Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Our discussion of digital news archiving projects and the pitfalls of footnoting online publications didn't even try to approach the issues of archiving video or controversies surrounding Google's book-scanning project. This post by Jeff Ubois at Berkeley links to a larger ongoing discussion of both those topics.
Television Archiving? Blog Archive? Google “Showtimes” the UC Library System: "Digitizing the world’s books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide “universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime.” So it’s troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.
The American Library Association, Library & Information Technology Association, and the Open Content Alliance are among the groups he mentions as being on the case.

Elsewhere on the archival.tv site, I saw this quote from Lawrence Lessig, echoing things he said about "read-only culture" at the AEJMC convention:
“Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in the newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded on videotape is not? How is it that we have created a world where researchers trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenth-century America will have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of media on twentieth-century America?” - Larry Lessig, Free Culture

(As is true of many things, a Scripting News item led me into this series of links. Thanks, Dave.)