SciFi Motherlode Donated to Canadian University 194
Freshly Exhumed writes: "SciFan aficionados might soon be lining up to study at the University of Calgary due to an
amazing donation: A massive collection of science fiction and pulp magazines spanning the last century has been donated to the University of Calgary which officials say will be a boon for literary and pop culture research. William Gibson had spent many of his 92 years sealing his prized collection in plastic, leaving behind a true motherlode of science fiction writings."
Since He Was 95... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Since He Was 95... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Since He Was 95... (Score:2, Informative)
Um, unless of course this is a collection & obituary sent back in time...
Re:Since He Was 95... (Score:2)
Maybe he waited until he could read before he started collecting Sci-Fi... *shrug*
Re:Since He Was 95... (Score:4, Interesting)
I for one am not ready to count out the idea that time travel was involved and that this is the cyberpunk author William Gibson. I think that the age of some of the pieces in the collection supports that theory as well.
As we all know, the sci-fi writers of the 20th century are, in the future, remembered as pre-cogs, and for that reason, they are sometimes retrieved by time dredge by interested parties in the distant future. Phil Dick tells us that this happened on one occasion to Poul Andersen. It seems conceivable that this happened to Gibson, but he was returned to a different time, either accidentally or for some purpose -- perhaps to amass this very sci-fi collection.
But why ??? What forces are at work here ?
This William Gibson's Identity (Score:2, Informative)
Hopefully... (Score:1)
doubtful (Score:2, Informative)
Re:doubtful (Score:4, Informative)
Kyzia said some of it should get to ibiblio [ibiblio.org], and since some of it is from the 19th century, that's eminently reasonable. That "very little science fiction" includes authors like Jules Verne [ibiblio.org], whose stuff is already available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.net]. And while we're visiting the 19th century, though the article doesn't mention him, also freely available are the works of H.G. Wells [ibiblio.org].
Responsibility for preserving information... (Score:5, Insightful)
With this mania about preventing copies, I can see a day when NOBODY can benefit from when copyright expires on an item, because it's long mouldered away, neglected by it's owner, and locked away from those who would have preserved it. Really, copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period, or else compulsory licensing to libraries and archives should be part of the deal, in order to ensure that the stuff the copyright owner makes money off of today can be enjoyed by the public tommorrow.
After all, the intent of copyright was to ensure the public had access to creative works, but making sure the creator had an incentive (ie, they got paid) to release their work and profit by it. But the key intent is to make sure that the work is acessible to all, so that the public as a whole can benefit. After all, that's why we have libraries, so that the society as a whole can be enriched.
Unfortunately, there are some who believe the exact opposite, that money should come before the public good... and they can afford to hire politicians to write laws that enforce that belief, and the lawyers to make it stick. The irony here is that corporations too were created for the public good [context.org].
And it doesn't look like any concrete reform is going to come out of Enron and Worldcom. We really need to address the issue of corporations divorcing themselves from the rest of society, and acting as if they're above the law. Perhaps we need to go back to chartering corporations with specific aims that can benefit the public, by power of the state legislatures again?
as if? (Score:1)
All the rights, and bugger all of the responsibilities... the day that corporations became above the law passed a long long time ago....
Re:Responsibility for preserving information... (Score:1)
Re:Responsibility for preserving information... (Score:2)
This goes beyond the simple fact that copyright was specifically intended to increase the pool of available material. If a work is not available, why should the government go to the trouble to protect the author's interests.
Authors should hold up their end of the bargain.
If their publisher doesn't have any interest in making money off the work anymore, just what value does it hold for the author anymore?
Re:Responsibility for preserving information... (Score:2)
Not that i necessarilly agree with the proposed solution, but i don't think that that would really benefit the publisher.
Look how many people swap media now even though it's technically illegal. You think people would keep buying it if all of the sudden it was perfectly legitimate to d/l a free copy?
