Tag: Information access

An new hero takes on the ancient astronomical works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html.  This site deals with Mathematics, and Mathematical Astronomy in the works of ancient writers.  It does so by getting hold of whatever texts exist and fixing the errors in the Google scans and so forth.  If you want the complete works of Hero of Alexandria, they’re here.  Archimedes, Ptolemy… likewise.  Arabic writers?  They too.  The author, Joe Leichter, writes:

I hope to make available public domain materials that are essential for the study of ancient and early modern mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Google, for example, has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, “mistakes were made”. For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner’s’s edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

The man is a hero.  Ancient scientific works are a horrendously neglected part of the ancient world, because they require skills and interest in both the humanities and the sciences.  Still more neglected are the Byzantine writers on this subject.

All this from a blog that I had not seen before, opuculuk by Nick Nicholas, reporting on a search that he did on the works of Chioniades.  (Nick works for the TLG, and was working on their lemmatizer, when he started to come across chunks of untranslated Arabic in the scientific works of Chioniades.  Mr. C., a 12th century writer, had been taking lessons from some Persian, so had got a whole load of jargon for his pains!)

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Irving Woodworth Raymond and Orosius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first English translation of Orosius was made by I.W.Raymond and published in 1936.  It’s probably still in copyright in the USA, unfortunately, which keeps it off the web.  A later translation exists in the Fathers of the Church series.

Someone wrote to me about Orosius today.  Apparently he is the first writer to mention the term “Asia minor”.  This led me to look again at the copyright.

When did Raymond die? (he was born in 1898, according to COPAC)  A google search led me to an obituary in the St. Petersburg Times, August 11, 1964:

NEW YORK — Dr Irving Woodworth Raymond, 65, professor of history at Brooklyn college here, died Monday at his home in York Harbor, Maine.

Isn’t Google books wonderful?  I remarked yesterday how the British Library, in putting newspapers online, made sure to charge for access; Google gives it to us for free, and we all benefit.

Sadly it looks as if his work won’t come out of copyright in the EU (life+70 years) until 2034, by which time I will be dead myself, I suspect.  In countries with life+50 years, that reduces to 2014.  And I can’t tell you when it comes out of copyright in the US, as I don’t understand the current situation; publication + 95 years, i.e. 2031?

What a mess this copyright law is!  Who benefits from keeping this offline?

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British Library still doesn’t get it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The BBC has a belated but fawning story today, Just click for a century of news:

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people’s homes.

The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack the Ripper to WC Grace. (etc)

Ah.  So, “just click”, eh?  What use is this to most of us?  Access for the privileged only, it seems.  Can you imagine any of us paying for this? 

But there is more, and worse, at the British Library site, where the new government “Digital Britain” report is discussed.

Digitising content

Dame Lynne said: “I welcome the fact that Lord Carter specifically referenced the British Library’s Nineteenth British Century Newspapers digitisation programme as an example of how new business models can enable national institutions to work with commercial partners and funding bodies to make millions of pages of historic content available online to researchers and the public. We are sitting on a goldmine of content which should be considered integral to the UK’s digital strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digitised content – sustained public investment, along with the innovative business models cited in Lord Carter’s report, will enable us to achieve this.”

I’ll bet she does.   Who else would endorse the idea of selling access, but the man who has just proposed taxing internet access? 

The reference to access for  “the public” is tacked on, as an afterthought.  The British Library, indeed, doesn’t exist to serve the public — in the opinion of all too many of its staff.  The vision of universal access to information and education is debased into a vision of more income for themselves.

There needs to be a culture change at the British Library.  The people who see the collection purely as a windfall to be exploited for their own budgetary gain need to be eased out.   An open-source public service attitude needs to replace it.  And it will.

It’s easy to get depressed by how out of touch the management of the British Library is.  Yet the pressure for open access grows stronger all the time.  The very idea of charging for this will seem absurd or disgusting in 10 years time.  Every year a flood of new staff will enter the British Library, carrying their iPhones with their built-in digital cameras and their WiFi-enabled devices of various sorts; and will try not to laugh at the policies they find.  These people will bring about the revolution.

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Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) goes open access

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Editors of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) [ISSN 0017-3916] have issued the following announcement:

Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.

The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.

Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholarship on Greece.

