PDF is here. It’s plainly a google book, but not sure where from.
Tag: Information access
18th century scholars in the 21st century
While I was kept offline and looking for something to read, I found on my hard disk some volumes of the Bibliotheca Graeca of J. Fabricius. This is a catalogue of all Greek writers from the beginning up to the renaissance, complete with extensive chunks of their works. It’s in Latin, of course, but anyone with a bit of effort (and maybe a bit of help from QuickLatin) can make something of it if they try.
This massive and monumental work has long been inaccessible to anyone. It was published so long ago that it disappeared into rare book rooms 150 years ago. Once in there, no-one was able to consult it except in small chunks under the hostile gaze of the dragons that such places tend to employ. Difficult of access, in a language increasingly unused, and of course also out of date, it has vanished from our eyes.
Yet such works have a tremendous value, so long as one can look at a complete set. If you have a bunch of volumes before you, you learn something about the scope of Greek literature simply by browsing. Every page adds something. Reading the contents pages alone will introduce the reader to writers of whom one might never otherwise hear. Dip in, a little here, a little there. Read up on someone you know a bit about, and then enjoy the luxury of letting your eyes drift onto the next entry. Plonk the book down while you grab a beer, and pause to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, or whatever. Pick it up when the dialogue gets boring, in short snatches. Take a volume to bed, and skim a few pages before turning off the light. In time no page will be unfamiliar to you, however large the book, and you will acquire a width of knowledge which few today can boast.
This is how to master such a book. But of course this all depends on whether you have a personal copy, which you can gaily toss into the bedside cabinet. In a rare books room, such study is impossible. Google books has done us all a tremendous favour in making volumes available in PDF.
We need the other volumes too. But the current PDF’s aren’t really good enough, splendid though they are. We need PDF’s scanned at a higher resolution, in black and white. We need images that are clear, at least 400 dpi. Then we can dash off to lulu.com and print a copy ourselves! For how else, except in book form, can one play with such a book?
MIT to make all faculty publications open access
This story from slashdot is good news:
“If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.”
In copyright books for free, more on Ethos
Ohio State University Press have started making full texts of some of their books available online as PDF’s. They’ve realised that they’re not making money on these, and decided to get on with the business of disseminating knowledge instead. My heroes! The list is here. Thanks to Christopher Ecclestone for the tip!
Titles include Gregory, Timothy E.: Vox Populi: Violence and Popular Involvement in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century A.D. Lots of stuff on Ephesus and Chalcedon, Cyril and Nestorius.
But the pick of the lot is the English translation of all the works of Fulgentius Mythographicus by L. G. Whitbread! This is a wonderful find. Get your copy of this 5th century Roman living in Vandal Africa now!
Moving on, books tend to come to me in groups or not at all. Today I got an email from the Ethos service. I blogged on this a couple of months ago. Basically you can order a PDF for free of a UK dissertation, and they will scan it and upload it. I ordered a couple and waited; and today they arrived. This service is going to be a howling success. It will quickly get all the important UK dissertations online.
UK museums get the web: it’s snowball time!
Eight UK museums have got together to set up a website to put their collections online and get members of the public to contribute their own photos and information, and use the data to compile their own albums of data. It’s called Creative Spaces. At the moment it’s in beta.
Andie at Egyptology News tells us it’s a project of…
… The Royal Armouries, The V&A, The Imperial War Museum, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum and The Wallace Collection.
The site allows you to search all the collections at once, tag and store items in notebooks and groups, and upload your own images, videos and notes to share creative inspiration with others – effectively creating your own collection from some of the world’s greatest museum collections.
This is a nonprofit, public sector project, and it’s the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way.
This is precisely the sort of thing to do: make the stuff accessible.
Everyone will gain, no-one loses. These tax-funded collections become more accessible to the world. They get more visitors, as people realise what they hold and want to get a better photo or examine the original. Thus the collection users start to add value. Other sites start to link to the data. The wins just go on and on, like a snowball gathering weight and momentum as it rolls downhill. Brilliant!
I see that you can order higher-resolution photos of V&A stuff. I looked at this medal of Constantine, and couldn’t make out the lettering, which was a bit disappointing. I then tried “papyri” which led me to this page from a 7th century Coptic codex of a life of Shenouda. Only one side, tho. But this is clearly a very good idea.
