Put it all online
I had the opportunity of sitting with Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Library of Alexandria at a session at the STS Forum. He told me a story about a fellow educator and librarian who was dismayed that students were only citing things that they could find on the Internet and were no longer using physical libraries. Ismail said that he disagreed. He told me that he felt that students using the Internet were correct and that it was the libraries that needed to make more material available online. I totally agree. (He also said he was a fan of Wikipedia.) So it’s good news that:
Matt Haughey @ CC Blog30 Million newspapers to be put online
Great news for the public domain: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress are putting 30 million newspaper pages online, dating from 1836 to 1922.
It’ll take until 2006 to complete the project but the Library of Congress has put up a sample from The Stars and Stripes, an armed forces paper, posting every issue from 1918-1919.
(Via Joi Ito’s Web.)
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all great news. but i suppose it is much like the online archives of the norfolk and western railroad in the end, they exist online, but no one can find them and if they can find them, they might not find them of particular value for any given reason under the sun. in short, there is a difference between putting things online and putting things online and making them useful.