Of course if i were going to write the law myself, i would put in a safeguard or two. After X amount of time goes by without the material being available all contracts regarding it would be nullified and control would revert to the author. After X + a year, the copyright would expire if the author hadn't made it available again.
Of course given what i've heard about the RIAA the first part of that would be a great idea even right now.
Re:Responsibility for preserving information... (Score:2)
They need $$$ to clean and preserve the material! (Score:2)
I've been looking over the UCalagary library site [ucalgary.ca] but I couldn't find any explicit donation mechanism. Anyone know who to contact to donate funds to preserve this material?
Re:They need $$$ to clean and preserve the materia (Score:1)
donations (Score:4, Informative)
Re:donations (Score:2)
Now, that's in the US, I don't know about Canada.
Re:donations (Score:2)
I don't know if universities are considered charitable organizations or not, and I don't know how Canadian law works.
Regardless, if you want to donate, you should contact the library and find out how you can help financially and how you can be assured that your funds will go to help the restoration of this collection. Otherwise, you might be buying knick-knacks to decorate the home of the university's president (or regent, or chancellor, or whatever he's called).
Re:donations (Score:1)
Also, a quick search revealed that in Ontario and BC (at least) if a purpose is specified, they must spend the money on that. Presumably this would be similar in Alberta, but I don't know for sure.
Re:donations (Score:1)
I think most of the provinces have that rule.
How to donate to the Gibson collection (Score:2, Informative)
digitize? (Score:4, Interesting)
from what it sounds like in the article, they're going to catolouge this and stick it on a shelf for people to read... like the article mentions, pulp fiction sci fi was meant to be thrown away...those books will only last a few precious years of handling before they're lost forever.
i've seen a few book digitizing devices, but i've never seen them in wide use at libraries....does the library of congress digitize their library? is there anyway to access/query it? a book only lasts forever, as does a digital copy and the means to read the digital copy, but an obscure dusty book on a dusty shelf out of reach halfway across the country from me isn't going to help me much on my college thesis (or 10,000 other people who might need to access exerpts of the book for some reason or another)
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
More likely they will keep them in the reserve room, and if you want to look at anything, you might have to stick with copies.
Re:digitize? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:digitize? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for digital media, there's no reason in theory why it couldn't be built to last for centuries. In practice, of course, such things would probably be too expensive, but I fully expect to see some longer-lived digital media (at least equivalent to acid-free paper) before the century is out.
Equipment (Score:1, Insightful)
Ask those people who had to pay a tonne of money to have their old Wordstar CP/M disks transferred to MS word.
In a century or more most of what we produced digitally will be gone forever.
Re:Equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, your CD-ROM drive won't last the 100 years they claim the disks will, but it's a documented format and people could easily build a reader if they felt the need. Hell, with a really high-resolution scan you could read the data directly. And that's with CDs, something hard to preserve.
Xerox (and others) have been working on a printed storage medium, where data is represented by little left or right leaning slashes and encoded with enough error-checking and redundancy that you can recover the data from any piece of paper large enough to hold it. (Put 1/8th of a page of data together and any 1/8th of a page contains all of it.)
The Xerox method was actually intended for digital watermarks, so that links to the original document would allow people to find it from an old printed copy, and so embed author info, etc, in every page of the document and have it look, to the naked eye, like a uniform light-gray background.
You could do something like this fairly easily with the intent being to save the data. The storage was fairly impressive, 15k per page or something, and you could use a simple self-documenting compression to cram a lot onto each page. Print these out as your "fall of technology" backup and store properly. Any self-respecting geek could write a reader in very little time. For extra insurance, print a few pages of human-readable text describing the procedure and offering psuedo-code for decompressing the data.
On the computer, store everything in text-based formats and store it with the appropriate RFCs for the formats for the non-text based data. Even if people forget what XML or HTML are they can still see the original text in there and figure out how to strip that out easily if need be.
This is assuming that people don't copy the data to a new storage medium when updating their computers, and that the whole world forgets how to access common formats.