News snippet: Wiley overcharging for theology journals?
There are angry faces at a lot of small theological libraries across the world today. American publisher Wiley bought a load of academic theological journals recently, and have jacked up the prices by as much as 100% or more. Worse yet, they bundled the increase with a compulsory electronic subscription which — in stupid countries — is an item heavily taxed. If the library only has electricity for a few hours, as third-world countries do, they can’t use it anyway.
I’ve today seen an angry letter written by a bunch of people to the VP of marketing. The basic complaint is that Wiley have applied commercial pricing of the kind paid by huge US pharmaceuticals, that it will prevent the libraries taking the journals and probably destroy the journals as well.
The letter is a gem, which sheds a hideous light on the industry that battens off our tax dollars. Why precisely do we need Wiley anyway? What do they do, that we can’t do ourselves with printing at lulu and a bit of effort?
UPDATE (20/3): It looks as if Wiley have got the message. More news when I have it.
UPDATE (19/3): I’ve asked for specific details, which should come out in a day or so. “I do know that the International Bulletin of Missionary Research is one of the journals in question, and has gone from around £30 a year to something like £144…”
UPDATE: (19/3) Here’s the letter.
Subject: Pricing of Wiley’s theological journals
From: “Alan Linfield” <…>
Date: Thu, March 19, 2009 12:06 pm
To: ABTAPL…All of us have been suffering widespread consternation at the number of steep rises in journal subscriptions which have recently hit us. This consternation is not just affecting us in ABTAPL; some of you who are members of the BETH discussion list will have seen postings on the subject there, and it was also evident at the Forum of Asian Theological Libraries convention in Singapore, showing that this is a grave issue affecting theological libraries across the world.
Those of us in Singapore representing the various associations present at the conference have therefore agreed and jointly signed a robustly-worded protest, which has just been been emailed to Ms Reed Elfenbein, who as VP for Marketing at Wiley’s global HQ in the USA is the highest placed marketing executive in the company. This protest is reproduced below…
From: Alan Linfield
Date: 19 March 2009 11:47:56 GMT
To: relfenb…
Subject: Wiley’s theological journalsDear Ms Elfenbein
This is being addressed to you by representatives of four associations which together represent a large number of libraries in the UK, continental Europe, India, SE Asia and Australasia specialising in theology. We have taken the opportunity to confer together and send this joint communication while we have all been attending a convention of the Forum of Asian Theological Libraries, which took place last week in Singapore.
Our specific reason for contacting you personally is to make it known at the highest possible level within your company our intense anger at the pricing of a number of major theological journals whose publication you have recently taken over. In many cases the new subscriptions our members are being charged has increased by over 100% – indeed in some cases by considerably more. We have to tell you as emphatically as we can that these price rises are completely unacceptable, and in very many cases will now put these key journals beyond the reach of many of our members, (who of course collectively constitute the natural and most obvious market for them).
Given Wiley’s historical association and track record with science and technology publishing, it appears to us that you have simply applied the same basic business model to theology journals as you have done with scientific journals, assuming that similar business dynamics will apply. This however shows a complete lack of research and an utter failure to appreciate the nature of the market for theological journals. In the majority of cases these are bought not by well-funded university libraries and the scientific research establishments bankrolled by big business that your company is more accustomed to dealing with, and which are well able to afford these kind of prices. Rather, they are typically bought by small, private theological seminary libraries, largely funded by small endowments and private donations, and whose total library budget is probably a good deal less than your annual salary; indeed many of them are in the majority 2/3 world, and their typical annual budget is probably a good deal less than your PA’s annual salary. These journals are, as you must be aware, highly important and strategic resources for our member libraries; by putting them out of reach of the great majority by these huge price increases you will risk not only losing a great many customers, but you will also be putting the future of the journals themselves in jeopardy, as there will now be a very real danger that you will end up with too few subscribers to make the journals viable.
