First, scan the books
Christopher Dawson is a high school teacher who does a great job of producing the content for a blog on education that Ziff Davis publishes. As a former high school teacher myself, I can both relate to Chris's perspective and also appreciate the time and energy he manages to find on top of his exhausting "day job". I'm a regular reader of his blog and recommend it for your consideration.
In his recent post "Is Google locking up historical works?", Chris points to some of the ongoing concerns about the efforts of Google (many others, such as Microsoft are making similar efforts) to scan and digitize the content otherwise locked up in books. In particular is the very significant concern and possibility that yet again the use of copyrights and so called "intellectual property protection" could be applied to this "new old content" that is created by scanning the contents of books, especially very old and/or out-of-print books. For example, a recent CNN article "'Monotonous' page turning helps digitize books for Google" highlights the work that the University of Michigan is doing to scan what is believed to be the oldest Christian Bible (16th century) in the world with Arabic type.
The scanning process for such valuable books is very slow and arduous, since it requires that each page be individually photographed, sent to a computer for clean up, then run through OCR software (optical character recognition) to turn the images into digital text that can be indexed and searched. Then the whole thing needs to be published to the Web (hopefully in its entirety).
We addressed this topic of scanning and digitizing the vast volume of content locked up in books in the previous OCOT article "Books - the NEW old medium" back in January 2007. Unfortunately, not too much seems to have changed since then, although a few million more of the estimated 50-100 million books have been scanned and indexed. So I would like to make that same point today, 14 months later, that I made to close out my posting back in January 2007:
"I was just delighted to finally see some acknowledgment that the majority of the world's content is NOT yet available on the Internet at all! Books are but one great example, especially those in most libraries. Then there are related issues of the degree to which most information in magazines (and especially journals) are still difficult to discover online. Yet to listen to some people, you'd think that if content doesn't show up in a search result, it doesn't exist. I, for one, can't wait to have this mass transfer of content to digital forms occur and for it to be accessible for mass discovery. And I suspect that as noted in my upcoming podcast "Living in a World of Exponential Change", this will happen MUCH sooner than expected. Now we just need to shift the focus from searching to finding! But that's a topic for another posting."
While I share the concern for any reduction in access to the content of the world's vast collection of books and applaud all efforts to ensure that ready open access is the norm, I also hope that the pace of scanning all the world's books, magazines, journals, etc., to make their content available online and searchable continues and picks up pace dramatically as Google's new technology promises. But we have far to go before we even put a dent in the vast reservoir of human knowledge that is otherwise locked up and unavailable. While the rate of new content continues to escalate (which is great news too) I suspect that much of this new content is stimulated by some of the "old" content and/or references it. With the overall health and well being of all future content dependent in part on all the previous content, no goal could be more important.
Next, scan EVERY thing!
However, as enormous as this task of scanning the world's books is, my mind wanders to the even larger challenge of scanning EVERY thing in the world! Think about the goal of those book scanning projects noted above, as being to create a vast networked repository (virtually a single repository) filled with all the content of all the books in the world and available at your fingertips. What I'm now asking you to imagine is an even larger virtual single repository filled with the drawings and models of everything that has ever existed!
As I already said, there is not really any truly and purely "new" content; rather we take parts and pieces of pre-existing "old" content, and ideas and use these to create or inspire new versions, iterations, or assemblies. Think about designing and building things in a similar light. Almost all "new" designs have their roots in things that have been previously designed and built. Even very new, provocative designs of buildings, clothes, cars, furniture...pretty much anything and everything...has these roots, and in many cases, actual components that have already been designed and built. We simply create "new" things by taking existing objects and either combining them (welding, gluing, bolting, sewing, etc.) into new assemblies or modifying (cutting, shaping, grinding) them.
What's my point? To wonder and ponder "Why?" Why is it that we most often start with a bland paper/screen/canvas if most or even many designs consist of a large percentage of pre-existing parts, pieces, and design? Seems to me that we often spend (waste?) time recreating these pre-existing parts and pieces that make up the new item we are designing before we can get started with the new design. Of course, sometimes it is best for the creative process to start with a "blank slate" so as not to be influenced as much by the past and try to create fresher, newer ideas and designs.
However, even in this case, we usually end up choosing to use some pre-existing components, so we just delay the time when we want and need to bring in the drawings and models of these pre-existing parts. All of which takes me back to my earlier comment about what a HUGE benefit it would be to our efficiency and effectiveness of designing and building if we had access to a repository of the drawings and models of EVERY thing that currently or previously existed.
To some extent, this problem of making drawings and models of EVERY thing available is being resolved by the increasing availability and affordability of scanners that enable us to quickly scan an existing item and have the resultant 3D model data displayed on the screen. If this is new to you or you'd like more details, check out my previous posting "Coming Soon to a Desktop Near You: Massive Amounts of 3D for the Masses". BUT, this task assumes that you have the existing item in your possession. What if you don't? What if that part no longer exists? What if you don't have one on hand? What if you can't afford one? This problem would be resolved if we had the repository of drawings and models.
And yes, yet again the same questions of "ownership", copyrights, and IPR enter the picture. But, once again we need to step back and take the larger, longer view that if almost all "new" design is a product of the past, then isn't the best way forward and the production of more and better designs directly dependent upon the ready access to those of the past? Would we not dramatically accelerate new designs if there were more access to all the objects we've already designed and built? Heck, we could even start with the scanning and modeling of all the natural forms and objects from plants and animals to all the "old" objects and artifacts that do not "belong " to anyone. That just might take a few years itself! If there are 50-100 million books. I suspect we'd need to add quite a few zeros to that number if we were counting the number of "objects" in the world.
Mass Contribution as a solution?
I'm quite aware of the enormity of this suggestion, and how truly overwhelming and impossible the scale of such a "boiling the ocean" type of problem this can seem. But counter this with the increasing examples of exponentially scaling contributions. Consider, for example, how all the metadata for songs—what you see when you put a music CD into your computer, for example—is created by mass contribution from average people like you and I. Consider the flood of content being created daily by all of us as we type out e-mails, write blogs, take photos, create presentations, etc.
Now imagine that we have something similar for scanning. As more and more of us start to have our own 3D scanners for example, imagine if a "contribute & share" button came up every time you scanned something, and if you clicked on it, then "whoosh!"—away would goes your data to the big repository in the sky. Imagine if every manufacturer were to publish its product catalogues as 3D models and drawings, rather than just photos and text descriptions (by the way, many are already doing this)?
Imagine if..................
In any case, ALL of this requires that we get started, so "Scan, Scan, Scan; as fast as you can!"
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