And yes, I do know of which I speak. I've reverse engineered disk-storage formats from old PCs to allow disk-images to be used as file systems on modern PCs, to extract old files, or for high-level emulators to use.
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
Re:digitize? (Score:4, Interesting)
All of the audio material is stamped on titanium records guaranteed to last 1,000's of years, for example, and they even developed a paper for their printed material which is fireproof, acidproof, bugproof, and supposed to last 10's of thousands of years. Some sort of blend of Irish linen or something - very high quality stuff.
Say what you will about CoS, but Author Services has been doing a pretty good job of preserving the stuff they want to preserve.
They could commercialize their techniques and make a fortune.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
You aren't suggesting that the Church of Scientology is out to make a profit are you?
Re:digitize? (Score:3, Insightful)
And Irish linen burns quite nicely, thank you.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
In practice, that is true; however, you can easily copy the partially-degraded (but still readable, due to error correction) copy onto the latest media format, without loss of fidelity or information, as long as you don't wait too long.
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
That said I agree that an electronic archive would be great. If nothing else, it makes the collection so much more accessible. But don't ruin the originals for it.
Re:digitize? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is almost certainly not the case. The idea that books turn to dust on the shelves is largely false. Even books printed on quite acidic paper will probably last for centuries (with typical research library handling frequency) if they are well looked after. If they are cut up and fed into scanners, they will then be thrown away. Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals). Also lost would be all the historical value inherent in the books as physical objects and in the collection as a whole.
The "slow fires" were invented by technocrat library managers as propaganda to generate funds for "preservation" projects. These huge projects have given the managers much power and prestige while destroying millions of volumes of irreplaceable books and newspapers. Read Double Fold (Nicholson Baker, Amazon [amazon.com]) for much more on this subject.
Re:digitize? (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, it is also possible to do non-destructive scans of material at a very high quality. There are some nice examples at the British Library (the actual place, no idea if it's online). However this, of course, expensive --- so is unlikely to be done in this case. Pity.
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
Oh. I see your point.
Or - no - wait! Why not (get this) do the scanning right? D'ya think that might work? Huh? Do ya? Do ya?
Re:digitize? (Score:5, Insightful)
What type of experiance? The quality of the scans is of course dependent on how carefully they are done. Notice that the National Yiddish Book Center/Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library [http] did just that to a lot of the books, and produced high enough quality scans to make new books from them.
Also, I sometimes scan public-domain books into the computer. I just sent scans of several books to someone with webspace and a preexisting site. If you look at those scans, you may get the impression that the contrast and grayscale was lost. What you probably don't realize, is that those are scaled for the web, at 90 KB for two pages. It's not feasible to put up the original 4 MB scans, and few really care about the difference. I would assume that other projects would be similar; you can get excellent scans if you talk to the person, but they aren't going to waste webspace and bandwidth offering huge high-detail scans to everyone who wanders by.
Re:digitize? (Score:3, Informative)
Now the GPS/mapping software I use supports it, but I have no way to create MrSID files, or I would.
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
As I said in the comment to which you are responding, read Double Fold for much more on this. I don't have the time or inclination to repeat the details of all the hugely expensive and disastrously destructive "preservation" projects that Baker documents there. Yes, it is possible to scan (or photograph) books non-destructively, and to get good results. For all I know, the Yiddish project you identify is an example of such good practice, which I fully support. But the great majority of the books, newspapers, and journals "preserved" in the last fifty years have in fact been destroyed in the process, replaced at great cost by a shoddy partial copy with a shorter shelf-life.
Baker's remarks about contrast, colour, and greyscale are mostly for microfilm results, for which it is the normal deliberate decision to use very high-contrast film, hugely compressing the dynamic range of the original. Digital scans also usually lose much of the dynamic range, but are often not as appalling as microfilm. It has a lot to do with the technology chosen for scanning, and less to do with the size of the resulting images. Digital preservation projects usually scan in 8-bit greyscale at 600dpi, which is woefully inadequate, of course. And the results are often kept in proprietary formats in proprietary Document Management Systems.