It was also disappointing to note that you have also followed the tired old ploy of trying to give a semblance of justification for these price rises by bundling in an electronic subscription. An electronic subscription to the International Bulletin of Missionary Research is of little use to the small seminary library in Myanmar which only has an electricity supply at night; or to another in Indonesia which has only very unreliable dial-up internet access. You seem to assume that all the libraries which take theological journals are of the high-tech variety, whereas the opposite is more typical, demonstrating again your crass failure to research the market properly. Moreover, electronic subscriptions also attract sales taxes in many countries, thus driving the price up even more. It is particularly distressing that two of the journals which have suffered the highest rise in subscription price are those formerly published by the World Council of Churches, which historically has always had a bias to supporting the mission of the Christian church in majority-world contexts by making their journals affordable there, something which is now being completely undermined by your brutal business policies, which appear to us to be nothing more than rank profiteering.
We therefore call upon you as a matter of urgency to rethink your subscription rates for these theological journals, and in doing so also carry out proper market research in order to identify subscription levels your clients can realistically sustain; We also call upon you to reinstate a print-only subscription option for the many (and often disadvantaged) libraries that for one reason or another are unable to make use of an electronic one, so that they do not have to pay for anything more than they actually need.
In order to demonstrate the worldwide depth of feeling which exists on this issue, we are also asking all the individual libraries of our associations that have been affected by these inordinate subscription increases to contact you as well, so that you can learn in more detail their exact circumstances and the effect your misguided policies are having on them. We are confident you will soon realise that we have not been exaggerating.
We shall also be distributing press releases, with copies of this communication, to appropriate publishing and librarianship journals.
Yours sincerely
Alan M Linfield
Chair, Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries
(ABTAPL)Rosemary Watts
Western Australian Chapter Chair of Australian and New Zealand Theological Library Association (ANZTLA)Elizabeth Pulanco
Chair, Forum of Asian Theological Libraries (ForATL)Odile Dupont
President, Biblioteques Theologiques Europeen (BETH)
What about “Google manuscript”?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just download manuscripts as PDF’s, rather than go through the gruesome and expensive process of obtaining whatever rubbish the libraries feel like selling us?
Last week I wrote to Google suggesting that they do a project to make medieval manuscripts accessible. We all know how difficult archives make it for us to access texts in this form! Today I got a reply:
Hello Roger,
Thanks for your email and interest in Google Book Search.
I appreciate you taking the time to offer us this feedback about including ancient and medieval texts. I have passed along your email to the other members of my team. As this is still a young program, new ideas are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful. Please continue to share your suggestions with us.
Sincerely,
Tom
The Google Book Search Team
Interesting to know that Google DO reply. If you’d like to see Google take an interest in getting text-only manuscripts online, why not tell them so?
UK government seeks to kill net neutrality in EU
The EU doesn’t get the internet, it seems
The US Google Books and Archive.org are free. The EU equivalent charges readers money. That tells us everything we need to know about the EU.
How many of us were aware that there *was* an EU official alternative? few, I imagine. But today I learned about it: Books2EBooks. It’s a glossy site, paid for by levies on taxpayers who didn’t get a vote on it (like all EU projects). The site is full of guff about how wonderful, wonderful the internet is. Get books from EU libraries, it boasts! Only in the small print is buried the fact that, yes, you have to BUY them from the site. How really, really FUNNY!
Most of the libraries are German, and their holdings were paid for by the taxpayer. This is more evidence that the Germans really don’t get the internet. Or — to be fair — that officialdom in Germany doesn’t get it.
We all know that the internet is about free access to information. US libraries are cooperating to make their holdings accessible freely online. Individuals like myself donate our time to creating archives of material.
But here, ten years after the web started, these greedy bureaucrats stir their hulking hog-like bodies, swollen with tax dollars exacted from the helpless for necessary services and diverted to themselves. They look at Archive.org, which is free, and see only a chance to make a bit of money for themselves by selling copies of out-of-copyright books in their holdings. Do they hate people? Or are they merely greedy?
Isn’t the EU contemptible? Let’s thank our lucky stars we don’t live in Germany.
Arabic texts online in Arabic
A notice from BYZANS-L:
On 09/03/2009, Alexander Hourany wrote:
Here are some websites that contain free online versions of old Arabic sources like the history of al-Tabari and many others. Although some of them contain typing errors, they are very usefull in textual search.
al-Meshkat library site:
http://www.almeshkat.net/books/index.php
Yasoob al-Din library: http://www.yasoob.com/
al-Mostafa library: http://www.al-mostafa.com/
Now all we need is someone who knows Arabic to look at these and tell us what is there!