In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
John
John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
Google might be interested. In principle, they will scan for Google Books everything you send them that is out of copyright. Also, perhaps the Million Book Project. Maybe descendants of owners, editors, or journalists of these newspapers will be interested to help too.
I'll notify some people.
I wish someone would support Project Runeberg or Project Gutenberg so they could scan them and make them _free_... John
Nikola Smolenski skrev:
John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
Google might be interested. In principle, they will scan for Google Books everything you send them that is out of copyright. Also, perhaps the Million Book Project. Maybe descendants of owners, editors, or journalists of these newspapers will be interested to help too.
I'll notify some people.
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On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:43 PM, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
I wish someone would support Project Runeberg or Project Gutenberg so they could scan them and make them _free_... John
Project Gutenberg is a depository and helps by providing mailing lists, but it doesnt *do* digitisation. Project Gutenberg Europe might be able to help you find someone.
Distributed Proofreaders (DP) is the project that does the hard work, and is where you will find people to help.
There is a DP Europe, but they dont appear to have produced many etexts; still - it is worth letting them know as someone might be looking for this golden opportunity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Proofreaders http://dp.rastko.net/
Internet Archive might also be able to help; I have forwarded your email to someone who works there.
-- John Vandenberg
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 2:59 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Distributed Proofreaders (DP) is the project that does the hard work, and is where you will find people to help.
There is a DP Europe, but they dont appear to have produced many etexts; still - it is worth letting them know as someone might be looking for this golden opportunity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Proofreaders http://dp.rastko.net/
In general, projects like this would go through the standard PGDP site. DP Europe is only used when the work is not in Latin script or in a language high in diacritics (PGDP works in Latin-1, using encoding for other characters (e.g. [>z] for ž), DP Europe works in Unicode) (it might also be used for works PD in Europe but not in the US, I'm not sure about that).
John at Darkstar wrote:
I wish someone would support Project Runeberg or Project Gutenberg so they could scan them and make them _free_...
Where are the newspapers now? How large (physically) is the collection? Can you (Wikimedia Norway) find funding for storing them for a few years? That could give you time to think of what to do. After this, you can either scan them, store them longer, or give up and throw them away.
You need to do the math. Things like square metres and months of rent should be easy to calculate. Is the sum reasonable? If you can find the money, would this be the best use for it? (Apparently, the library doesn't think so.)
Are the same newspapers available on microfilm, and which costs less: To buy a copy of the microfilm or to store the newspapers? Scanning the microfilm will require less man-hours and therefore be cheaper. It will still be a large project.
I have scanned some old books with sheet-feeding scanners, by cutting off the spine. These are books that I got for free or bought cheap, such as "The New Students' Reference Work" in Wikisource. The drawback is that I need to store the books. For this, I rent a small storage room of 14 square metres (13x11 ft), which is almost full. This is the tiny, hobbyist scale of Project Runeberg. It's a bit bigger than Wikisource, but much smaller than any real library.
For a larger digitization project, acquiring and storing books (or newspapers) is a real burden. It's a lot smarter to scan collections at libraries that you don't have to store. This is what Google does, and what the Internet Archive does.
All digitization projects today use digital cameras instead of scanners. Cameras have recently grown from 5 to 10 megapixels, making them useful for larger and larger books. Newspapers have huge pages and should best be captured with a 50 or 100 megapixel camera. These are not affordable today, but might be in 5 or 10 years time. It might be wise to scan small books now and wait with newspapers for later. This is exactly what Google has done.
On 9/24/08, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
I find that really sad. Newspapers are such a vital record of culture and time. Recently, the National Library of Australia launched a project, The Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, still in Beta, where they are scanning and making available to the public, Australian newspapers that are out of copyright. Here's the link > http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home and http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/. I really love the project and I've been helping with text corrections. It might give you some ideas, maybe a university or library in Norway would be willing to take on a similar project.
-Sarah
Sad thing is, its the university that wants to burn the newspapers.. John
Sarah Ewart skrev:
On 9/24/08, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
I find that really sad. Newspapers are such a vital record of culture and time. Recently, the National Library of Australia launched a project, The Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, still in Beta, where they are scanning and making available to the public, Australian newspapers that are out of copyright. Here's the link > http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home and http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/. I really love the project and I've been helping with text corrections. It might give you some ideas, maybe a university or library in Norway would be willing to take on a similar project.
