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. 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. 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. 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. Michele (yeah, I have a name) -----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org]On Behalf Of Jon Noring Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 12:47 PM To: gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Perfection Marcello wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
How much harder is it to make an eBook set up to answer all these scholarly and reference questions, than just to read?
Providing source information and page numbers is easy. So it is to provide the page scans. Of course: page scans != ebook.
Marking up a book to satisfy most scholarly requirements is more work than I would care for, short of being paid to do it.
1) There are *reasonable* basic requirements, which are not onerous at all, that can be made to make the PG corpus of texts much more useful to academia and scholars. Here are a few that come to mind: a) Provide full catalog info for the source of the digital text. b) Provide the complete set of page scans. (I'm still of the opinion this should be a requirement, with the allowance that scans need not be provided under several defined circumstances.) c) In markup in the Master copy, add markers (plus maybe XLinks) to page breaks found in the source. 2) Any 21st century digital repository of texts should allow the ability of users to annotate, reference, and interlink the texts. This can be done without altering the texts themselves. Thus, the digital repository will do things that no traditional academic library of atomic-based artifacts can do. Thus, scholars themselves will improve the texts to meet their needs -- we need not do everything for them if we give them the tools to do it themselves. Jon Noring _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d