– The editors

The editors are to be congratulated for grasping the nettle.  But they are doing the right thing, and in the emphasis on wider access and scholarly quality are taking precisely the right approach. 

For the world is changing, and older methods of knowledge dissemination must change too.  Today I received an email from the French National Library, inviting me to take part in a survey and stating that they were rethinking all their services for the supply of reproductions.  Here too, we can hear the wind of change.

As the poet wrote (read the words aloud, as with all verse):

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

— “Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough

Thanks to C.E. Jones at Ancient World Online for the tip.

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Cambridge University Library — no, the incunables are NOT going online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them.  So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web. 

This would be quite a first — the obscurantism of UK libraries has to be experienced to be believed. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have done so much for the world in funding online initiatives, have granted them 300,000 GBP to do the job; not a huge sum, but probably enough.  The BBC article here gives the impression that the incunables will go online.

But then a revealing aside:

Over the next five years the University library will produce detailed records for each item.

This made me look twice at the glowing claims, and look further.  There’s no information on the library website at all, which is not good news.  History Today magazine has an article here.  This tells the real story:

Cambridge University announced, today, the beginning of a new project to catalogue, for the first time, the University Library’s celebrated collection of incunabula, pre-1501 printed books. The term incunabula literally means swaddling-clothes, or cradle, in Latin and was adopted to describe a book printed at an early date, in the first infancy of printing.

Very few records of the Library’s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue. Records will begin to be catalogued this autumn and, over the next five years, the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which will be accessible through its Newton Universal Catalogue. …

Although the project does not involve a complete page-by-page digitisation of the Library’s incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible has been fully digitalised …

As if anyone has any use for yet another Gutenberg online. 

So, the real intention is to have one or two staff members sit there for five years writing little card indexes (or whatever).  Digitisation?  Am I too cynical, to suppose that they’ll merely do a handful of books, as a sort of fig-leaf for what they really wanted to do?

Not that cataloguing is bad; but what we need, desperately need, is ACCESS TO THE BOOKS!!!  Not more catalogues.  Compiling a catalogue was the excuse used in the 19th century by Vatican libraries for denying scholars access to the library, and refusing them sight of what catalogue existed.  I don’t know if that ever-so-complete catalogue ever appeared, indeed.  But the obstruction of access was real enough.

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Germans attack Google books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From The Register today:

Google’s ongoing effort to create a vast digital library is set to come under fire at the EU from countries who fear it will violate copyright and stymie competition.

German diplomats plan to raise the issues in Brussels today, EUobserver reports, with support from France, Austria and the Netherlands.

Google controversially began scanning and indexing books in the US in 2004, without copyright approval. In October last year it cut a deal with American authors and publishers to pay them a slice of the profits it makes matching text advertising to book searches. US authors who do not want their work scanned and published online have until September to opt out.

That deal is now the subject of a Department of Justice investigation on antitrust grounds, because it grants Google exclusive rights to republish “orphan” (out of copyright) books online. It will also allow Google to resell rights to other digital libraries.

Both intellectual and market power concerns are now exercising politicans and officials on this side of the Atlantic, who hope their action today will put Google’s book project on the agenda of regulators at the European Commission.

The German government also plans to offer its opinion to a New York court which is set to consider Google’s US books deal. “It is not about participating as a party in the legal dispute but making the court aware of certain legal aspects,” the country’s justice minister said.

An unnamed EU diplomat said Google’s plans “are not entirely in the interests of European authors” and that Google would have to “ask European copyright holders for permission first [before scanning their work]”.

For its part, Google maintains its line on copyright issues that it merely wants to make knowledge more widely available

 Note the absence of any consideration of the interests of anyone but the publishing industry.    Nor does it seem that the ordinary German, or Frenchmen, will be asked whether he wants to be prevented from reading this material.

The unelected eurocrats have the reputation of being corrupt.  Here we see them, apparently in the pocket of big business, to try to ensure that people in the EU have to pay to see what is freely available in the USA.

Truly sickening. 

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More on “copyright” of the Greek New Testament

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still quite angry about the actions of the German Bible Society in claiming copyright of the work of the apostles.  I’ve been looking around the web for comment. 

The best comment I have seen is that the text can only be copyright if the scholars who produced it did their work badly.  Their intention was NOT to create an “original creative work”!