-Sarah
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Just to make it clear that this is not a hoax, someone is actually planning to do this and has tried to do so also
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article2668021.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/ostlandssendingen/1.6229132 (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.tv2nyhetene.no/innenriks/article2235950.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.aftenposten.no/kul_und/article2666751.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
John
John at Darkstar skrev:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
I think the best thing to do is to scan them and make them publicly available. Of course neither I or WM Norway can set forth to do such a task, but if there should be some wealthy person out there that might be able to involve himself in such a task, I think it would be a very worthy gift to the mankind (where is the women!) to do such a thing.
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
John
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On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:53 PM, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
Just to make it clear that this is not a hoax, someone is actually planning to do this and has tried to do so also
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article2668021.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/ostlandssendingen/1.6229132 (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.tv2nyhetene.no/innenriks/article2235950.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
http://www.aftenposten.no/kul_und/article2666751.ece (in english translation http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=no%7Cen&u=http%3a%2f%2fww...)
And a condensed version of those, with additional information and in real English rather than babel-English:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Libricide_plans_on_ice_at_University_of_Oslo
The news article is still in development, with more expansion possible as described on the collaboration page.
Please translate into other languages to help spread the word.
-- John V
John at Darkstar wrote:
Just to make it clear that this is not a hoax, someone is actually planning to do this and has tried to do so also
I would never treat this sort of thing as a hoax. It is probably happening more frequently than we would like to believe. The BBC's dumping of a lot of old "Dr. Who" episodes falls into this.
Ec
2008/10/5 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
I would never treat this sort of thing as a hoax. It is probably happening more frequently than we would like to believe. The BBC's dumping of a lot of old "Dr. Who" episodes falls into this.
Ec
Not very comparable. The BBC archive wasn't meant to form a complete store of what they had broadcast but what they could reuse. Contracts meant that much of the material could not be reused.
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
Traditionally, old newspapers in libraries would be converted to microfiche, why aren't they doing that?
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
Traditionally, old newspapers in libraries would be converted to microfiche, why aren't they doing that?
With thousands of papers on backlog and limited manpower resources, it's probably far too large a task for them to start now. I'm surprised that they haven't looked into turning this into a profit source in some way, such as selling people newspapers from the day they were born (cost of the sale to cover conversion to microfiche and postage, at the very least), or something similar.
--Andrew Whitworth
2008/9/24 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
With thousands of papers on backlog and limited manpower resources, it's probably far too large a task for them to start now. I'm surprised that they haven't looked into turning this into a profit source in some way, such as selling people newspapers from the day they were born
Thing is, this is impractical. You need to keep everything in storage, and you need to keep it all accessible, it's just that every now and again you send out a tiny bit of the collection. It's essentially all the downsides of keeping the collection but with a small amount of your running costs covered.
The companies that do this tend to operate on very small margins, with large warehouses, and concentrating on small timeframes. Everything pre-1900 would be junked, for a start...
I don't know. Apparently someone just show up at the store house with a letter giving them the power to start the processing, and then it seems, someone called Aftenposten and the whole process was halted. Now it seems like everyone points to the technical director of UiO.
Sorry, this is a bit off topic for this list...
John
Thomas Dalton skrev:
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
Traditionally, old newspapers in libraries would be converted to microfiche, why aren't they doing that?
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2008/9/24 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
Traditionally, old newspapers in libraries would be converted to microfiche, why aren't they doing that?
It is quite possible that they already have been, or that a similar collection elsewhere has been done, at which point it becomes moot.
Alternately, it could be that they've said - well, thirty other institutions have these, we never use them, they're a dead weight in our collection so we need to dispose of them. (This is very convincing - all libraries always need more space, and freeing up 3km of shelving? It's a dream). If there are several other copies around, then there is no pressing need for *this* to be the collection that gets digitised - someone else, someone with funding, is probably already planning it.
I note that no other institution is interested in taking this collection. That, to me, would strongly suggest it isn't unique...
John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in
Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Regarding digitalization: That's the responsibility of the national library of origin of those newspapers. And most of them already are digitalized or are in the process or queued for it.
If those newspapers are the usual suspects I would expect in a Norwegian archive such as Svenska Dagbladet, Berlingske Tidende, Politiken, London Times, Le Monde, El Mundo, New York Times and Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Prawda, and so on, I would assume that all of them are available online and why should a Norwegian university spend time and money to create another copy?
Digitalization and online archives allow that not every research library in the world has to do the same job again and again.
Ciao Henning
2008/9/24 Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net:
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Centralised archives are kinda handy. Doesn't help that rather a lot of the others have been broken up.
They don't know what the collection contains. Several has tried to get an answare and basically no one knows. John
Henning Schlottmann skrev:
John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually burned)
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in
Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Regarding digitalization: That's the responsibility of the national library of origin of those newspapers. And most of them already are digitalized or are in the process or queued for it.
