The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database. Neither Google nor anyone else will fuse the proprietary databases of early books and the local systems created by individual archives into one accessible store of information. Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention.And this from an earlier post in if:book:
We are in the midst of a historic "upload," a frenetic rush to transfer the vast wealth of analog culture to the digital domain. Mass digitization of print, images, sound and film/video proceeds apace through the efforts of actors public and private, and yet it is still barely understood how the media of the past ought to be preserved, presented and interconnected for the future. How might we bring the records of our culture with us in ways that respect the originals but also take advantage of new media technologies to enhance and reinvent them?Good food for thought...
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1 comment:
This quote disturbed me when I read it, and has each time I've seen it since.
Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously. Soon, the present will become overwhelmingly accessible, but a great deal of older material may never coalesce into a single database.
This seems to presume an awful lot about the future of copyright law and its impact on technology, which seems frankly contradicted by the last few years' legislative, regulatory and judicial history.
I feel like the future is far more likely to be one described in Patrick Leary's "Googling The Victorians":
If present trends in the direction of perpetual copyright continue, the
non-canonical print-culture legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will soon have become more widely accessible to more people than that of the twentieth and twenty-first, much of which will have been fenced off by its owners and made accessible only by payment of a fee, with strict prohibitions against sharing copies. Despite similar limitations imposed by commercial projects that aggregate public domain material for subscription-based access, the growth in all kinds of online publishing of out-of-copyright material is steadily making the nineteenth-century past more readily knowable and open to scrutiny than ever before.
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