Brad wrote:
This is a real polarizing issue, with many academics believing that they are the annointed guardians of literature and recorded knowledge. They feel threatened by groups like PG and DP which have by-passed their institutional traditions. Many academics today feel threatened by etexts in the same way that the clergy felt threatened by the printing press.
I asked for a copy of the TEI source for Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation last month from some academic group. They asked me to submit a formal request which would explain what I would use the text for!
[snip of excellent comments]
I totally agree that academia (in a general sense, there are notable individual exceptions) is overly protective (to a neurotic degree) of their collections of Public Domain materials and digital derivatives thereof, and should not be. This does not mean, then, that PG and other like-minded digital text repositories should therefore choose not to build their text libraries to have a *reasonable* level of quality for academics and scholars. Rather, what better way to stick it to them is to compete with them on their own turf! Doing this will also raise the consciousness among many, including our politicians, of the value of free and open documents. It might even lead to politicians in progressive states to pass laws requiring their state-run colleges and universities to scan their holdings of public domain works and place them online for free and unencumbered use. After all, many of the "academics" are being paid by taxpayer money, as are many of the archives/repositories they run, thus they are ultimately beholden to the public which pays them, and which is the moral owner of the Public Domain. I'm glad that Michael, this morning, made a call to digitize the OED. Despite my heavy criticisms regarding how PG is run, and what its basic requirements should be, I'm fully in support of its Prime Directive in that (in my words): "All public domain texts, both scans and cleaned-up etexts, should be made, and must be made, freely available in digital form to the world without restriction or encumberance." It pains me when I see publicly-funded academic digital repositories not allowing free and unrestricted access to any work whose source is from the Public Domain. Even if it cost someone $$$ to scan and markup the work, the results should be open to the Public. After all, it is the Public who owns the Public Domain, thus it has the moral right to demand how any digital derivatives of the Public Domain should be used. Jon Noring (p.s., I wonder if some States have an "open documents" law on their books that could be applied to their universities and colleges, and which could be used to force them to open up their digital scans and digital derivatives of public domain works in their collections? I may bring this up with Brewster when I meet with him next week. Thoughts?)