That's all I'm going to say on the subject. Read the book.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
The results are fabulous looking originals that are then mangled by idiots who recompress them to 30KB JPEGs so they can shove them on their Geocities account. . .
Good pirated books are simular too, there are a fair number of groups of people who translate books into PDF formate illegaly, and the better groups do a darn good job at it. Of course the lower quality groups, err, suck. A lot.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
I have books over 100 years old, including some fairly rare first editions, and the idea of cutting them up to scan them gives me great pain. I'd rather make the extra effort to process 'em one page at a time, tedious as that would be compared to despining 'em and running 'em thru a sheetfed scanner.
Remember, too, that given the relatively ephemeral nature of even the best digital media, and the problems of accessing outdated media and file formats, a digital copy is of no real archival value if it doesn't have a hardcopy backup.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
There are high end scanners. They are incredibly expensive (~$10,000) and, since the page isn't pressed flat, it can be hard to get a good scan. But even given only a flatbed scanner, it's a lot easier to get good scans without destroying the book than a lot of people seem to think.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
Tho $10k isn't a very large investment compared to a library full of irreplaceable books.
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
Just a vertical wedge that you can open the boot and drape over the narrow edge of the wedge, scan, flip the page, and repeat. So the spine of the book is totally unstressed.
OK you MIT students, get to work
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
Experience suggests that the scans will be of mediocre quality (missing some pages, missing parts of other pages, frequently having insufficient contrast to be legible, and losing any colour or greyscale information present in the originals).
Really? I think most astronomers would disagree, the ADS [u-strasbg.fr] has scanned a significant fraction of the back catlogue of astronomical journals. While most of the journals now publish electronic editions as well as paper most of these only go back to the mid to late 90's, online access to the back catalogue is amazingly useful for research. A full list of back catalogue of journals they provide access to is here [u-strasbg.fr] as you can see they've scanned some of them all the way back to the 1880's or 90's. Scan quality is uniformly good, I've yet to find a badly scanned journal article and I' use this service every day.
Al.Re:digitize? (Score:1)
We'll set up this shop where someone in the front reads from the book and everyone else copies down the words into -new- books. Heck, you could even add caligraphy to the words to spice it up some.
I'm going to be rich!
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
These aren't books. (Score:2)
They are not book as a rule. They are PULPS. Magazines printed on paper that would be considered low quality even by newspaper publishers. Add to that the fact that they may have color artwork that used unstable inks/dyes. Add to that that they are already old, 75+ for many. Maybe some were pH buffered by Mr. Gibson as he collected them, maybe not - the treatments are not cheap and add up fast. They will already be fragile. They are not going to take much additional handling.
They shouldn't be cut up to scan, but they need to be scanned ASAP. On the plus side, they don't have book style binding. They should tolerate a fair amount of flattening for a good scan.
They should be more broadly available to be read than these could possibly tolerate. A lot of that old stuff has never been reprinted (some quite desevedly
Re:digitize? (Score:2)
That's a hell of a lot different from some 1950-era paperback printed on the cheapest acidic paper available, using the lousiest binding method that didn't immediately fall apart on the bookseller's shelf.
Re:digitize? (Score:1)
You can get pretty much any book from pretty much any university in North America through Document Delivery or similar dept. at your library. They check out OCLC (IIRC), and as long as the book isn't in a special collection (and sometimes even then) they'll get it for you. Special Collections books will even be photocopied for you, usually for a small fee, by the other library.
Well it has to be said (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Well it has to be said (Score:3, Interesting)
Be forewarned, these are part of a special collection on "Human Sexuality" and can't be checked out the library. I don't think you can even browse the collection without requesting permission, but it's nice to know there's a larger collection of porn in comparison to what's under your bed.
