Monday, November 24, 2008
Books Digital Libraries Will Never Catch On
Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:17 AM
The BBC informs us that the European Union launched an online library last week. It "includes paintings, photos, films, books, maps and manuscripts from 1,000 museums, national libraries and archives across Europe."
The site crashed soon after launching, however, because it was receiving more than ten million hits an hour, which is over twice what the site administrators expected.
"Thousands of users were searching for the words 'Mona Lisa' at the same time", explained a spokesman for the European Commission.
The site should be back up in mid-December. I know this is probably a low US priority right now, but in my dreams, this is one of Obama's job creation projects: an online Smithsonian with, basically, everything you'd be able to find in our libraries and museums. Certainly, this crash has proven that there is a demand for that sort of thing.
(Thanks to Slog tipper Davida.)
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Really? "Mona Lisa" is what you search for? Why not search for something that you haven't seen before? Can't you get that from a Google search?
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I would guess that significantly less than one one-millionth of a percent of human writing and painting has been digitized, despite the efforts of Google Books and similar efforts. Leaving aside all the stuff that's protected by copyright, there's still an infinity of material out there. If you've ever been unfortunate enough to do a lot of microfilm research, you know how little is on even that pathetic medium.
Then consider the tragic state of OCR currently, for indexing purposes. Much of what's out there, like the NYT historical archives, is just unreadable gobbledegook like "E forfv3 gg W!9snrt".
But yeah, me want.
Then consider the tragic state of OCR currently, for indexing purposes. Much of what's out there, like the NYT historical archives, is just unreadable gobbledegook like "E forfv3 gg W!9snrt".
But yeah, me want.
5
Continuing political news:
Tunrs out the gov. of Delaware is going to appoint Joe Biden's aid as the new senator.
Hmmm maybe we're back to the gameplan of having a placeholder there till Beau gets back from Iraq, so he can then take the spot?
Go Obama Machine!
Tunrs out the gov. of Delaware is going to appoint Joe Biden's aid as the new senator.
Hmmm maybe we're back to the gameplan of having a placeholder there till Beau gets back from Iraq, so he can then take the spot?
Go Obama Machine!
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Speaking as someone who's been working full-time on digital libraries for the better part of six years, let me say that this is difficult, time-consuming, and painstaking work. For every digital library hiccough like the Europeana crash, there are numerous successes. Where libraries have stumbled and fell is in trying to do too much by themselves.
Keep an eye out in April/May for the public debut of the World Digital Library. http://worlddigitallibrary.org/
Keep an eye out in April/May for the public debut of the World Digital Library. http://worlddigitallibrary.org/
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gk,
Not everyone is financially or physically able to go to see the Smithsonian collections. Especially since:
"Most of its facilities are located in Washington, D.C., but its 19 museums, zoo, and 9 research centers include sites in New York City, Virginia, Panama, and elsewhere."
And even if you can physically visit each site, most of the over 136 million items are not on display.
Not everyone is financially or physically able to go to see the Smithsonian collections. Especially since:
"Most of its facilities are located in Washington, D.C., but its 19 museums, zoo, and 9 research centers include sites in New York City, Virginia, Panama, and elsewhere."
And even if you can physically visit each site, most of the over 136 million items are not on display.
9
An online smithsonian like this one:
http://www.si.edu/research/ ?
(There is a tremendous amount of Smithsonian material that is fully searchable, viewable and downloadable. Try it out!)
http://www.si.edu/research/ ?
(There is a tremendous amount of Smithsonian material that is fully searchable, viewable and downloadable. Try it out!)
10
Re: Smithosonian. I was actually visiting their sites (Linked above) just last week. You see, back in the mid 80s I worked with them, many of the major museum on the idea of creating online, hypertext linked indexes of their vast image material.
How vast? Museum of American History? 6M images and 9 full time photographers on staff. Air and Space - 13 M images, not including video. Nat Geo (not part of Smithsonian) - 50M images. Library of Congress - they couldn't even guess back then what they had.
The scale of the task is daunting. They knew they could only digitize once, but with standards changing, and especially with resolution ever growing, when to do it, let alone how, was and remains a huge issue.
I believe almost any Museum would want to put its material on line. But there are practical (and in some reasons copyright/rights) issues preventing a major effort.
That is why I was stunned at even the drop in the bucket available now from all of them. The google/Life announcement is simply stunning in scale, but how long has it taken to digitize 10M images, all essentially in the same format? How many of them are already digital from the get go? And how effective is the initial indexing scheme?
This is going to be a long slow ride...
How vast? Museum of American History? 6M images and 9 full time photographers on staff. Air and Space - 13 M images, not including video. Nat Geo (not part of Smithsonian) - 50M images. Library of Congress - they couldn't even guess back then what they had.
The scale of the task is daunting. They knew they could only digitize once, but with standards changing, and especially with resolution ever growing, when to do it, let alone how, was and remains a huge issue.
I believe almost any Museum would want to put its material on line. But there are practical (and in some reasons copyright/rights) issues preventing a major effort.
That is why I was stunned at even the drop in the bucket available now from all of them. The google/Life announcement is simply stunning in scale, but how long has it taken to digitize 10M images, all essentially in the same format? How many of them are already digital from the get go? And how effective is the initial indexing scheme?
This is going to be a long slow ride...
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