April 2012
“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.”
—Fahrenheit 451 (via livs4life)
Techdirt: Cultural Insanity: You Can't Show the Painting in a Movie Without Paying a Copyright Holder →
techdirt.com
“The NY Times has an article about yet another ridiculous bit of copyright law, the fact that moviemakers have to license artwork, even if they own the physical piece to show it in a movie. And it gets even worse, when you find out that the ridiculous position of the Artists Rights Society (think the RIAA/MPAA for artists) is that the newly released 3D version of Titanicneeds a new license, because its use of artwork is somehow not covered by the original license…
Why do we let this kind of craziness happen? Why don’t we, as a society, stand up and point out that it makes no sense. If you have possession of the painting, why shouldn’t you be allowed to use it in a movie? Even if you don’t have the painting. How is having that painting in the movie, in any way, harming the economic value of the painting? The answer is that it is not. If anything, it’s increasing the prestige and value of the painting… and it’s doing all of that for free. ”
“Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
—Ray Bradbury (via roscoe-)
“Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries. Harvard can’t put the actual content of much of this material online, owing to intellectual property laws, but this so-called metadata of things like titles, publication or recording dates, book sizes or descriptions of what is in videos is also considered highly valuable. Frequently descriptors of things like audio recordings are more valuable for search engines than the material itself. Search engines frequently rely on metadata over content, particularly when it cannot easily be scanned and understood. Harvard is hoping other libraries allow access to the metadata on their volumes, which could be the start of a large and unique repository of intellectual information. “This is Big Data for books,” said David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard’s Library Lab. “There might be 100 different attributes for a single object.” At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, he said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a “virtual stack” of related volumes garnered from various locations.”
—Harvard Releases Big Data for Books - NYTimes.com (via dwattersw)
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Books have worked the same way, more or less, for centuries. They are a remarkably intuitive technology. Open, read, close. “Or if you have a photo album, you know exactly what that is,” says Bill LeFurgy, who works for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library. “It’s self-evident. It’s self-describing.”
Now consider the disc, compact or floppy. The disc is not intuitive. The disc may contain photographs, but the disc will not show them to you unless you know how to open it — which, as everyone relocates to the Cloud, will become an increasingly antique skill. In 75 years, the disc will be modern civilization’s hieroglyph; the Rosetta Stone will be the yellowed user manual of an Apple IIe.
While books have endured unchanged, other forms of technology have bred with the speed of invertebrate insects, multiple generations each decade: 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, flash drives, Google docs, Pinterest boards — old things abandoned for new things in increasingly short life cycles.
“I worry about this,” LeFurgy says.
” —Library of Congress’s collection preserves history of American culture (via thelifeguardlibrarian)