will copy their pragmatic approach. In my university we managed to save some thousands books which should have been destroyed, selling them to students. Perhaps we managed to keep it a zero losses operation, but it still needed some lobbying, a bureaucratic niche (it's not so easy to sell public properties) and most of all a very committed librarian. But, note that nobody will ever take our hundreds (thousands?) of shelf-meters of super-old medicine journals. Perhaps we'll find some millions euros to build a new deposit where they'll be piled up in a huge compactus nobody will ever access, just for the sake of preservation, but it's more likely that they'll just rot where they are without any decision, until we'll be forced to throw them away even according the most generous librarian standards.
Finally, this is just a minor problem, if you think of the hundreds of thousands of uncataloged books piled up in the damp cellars of the Florence National Central Library, going rot for lack of funds... just to mention the biggest Italian example, because it's the same everywhere.
Nemo
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