[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

[Lars Aronsson]

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/nummer.html

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.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/