If those newspapers are the usual suspects I would expect in a Norwegian archive such as Svenska Dagbladet, Berlingske Tidende, Politiken, London Times, Le Monde, El Mundo, New York Times and Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Prawda, and so on, I would assume that all of them are available online and why should a Norwegian university spend time and money to create another copy?
Digitalization and online archives allow that not every research library in the world has to do the same job again and again.
Ciao Henning
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Henning's right, there's an excellent chance the papers in danger of destruction have no real need to be archived at all.
--David
On 9/24/08, John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no wrote:
They don't know what the collection contains. Several has tried to get an answare and basically no one knows. John
Henning Schlottmann skrev:
John at Darkstar wrote:
In Norway a university has a large collection of newspapers, the collection is claimed to cover around 3000 running meters in the store house - without the norwegian and nordic newspapers, whats left is international newspapers from the last 150 years. If no one is coming up with a solution the collection is going to be destructed (actually
burned)
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in
Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Regarding digitalization: That's the responsibility of the national library of origin of those newspapers. And most of them already are digitalized or are in the process or queued for it.
If those newspapers are the usual suspects I would expect in a Norwegian archive such as Svenska Dagbladet, Berlingske Tidende, Politiken, London Times, Le Monde, El Mundo, New York Times and Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Prawda, and so on, I would assume that all of them are available online and why should a Norwegian university spend time and money to create another copy?
Digitalization and online archives allow that not every research library in the world has to do the same job again and again.
Ciao Henning
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On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:42 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Well, then I see absolutely nothing wrong with burning them. One might want to check if archives of those papers exist in their country of origin, but if so, there simply is no need to preserve warehouses full of dead trees.
Someone should perhaps ask that the papers to be recycled rather than burnt :)
Henning Schlottmann wrote:
From these words I understand that the Norwegian papers (and those in Norwegian language) will be preserved, and the destruction only concerns international papers in other languages. Is that correct?
Yes.
Regarding digitalization: That's the responsibility of the national library of origin of those newspapers. And most of them already are digitalized or are in the process or queued for it.
There might still be a case, though. The microfilming and scanning of Swedish newspapers is handled by the Royal Library in Stockholm. But they might not share the digital images, for various bureaucratic or prestigeous reasons, or they might delay the sharing. Acquiring a separate copy in Norway that we can scan and make free earlier could actually be useful. But it would be expensive and we would need to find funding for that project.
(You can apply this reasoning for any pair of countries.)
Right now, the State of California is claiming copyright to the text of its legislation and Internet pioneer Carl Malamud has started a campaign to change this ruling. This is an example of how even a very progressive state like California can sometimes be extremely backwards.
A similar case was taking place in Sweden in the 1990s. While not copyrighted, the only electronic copy of Swedish laws was available only as a modem subscription service from the parliament's printing office for about 1000 dollars per year. They are not a for-profit company, but they claimed that this was only covering the costs and couldn't possibly be done any cheaper.
After the parliament decided in 1996 that this should be made available for free over the Internet, the printing office started a telnet service, where you could search and read the laws in a text terminal window. The decision didn't state "web", only "Internet", so this was formally correct but still a huge disappointment. This is when I started a Perl (expect) script to access the telnet interface and download all the texts (70 megabytes of text in 6000 documents), then convert them to static HTML pages and provide them on the web. You can still find them here,
http://web.archive.org/web/19970227225251/www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/sfs/nu...
Soon after this, the parliament's printing office started to develop its own web interface, which was opened in the summer of 1997, http://rixlex.riksdagen.se/
One can only wonder how long they would have delayed that action if I hadn't "helped" them to get started.
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
John
The collection of international stuff isn't that unique. Although intact collections are increasingly rare. There is I understand at least something of a market for old newspapers so unless the place has serious access issues burning would be an odd choice.
They say it perts of it is complete, but how can they claim that and at the same time say they don't know what the collection contains?
John
geni skrev:
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
When I heard of this I was shocked. Most of us are. I've infact studied with the university that attempted tu burn the newspapers. The plans have been stalled for now, but some permanent solution has to be found.
John
The collection of international stuff isn't that unique. Although intact collections are increasingly rare. There is I understand at least something of a market for old newspapers so unless the place has serious access issues burning would be an odd choice.
2008/9/24 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no:
They say it perts of it is complete, but how can they claim that and at the same time say they don't know what the collection contains?
John
Oh pretty easy. Big collections often have poor cataloging. Even if you know what you've got beyond "most stuff between years a and b published by x" that doesn't mean you know where it is.
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