3 ms·

Before the age of corona, I was really getting into spending hours in the reference and old books sections of the library and boggling at things like centuries

Before the age of corona, I was really getting into spending hours in the reference and old books sections of the library and boggling at things like centuries of german language chemistry journals, shelf spanning encyclopedia, 1970 AI journals, tomes upon tomes of outdated education theory books, multiple different complete histories of European art, How-to's for Kite mounted film photography, contact indexes of professionals and society members, compendiums of historical news papers... Thinking all this information is fossilized here, and no-one is ever going to put it to use again, or even have the attention span to sit and read it, let alone the skills synthesize knowledge from it, or the guidance of a community familiar with the the important texts, and authors to navigation to the good bits.. I was very aware of the difference in my mind now, and when i was younger, when I could just sit and be absorbed by a book, without trying to race ahead.

rtkwe 6y ago
I think we will get around to extracting it but there are a lot of roadblocks to doing anything with it. A lot of it is IP is a complete mess so even if a company or institution did want to digitize it actually making it available is a complete nightmare, it's ok on '23 to '78 works because it's at least a fixed length but on any works printed after that the period is variable so you have to research when every author died. [0] [0] Not even sure how that works for things like journals or pieces with multiple authors like scientific papers! I imagine for collected works each piece would be under a separate copyright duration?
jbay808 6y ago
For what it's worth, people do still enjoy those books sometimes. You did! I spent a lot of time browsing the MIT library for their century-old books on metalworking, aircraft design, electromechanics, and similar topics. A lot of fascinating information is locked up in those pages, in many ways no less useful than what is published today, but much less commonly known.
tmaly 6y ago
I did something similar. I would browse my university’s library and come upon all sorts of interesting topics. I would still do this at a local library near my office. Unfortunately its closed now with appointment only due to covid. There are so many interesting bits of information sitting in these books. Its almost as if it’s waiting for someone to stitch together a new idea or theory.

rtkwe 6y ago

I think we will get around to extracting it but there are a lot of roadblocks to doing anything with it. A lot of it is IP is a complete mess so even if a company or institution did want to digitize it actually making it available is a complete nightmare, it's ok on '23 to '78 works because it's at least a fixed length but on any works printed after that the period is variable so you have to research when every author died. [0] [0] Not even sure how that works for things like journals or pieces with multiple authors like scientific papers! I imagine for collected works each piece would be under a separate copyright duration?

jbay808 6y ago

For what it's worth, people do still enjoy those books sometimes. You did! I spent a lot of time browsing the MIT library for their century-old books on metalworking, aircraft design, electromechanics, and similar topics. A lot of fascinating information is locked up in those pages, in many ways no less useful than what is published today, but much less commonly known.

tmaly 6y ago

I did something similar. I would browse my university’s library and come upon all sorts of interesting topics. I would still do this at a local library near my office. Unfortunately its closed now with appointment only due to covid. There are so many interesting bits of information sitting in these books. Its almost as if it’s waiting for someone to stitch together a new idea or theory.