daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:
- There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain. Part
of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it all. In the case of books and magazines, digitization often involves destroying the hard copies in the process. There are, however, specialized scanners that can do the work without ruining the books themselves. These are expensive (about US $30,000 a machine). Ten machines, strategically located around the world, along with student staff to operate them around the clock could help to preserve these texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and volunteer) will be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to ensure that it doesn't get lost in a glut of material
All that scanning and OCR work could be quite tedious, and people might even need to be paid for this. As look as these workers don't develop an addiction to the money we provide it could work. These machines could go into key small institutions with significant archives who would appreciate having the machine. Perhaps they could even keep the machine once our work there is done. Students could be paid on a per semester contract basis, with renewal available when the previous year's targets are met.
- To ensure all of this remains accessible, we will need a LOT of servers
and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.
Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years. Costs include staffing, identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just coordinating a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.
A long term hardware optimization strategy would make interesting reading.
And there is competition too. As an example, _http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/_ (http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/) is a collection of Internation Women's Journals, some of which are very important historically. They are already scanned, but they are inaccessible because a private company has (rightfully or wrongfully) copyrighted the scans.
This is where we need to decide where we should and where we shouldn't co-operate. Our bottom line must remain to make everything accessible to everybody. If they insist on the proprietary nature of this material, or try to invoke database protection laws it might be necessary to scan our own copies of everything that they have.
Ec