If the German Bible Society believes that it is not issuing the work of the apostles, but of Mr. Aland — to the extent that it is an original, creative work — and that no-one else has the work of the apostles, then I would like to see them say so!

But the most interesting comment was by Stan Gundry of Zondervan, here.

I am not a copyright attorney myself, but I have had lengthy phone conversations with a lawyer who is credited with being the best in the USA. Here’s the deal, at least according to USA copyright law. Ancient texts such as those we are dealing with in the OT (Hebrew/Aramaic) and NT (Greek) are in the public domain and are not protected by copyright. In fact (and this is controversial), even the critical texts as reconstructed by textual critics cannot be protected by enforceable copyrights. The textual critical apparatus has a somewhat better claim to copyright, but to the extent that such an apparatus is a catalog of information, my sources tell me that any claim to an enforceable copyright is weakened. “Sweat equity” in the recreation of ancient texts is not sufficient to establish copyright. It takes sweat equity to create a phone book, but you cannot copyright a phone book. This is not something that the United Bible Society or the German Bible Society wants to hear or agrees to, this is what our lawyer consultants have told us.

Peter Kirk has two posts full of common sense on this also.  Among other things he points out that the Germans have not actually issued take-down demands, and we shouldn’t act as if they have until they do. 

 

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Flame the German Bible Society

Posted on by Roger Pearse

These greedy bastards are claiming that they own the text of Greek New Testament, and anyone who wants to use it must pay them. In the meantime they’re forcing MorphGNT and zhubert.com offline. So why not tell them politely but firmly what you think of their evil scheme? Make sure that they know that they are injuring thousands of people, in their greed? Email addresses are here

After all — the same claim would affect every classical text online.

Isn’t it typical that it’s a German business who tries to screw us all over?  They contribute almost nothing to the web, yet here they are, trying to seize the work of others for their own profit?

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MorphGNT busted by “copyright”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is something that makes me rather cross.  It seems that the MorphGNT project, run for years and years by Jim Tauber, has fallen foul of a sudden claim of copyright by the German Bible Society.  This in turn has torpedoed the ReGreek site, which used MorphGNT. 

For those who don’t know, MorphGNT is a text file, containing the “Morphologised Greek New Testament”.  The file contains loads of rows like this:

010101 N- ----NSF- βίβλος βίβλος
010101 N- ----GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις
010101 N- ----GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς
...

The first column is book/chapter/verse, the next one part of speech (all nouns here), the next specifies the tense, Nominative, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Masculine, the fourth column the word that actually appears in the NT (in whatever form), and the fifth column is the headword or lemma — the dictionary form of the word.

There are updates on the Open Scriptures blog, linking to a discussion group where surrender seems to be the only option under consideration.  They should, instead, seek legal advice.

I confess that I don’t understand how the German Bible Society have any claim or rights over this.  How can they claim copyright over any of this?  Are they claiming that the NT is *their* copyright?  What is needed, I feel, is a good lawyer to tell them where to get off.  I’ve submitted this story to slashdot.org.  Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks to Mark Goodacre for the tip.

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What to do about offline Origen?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The homilies of Origen are all offline.  This is because the 19th century translators of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (repackaged as the Ante-Nicene Fathers later) were selling their translations by subscription, and couldn’t get enough subscribers to translate these works.  Of 574 homilies, only 186 have survived, mostly in Latin translations by either Rufinus or Jerome.

Quite a few have been translated in various series during the 20th century.  But under our accursed copyright laws, these remain offline and inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

From time to time, I wonder what to do about this.  What can be done, I wonder?

I suppose that I could commission someone to make a translation.  But this would be costly, and also wasteful.  I hate the idea of spending my hard-earned to produce a translation of Origen’s homilies, when so many ancient texts remain untranslated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting someone who knows Latin to take a modern critical edition of the Latin text, and whatever translations exist in English, and produce a copyright-free version that way.  It’s always quicker and easier to translate something when someone else has done the heavy lifting and produced a first version.  I wouldn’t care whether the result was of publishable quality, so long as it was fairly true to the original.  But… who would I ask?  I could make such a thing myself fairly easily if laboriously, if I had time, but I don’t.

If I were a billionaire, of course, I would just buy the companies that own the existing versions, give the texts away, and then sell on the companies.  But I am not.

Are there any other alternatives?  It is deeply frustrating.  What can be done?

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