My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed on the meta page:

 

1. 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 (I have visions of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally stored in some crate in an army warehouse).

 

2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost. Manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not OCRed easily. To make this information available, developers should be paid to create adequate OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5 million.

 

3. Music has been recorded around the world for well over a century, yet many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax cylinders and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating, identifying, and remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough cost: $35 million over two years.

 

4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely rare and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For example, [[Theda Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the word "vamp" was first used to describe her), yet none of her films survive, and they were made less than a hundred years ago. Films are international, they include important historic documents such as newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today, most preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly. In other words, they are taking important works now in the public domain, restoring them, and contending that the restoration is an original work, i.e., another hundred years at least until some Vigo or Charlie Chaplin films enter the public domain ... and little attention is being paid to newsreels of events like the Russian revolution, World War I, etc. Like music, people should be offered scholarships to learn the art of film restoration and work on these projects. Until this happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.

 

5. 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.

 

And there is competition too. As an example, 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.

 

Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.

 

Danny

 

 

 

In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time, jwales@wikia.com writes: