book digitising - robots in the library

Many of you are probably already aware of some of the book scanning projects underway around the world. The most well known one is that being run by google. In these projects, books in the collections of the worlds libraries are systematically being scanned and converted into digital assets.

These projects bring up issues connected with intellectual property that can (and do) lead to heated arguments, but I just like this scanning machine, produced by a company called Kirtas, that "rewrite[s] the story of the conversion of books to bytes". It's not the way Google is doing it - apparently they use more human-assisted technologies - but its still pretty amazing. Wait for the embedded movie to load and watch it turn the pages.

some things do last

In a week when I have been frustrated a few times by the tendency for things online to stop working or disappear (example: openomy.com which was offline at all the wrong moments last week but seems to be better now - fingers crossed), I'm cheered to find an online journal that has now been continuously online and publishing for 10 years. One of the readings for next week is from there, and while reading up on it, I happened to have a poke around and found that the journal is going strong. I tend not to expect this, so this was a nice surprise.

the elements of style

I found this great article that kind of does two things at once. (Click the title of this post to see it.) It takes some nicely worded "reminders" about good writing, from a small book by William Strunk on writing called "The elements of style", first published in 1918, and applies them (the reminders) to the practice of web design. I found it interesting for a number of reasons.

One reason is that even though it's so old, most of the advice is still good - as it applies to writing. Another is that as a writer today, you should be aware at least of the fundamentals of web design - even if you're not a web programmer - because it's quite likely that at some point some of your content is going to make it onto a website, and you may have to work with web designers and/or developers to get it there, so it's sensible to have some ammunition when you have to argue with them. Finally, it's interesting for the reason that the boxes and arrows website published the article, which is to provide advice to designers. Some writers do their own web design, so they should read this.

Here's a link to the full text of the Strunk and White book.

Snow Crash

The Googlezon story, or Robin Sloan's "Epic" animation that we looked at at the end of the class last week, reminds me of a book by Neal Stephenson called "Snow Crash". Stephenson fills this book with a lot of fascinating predictions about the near future (the book was written in 1992), including the idea of people who make their living indiscriminately recording information and uploading it to the (now corporatised) Library of Congress, in the hope that some of it will be downloaded (and paid for) by someone, somewhere, with the result that royalties will be paid.

Great book, if you're looking for something to read in all your free time.

(By the way, this was originally posted in August 2005. I just edited it on 7 Aug 2006, but not in any way that changes its meaning significantly.)