Thursday, April 23, 2009
How To Digitize The World..And How Not To
The UNESCO/Library of Congress premiered this week. Initially I was pretty impressed by the interface from an information architecture perspective. I am a big proponent of Richard Saul Wurman's LATCH model as the five ways one can organize information (Location Alphabet Time Category and Hierarchy) WDL allows you to do this pretty quickly and directly. The home page shows the items on a map (Location) And there are browse buttons on top to view the items on a Place (location), by Time, by topic or type of item (category) and Institution (Location again) Very cool I thought. I'll show this example to my students.
But as I searched and researched the tool further, something else became obvious. There wasn't really a lot there. Maybe only 1500 items. And the About section of the website revealed it took almost four years to produce this interface since it was first proposed by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. There were scores of institutions involved in it And corporations like Microsoft and Googlecontributed about ten million dollars to its development. Ten million dollars for a collection of 1500 items? Even with a cool interface. Really?
I think what this once again proves is that WWW does not work best when it comes from the top down. Compare this project with Brewster Kahle of archive.org and his vision to scan the world's books, music, and in this TED Talk from last year. In it he talks about how a million books could be scanned for about 30 million dollars. Digital rights are an issue to be sure, but he shows how archive is filled with thousands of bands and concerts, historical films, and the Wayback Machine archive of the web's history. He is thinking big here, talking about putting the world's information online. And certainly there have issues: "Do we do it public or private?" "How do we have a world where we have both libraries and publishing?" But he shows how it can be done and it turns out to be more than a the WDL's token feel good project.
After I watched this video, I wonder if we should try to get the ObmamaMan to fire Billington and replace him with Kahle. Some of that stimulus money could go a long way to helping reduce unemployment numbers by hiring federal digitizers. After watching Wall Street gobble up tax payer millions, why does it seem at all lame ass idea to try to come up with 750 million dollars to put the complete content of Billington's LOC into a digital format?
Watch Kahle on his TED talk and see how this is possible.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:29 PM
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