6 ms·

That's a very considerable expense in itself - digitizing, creating and maintaining an archival site. Not to mention that there are copyright questions to be so

That's a very considerable expense in itself - digitizing, creating and maintaining an archival site. Not to mention that there are copyright questions to be sorted out, which implies legal costs.

werber 11y ago
I didn't think of the legal costs, they'd have to wait 70 years past the authors death to release it freely?
- mfoy_ 11y ago
  Forget legal costs for a second, the man hours required to digitize a sizable collection is no trivial matter. From what it sounds like, the collection this guy was looting from was huge. I doubt the organization had such a generous budget that they could afford such a project.
  - kragen 11y ago
    The person-hours required to digitize a sizable collection is, generously, maybe 12¢ per page. See my breakdown upthread.
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
That's what work study students are for. They cost any university pennies on the dollar. Simply cataloging and backing up stuff is about as well protected from IP lawsuits as you can get.
- eitally 11y ago
  And Special Collections libraries the world over employ students doing exactly that. I was one of them. :) I led this project (at UVA) for a couple of years, digitizing both manuscripts and first editions of Walt Whitman's works. It was fulfilling work as a student, and interesting. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
  - werber 11y ago
    Did you learn anything shocking that hasn't been published?
    - eitally 11y ago
      His handwriting was so bad I often needed one of the expert scholars to decipher it. I essentially learned through exposure, and realized how valuable studying the original manuscripts of authors can be. Whitman, for example, wrote on scraps of paper (essentially like Post-Its), and then tacked them to a large wall and rearranged, crossed out, rewrote, and edited everything like that, eventually getting to a point where he was happy, upon which time he rewrote everything again in the final manuscript he sent to his publisher. This was for Leaves of Grass. UVA also has the papers of William Faulkner, so I learned quote a bit about him, too. Additionally, four original copies of the Declaration of Independence. No, I didn't learn anything shocking, but I learned an awful lot about the history of the book, and archiving, and digitizing, and publishing. Terry Belanger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger), a MacArthur Fellow, was my mentor.
jobu 11y ago
This kind of material might fall within the domain of the Google Books Library Project. This would mean very little cost (if any) to the libraries themselves.
- kragen 11y ago
  I'm not sure the Google Books Library Project is actually continuing. Have you seen any books they've digitized this year?
kragen 11y ago
When I digitized the first-edition OED, it took me about a month of nights, using equipment the Internet Archive let me use. That means I was doing about 1000 pages a night, including nights when I didn't work and nights when I got lost reading it. It doesn't take even close to a month to build a book-digitizing machine (thanks, in large part, to the Archive sharing information about the approach that worked for its Scribes), so the labor is the majority of the cost. Based on this and on US$15/hour for an 8-hour day, digitizing a letter should cost about 12¢. 12¢ per letter, but then how do you "create and maintain an archival site"? You make a torrent and seed it. If each 12¢ page is 35 megapixels (A4/letter at 600dpi), then 8:1 JPEG-2000 compression should get you about half a megabyte per page. Half a megabyte of disk space is 0.0015¢. I pay about US$32 a month for my internet connection here in Argentina, and it can sustain about half a megabit per second, upstream, which is 164 gigabytes per month; so uploading that page to the swarm takes about 8 seconds and costs 0.01¢. You probably only have to do this once, but you might need to occasionally step in to resuscitate the swarm if all the other seeds die. So, to sum up, this "very considerable expense in itself" costs 12¢ per letter to digitize, 0.0015¢ per letter to create, and 0.01¢ per letter to maintain an archival site. You're right about the copyright questions, which could easily cost US$1000 (100,000¢) per letter. And that is the true unseen theft of the world's literary history.

That's a very considerable expense in itself - digitizing, creating and maintaining an archival site. Not to mention that there are copyright questions to be sorted out, which implies legal costs.

werber 11y ago

I didn't think of the legal costs, they'd have to wait 70 years past the authors death to release it freely?

mfoy_ 11y ago
Forget legal costs for a second, the man hours required to digitize a sizable collection is no trivial matter. From what it sounds like, the collection this guy was looting from was huge. I doubt the organization had such a generous budget that they could afford such a project.
- kragen 11y ago
  The person-hours required to digitize a sizable collection is, generously, maybe 12¢ per page. See my breakdown upthread.

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

That's what work study students are for. They cost any university pennies on the dollar. Simply cataloging and backing up stuff is about as well protected from IP lawsuits as you can get.

eitally 11y ago
And Special Collections libraries the world over employ students doing exactly that. I was one of them. :) I led this project (at UVA) for a couple of years, digitizing both manuscripts and first editions of Walt Whitman's works. It was fulfilling work as a student, and interesting. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
- werber 11y ago
  Did you learn anything shocking that hasn't been published?
  - eitally 11y ago
    His handwriting was so bad I often needed one of the expert scholars to decipher it. I essentially learned through exposure, and realized how valuable studying the original manuscripts of authors can be. Whitman, for example, wrote on scraps of paper (essentially like Post-Its), and then tacked them to a large wall and rearranged, crossed out, rewrote, and edited everything like that, eventually getting to a point where he was happy, upon which time he rewrote everything again in the final manuscript he sent to his publisher. This was for Leaves of Grass. UVA also has the papers of William Faulkner, so I learned quote a bit about him, too. Additionally, four original copies of the Declaration of Independence. No, I didn't learn anything shocking, but I learned an awful lot about the history of the book, and archiving, and digitizing, and publishing. Terry Belanger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Belanger), a MacArthur Fellow, was my mentor.

jobu 11y ago

This kind of material might fall within the domain of the Google Books Library Project. This would mean very little cost (if any) to the libraries themselves.

kragen 11y ago
I'm not sure the Google Books Library Project is actually continuing. Have you seen any books they've digitized this year?

kragen 11y ago

When I digitized the first-edition OED, it took me about a month of nights, using equipment the Internet Archive let me use. That means I was doing about 1000 pages a night, including nights when I didn't work and nights when I got lost reading it. It doesn't take even close to a month to build a book-digitizing machine (thanks, in large part, to the Archive sharing information about the approach that worked for its Scribes), so the labor is the majority of the cost. Based on this and on US$15/hour for an 8-hour day, digitizing a letter should cost about 12¢. 12¢ per letter, but then how do you "create and maintain an archival site"? You make a torrent and seed it. If each 12¢ page is 35 megapixels (A4/letter at 600dpi), then 8:1 JPEG-2000 compression should get you about half a megabyte per page. Half a megabyte of disk space is 0.0015¢. I pay about US$32 a month for my internet connection here in Argentina, and it can sustain about half a megabit per second, upstream, which is 164 gigabytes per month; so uploading that page to the swarm takes about 8 seconds and costs 0.01¢. You probably only have to do this once, but you might need to occasionally step in to resuscitate the swarm if all the other seeds die. So, to sum up, this "very considerable expense in itself" costs 12¢ per letter to digitize, 0.0015¢ per letter to create, and 0.01¢ per letter to maintain an archival site. You're right about the copyright questions, which could easily cost US$1000 (100,000¢) per letter. And that is the true unseen theft of the world's literary history.