On Sat, 13 Nov 2004, Her Serene Highness [Michele Dyck?] wrote:
This is what I want, too. I want cyber texts to be MORE useful, not less.
When libraries went to electronic catelogues, Info geeks cheered- they made libraries efficient. They should have been shot. What they did was throw out the original cards, which had been marked up by librarians and scholars, and which provided clues as to which books were worth reading. The people who cheered did not love books- they loved information. Knowledge and information are very different- knowledge takes time. When people thumb through things, they discover new things- hypertext links can help them do this.
I must admit that I, too, was surprised that ye olde carde catalogues were tossed out like babies with the bathwater.
Several of you here are academics. Academics who give and process info are not the same a researchers- you don't have the same needs. Research takes time and requires facts on a level that number and word-crunching don't.
More on research below.
And Michael- I think you are brilliant in many ways, but you don't even want to provide the amount of information required of a junior high school student writing a social studies paper, let alone a scholar- and I think that's a shame. I shudder to think what you believe scholars do, and why, if you love books so much, you have so high an antipathy for them.
It's not that I don't believe in this kind of information, it's that I didn't want to provide a different Project Gutenberg eBook for each and every single paper edition out there, and then have to keep canonical errors [sic] in them for all time. I wanted to created a "critical edition" that combined corrections and items from various editions, and we have always supplied the necessary information for citing our eBooks on request, which has apparently never caused any problem either for student or teacher.
Getting books on the web is more than a numbers game. It's about preserving somethng of value. What I'm seing here among some people is a mentality akin to the early archaeologists, who completely destroyed sites in their rush to get trophies for their museums. They were bad scientists and little more than barbarians. Destroying books in order to reach the new numerical goal is not a good thing- it's very, very bad.
Being a pioneer is different that being a researcher, unless you are Indians Jones, that is, but even he, if you will recall, had his most important work[s] taken away from him repeatedly by both those above and below him on the Darwinian ladder. Me, I'm a pioneer, not a researcher, and I fully warned everyone year after year that I am NOT a cataloguer, and that once we passed 10,000 books this would become a very obvious problem. However, libraries carry all storts of materials that don't come with cataloging information, such as records, CDs, DVDs, pamphlets, paintings, etc. Doubly, however, I am doing some feasibility studies on providing MARC records, and could use some help. Michael Hart