-Mr. Fusion
Re:Well it has to be said (Score:1)
role of women... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:role of women... (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently read a book by Ben Bova (The Watchmen [baen.com]), a re-release of a pair of novels originally written in the 60's, where he specifically says in the 1994 foreword that he did NOT alter the original text, and hence you would find women referred to generically as "girls".
Re:role of women... (Score:2)
role of women [google.com] produces 2,780,000 hits.
role of men [google.com] produces 2,590,000 hits.
It would seem men are the under-studied gender by google-counting.
elderly (Score:1, Redundant)
Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been looking forward to the first book of his 'noughties trilogy'. As well as the slow progression (but certainly inevitable!) of Neuromancer [corona.bc.ca] and the Zen Differential [corona.bc.ca], based on Count Zero, to the silver screen.
A big sigh of relief, and what a big boon to our understanding of the past's view of the future, it's now when hindsight truly makes the hopes and fears of past people known.
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2, Informative)
Then again, I suppose most people are used to Gibson, someone who wrote 'Neuromancer' out of his fear of computers, as the 'father' of Cyberpunk.
For more information on John Shirley [darkecho.com]
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Flatline (ot) (Score:2)
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Golden Age seems to have a very rosy outlook on life. Even Asimov's bleakest cloud had the silver lining of the Foundation saving the day. CJ Cherryh wrote "Life, it goes on, you know?" (erm, pardon, dont remember the name of the book, but can describe the cover)
Golden Age SF seemed to say "Tech (eventually) conquers all!" but cyberpunk states "Life, even with my Fujitsu eyeballs and Sony GreyMatter upgrades, still sucks."
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Didn't that have a sticker on the package announcing "Soon to be a major motion picture - with soundtrack by Devo!"
I'm glad I didn't go down to the theater and camp out waiting for tickets to go on sale...
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Yeah! I remember now! When the game loaded, there was a 30secondish Devo snippet from the alleged soundtrack to the movie. I remember playing the game and thinking how totally badass a move based on the game would be. I guess Matrix fulfilled that desire for me (even though, arguably, it *should* have been Johnny Mnemonic).
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Please do. I find a lot of the union-allience "worlds" that CJ Cherryh writes at least as depressing as the Cypherpunk stuff. Or maybe that is just her skill at putting her charactors up against such pressure.
Of corse cypherpunk tends to be "life, it goes on" too, I mean it sucks, but it drags on. don't they normally steal the vaccene, or uncover the memories, or....I mean very very few cypherpunk books are entirely soul crushing.
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Vernor Vinge has more rights to that claim than Gibson. True Names [amazon.com] was published in 1981, 3 years ahead of Neuromancer.
The True Names reference above is for the re-release of a 20th anniversary edition, that includes 11 essays, one by RMS.
Re:Not *the* William Gibson?!?! (Score:2)
Scanning (Score:1)
The Merril Collection (Score:4, Interesting)
A contemporary of Asimov, Leiber, Pohl and others she donated around 5000 items. The collection is now about 57000 items; Novels, Anthologies, Essays and more. What's really neat about the whole thing is that it's housed in a standard Toronto public library and anyone can use their services.
anyway...
J:)
Re:The Merril Collection (Score:1)
When I was at the University of Toronto, 1977-1982, the Merrill Collection was known as the Spaced-Out Library. It was housed in Boys and Girls House, the central children's library - right in the middle of the U of T campus.
We called it the "Engineering Reading Room" and spent many study and a good few class hours there.
Sniff..... (Score:2)
Re:Sniff..... (Score:1)
What a coincidence (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if this collector had any particular interest in cyberpunk? William Gibson owning a massive collection of Science Fiction publications. What an irony if it didn't include one of the pioneers of a significant genre of SF - the cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson.
Hopefully (Score:1, Interesting)
I once searched for old issues of a pop [yes, music] magazine only to be told there are no copies left in any of the national libraries. All had been stolen. And, the ones I received were torn and had centerfold posters missing, etc.
