CompuServe Messages

Jan, >> the problem is that "database locked up in a sea of ink". Accessability!<< You have hit on a topic that is near and dear to the heart of Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. Ever since he came to LC, he has been talking about how to "get the champagne out of the bottle." By this he means, how to make all of the information stored in LC available to the public and to the scholarly community. If you have any suggestions for him, you should write to him directly. As I have already said, converting books or newspapers to machine-readable form is very expensive. Whether it is scanned or keyboarded, the text must be proof read to insure that no errors have been created in the conversion. A related question is just what do we convert? American history is probably the most popular subject that is present in the LC collection. However, CD-ROMs on American history have already been published and are being sold for about $100. Anything that LC would distribute on CD-ROM would be in the public domain, i.e. not copyrighted. If the CD-ROM is really popular, a private company could copy it and undersell us. LC has already lost sales of our bibliographic authority products to companies who have bought our files and then undersold us. Under these circumstances, LC would probably not be able to recover our cost, and would have to rely on Congress, or someone else, to fund the effort. What you are asking for is not impossible, merely difficult. You should understand that the technical problems are the least difficult ones. [More]