Another state attack on information access here. Amusingly the unnamed bureacrat trying to close off free access used a definition swiped from Wikipedia in the proposal. Thanks to slash.dot for info.
Category: Information access
The EU doesn’t get the internet, it seems
The US Google Books and Archive.org are free. The EU equivalent charges readers money. That tells us everything we need to know about the EU.
How many of us were aware that there *was* an EU official alternative? few, I imagine. But today I learned about it: Books2EBooks. It’s a glossy site, paid for by levies on taxpayers who didn’t get a vote on it (like all EU projects). The site is full of guff about how wonderful, wonderful the internet is. Get books from EU libraries, it boasts! Only in the small print is buried the fact that, yes, you have to BUY them from the site. How really, really FUNNY!
Most of the libraries are German, and their holdings were paid for by the taxpayer. This is more evidence that the Germans really don’t get the internet. Or — to be fair — that officialdom in Germany doesn’t get it.
We all know that the internet is about free access to information. US libraries are cooperating to make their holdings accessible freely online. Individuals like myself donate our time to creating archives of material.
But here, ten years after the web started, these greedy bureaucrats stir their hulking hog-like bodies, swollen with tax dollars exacted from the helpless for necessary services and diverted to themselves. They look at Archive.org, which is free, and see only a chance to make a bit of money for themselves by selling copies of out-of-copyright books in their holdings. Do they hate people? Or are they merely greedy?
Isn’t the EU contemptible? Let’s thank our lucky stars we don’t live in Germany.
Arabic texts online in Arabic
A notice from BYZANS-L:
On 09/03/2009, Alexander Hourany wrote:
Here are some websites that contain free online versions of old Arabic sources like the history of al-Tabari and many others. Although some of them contain typing errors, they are very usefull in textual search.
al-Meshkat library site:
http://www.almeshkat.net/books/index.php
Yasoob al-Din library: http://www.yasoob.com/
al-Mostafa library: http://www.al-mostafa.com/
Now all we need is someone who knows Arabic to look at these and tell us what is there!
Arabic manuscripts in the British Library on micro-fiche
I learned today that all the Arabic manuscripts in the British Library were filmed and placed on micro-fiche. Apparently an Arab princeling paid for it, but great news. Less good news is that the set is available from IDC, offline, at the usual inflated prices (ca. $180,000). Remarkable really, considering that their investment is nil. They seem to have fiches of other collections too, such as SOAS.
I’ve never had much luck getting access to IDC microfiches. Does anyone know of a copy, somewhere that one could get copies of particular manuscripts in some usable form?
The March 2009 Bloodsucker award winner — the Bibliothèque Nationale Français
In early January I ordered images from the Bibliothèque Nationale Français of a manuscript of the unpublished 13th century Arabic Christian historian, al-Makin. Today I received a CDROM containing two PDF’s. The PDF’s were simply scans of a low-grade black-and-white microfilm, of about the same quality as a Google books scan. One was 40Mb, the other 10Mb. Together they totalled 640 images. I also received my credit card bill; these two files cost me $400.
My feelings may be imagined. At such prices, obtaining several manuscripts is impossible. And… for that obscene price, could they not have photographed the things in colour? The black and white images, of course, don’t scale. The rubrics are lost in the text. Quite how I print these things I do not know.
Oh yes. Want a copy? Well, they sent me a legal notice saying I can’t give you one. You have to pay them again, if you want to see them. These, remember, are publicly owned manuscripts!
This is disgusting. So, with all these reasons in m ind, I award the Bibliothèque Nationale Français the second Bloodsucker award.
I will award it, ad hoc, to institutions in receipt of state funding which in order to make money violate their primary directive; to make books available and promote learning.
Well done, chaps. May you all rot in the hell reserved for those who knowingly obstruct the progress of learning.
My previous award was to the John Rylands Library in 2008, also for making it impossibly expensive to obtain a usable copy of a manuscript of al-Makin.
Postscript: I have now discovered that the photographs are of two-page spreads. Most of the images have a large black band down the centre of the opening, wide enough to obscure the text on the inner margins. Guess what? Being black on white, this means that the ends of the words are all unreadable. And this, for $400. I have been forced to write back and point this out. I may have to involve VISA, to recover money for substandard merchandise. What’s the betting that they simply try to get me to pay yet more money?
UPDATE 6th March 2009: No reply from the BNF. I’ve now written again and threatened (politely) to go to VISA for a refund.
Google to digitize every book in the world
A story this morning in the New York Times: that Google is placing adverts in print media all around the world, large and small, trying to find the owners of copyrights, as part of its agreement with publishers to handle in-copyright material.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first they must be found. Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print. …
The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.
I had wondered whether Google was pushing forward with Google Books, now that Microsoft has pulled out of Live Books, but it seems so. Very good news. And this, remember, is for books that are in copyright.
Thanks to Slash.dot for the tip.
Koln archive building falls into large hole in ground
According to the report on the English pages of Der Spiegel, the 1971 building collapsed. Work on the tube line running under the front wall may be responsible. Loads of documents may be lost, some dating back to 922 AD. It’s unclear whether any medieval manuscripts will have gone west. More here (in German), which links to a PDF showing pages of a 9/10th century gospel manuscript on p.20 of the PDF.
I bet that they didn’t allow anyone to photograph them first. In most disasters, the fire brigade are called in to saturate the building with water, just in case any documents escaped. That usually finishes them off!
UPDATE: The Cologne Archive is currently asking for volunteers in the area to help with the disaster recovery. If you are interested in helping out, please see the archive website: http://www.koelner-stadtarchiv.de/index.html
The future of online research
An important article here in Digital Humanities from Greg Crane of Perseus, looking at where we are and where we go with collections like Archive.org and Perseus. It includes discussion of experiments with OCR’ing Ancient Greek, and an image of the Venetus A manuscript of Homer.
Internet Archive blog
There is a blog for the Internet Archive (archive.org). It’s here, and I’ve added it as a link.
Three Israeli bible mss available for download
At Paleojudaica I learned of this message from Elhanan Adler:
The National Library of Israel, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project, is pleased to announce the digitization of three of the Library’s most important Bible manuscripts… The manuscripts are presented in the DjVu format which provides high quality, magnifiable images compressed into relatively small files for easy downloading. In order to view DjVu images it is necessary to download and install (once) a special free viewer program.
This is a red letter day. A major library has made manuscripts available in a downloadable, easy-to-use format. Well done, boys! That is what we want to see.