Hopefully, Los Americanos can preserve the Donald Duck mentality present in the Western world post-WWII era bewtter than the hopelessly traditional/conventional institutions in Europe like The Vatican, Louvre, etc.
Who will save the Ackermansion? (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently Forrey needs some cash to retire. Sure would be nice if a benefactor could step in and preserve the collection intact. Visit the Ackermansion [vwh.net] here.
i'm thinking about moving to calgary ... (Score:1)
Edit that? (Score:2, Insightful)
The article could be about a japanese brain surgeon.
Half of us would go "What? The father of cyberpunk got a new job in Japan? Cool
Doh!" anyway...
Sci fi everywhere in Canada (Score:1)
Copywrites, Digitizing, and other thoughts... (Score:2, Interesting)
If the work was created as work-for-hire (in other words, a publisher/corporation paid the writer to write that piece) then the copywrite can last for a duration of up to 120 years from the publish date.
So a work-for-hire piece will become public domain sooner than a freelanced piece. Knowing that one's children will benefit from one's hard work and creativity is certainly an incentive to try and create something for the public to enjoy. The more they enjoy it, the more income your family will receive.
I have a lot of old sci-fi paperbacks that I've collected over the past 30 years. Not that I was collecting them, but I was reading them and then sticking them on my bookshelves. Most of the older ones crumble now when I pull them out to read them. So I'm all for digitizing this collection to preserve it! Using proper storage techniques, yes these paper goods can last for centuries. Thank heavens that Mr. Gibson made some effert to do this! But with today's technology, digitizing would be a more permanent solution.
I would recommend digitizing at 4000 dpi (optical) to maximize the image quality. 600 dpi would not be adequate for high end printing, should some publisher wish to print some of the collection. I would think that on a university, there would be enough students who are deep afficianados of science fiction who would be quite dedicated to working towards copying this collection with great care.
Yes, magnetic media fades, but optical media does not. Well, so long as you don't scratch the disk...
All of the works with a publishing date prior to 1923 could be immediately posted to the internet for access. Works after 1923, permission would be needed from the copywrite holders to be posted digitally, depending on the state of the copywrite. Chances are, with a lot of the older works, permission could be had fairly easily. There are times when the children of the artist are sufficiently well off that they don't need the income, or they would like to see their parent's name become known again, and release some or all of the works to public domain.
Last, I'd like to point out the shear volume of work and dedication that Mr. Gibson had put into his collection! Finding periodicals that have gone out of print (comic books and the like) is NOT easy! In the article, the brief mention of the traveling Mr. Gibson did should give one an idea of what was involved with this. On top of that, he loved the genre enough to preserve it as best he could. Condsider how we are going to benefit from his work! A nod should also go to his son, Andrew Gibson for making the donation. Just as his father preserved the hard work of many writers and artists, Andrew Gibson has preserved the hard work of his father.
To the both of you, I'd like to say thank you. To my fellow
Optical Media (Score:2)
Re:Copywrites, Digitizing, and other thoughts... (Score:2)
Ok, i don't care what they told congress at the time, what the lifespan + 70 (or whatever it si now) guarantees is that Mickey Mouse [findlaw.com] doesn't fall into the public domain.
92 years?? (Score:1)
The Collector (Score:2)
% type of electromagnet you might see suspended from a crane. He is
% dressed as
Collector: Behold, I am the Collector, and I have come to add
you to my collection.
[turns on a magnet, which attracts Lucy's
breastplate. She sails up to the magnet, where she
is trapped]
Lawless: Must
[unties the straps holding it on. Below, everyone
in the audience produces a camera]
Maybe later. [reties straps]
-- "Treehouse of Horror X"
From BABF01 [snpp.com]
M@
Larger than MIT's collection? (Score:5, Informative)
The size of the Gibson Donation is quite astonishing. The MITSFS Collection supposedly has 90% of all english-language science fiction ever published, and we have deals with the publishing companies to get a copy of every new SF book that comes out - often before the bookstores get them. I guess the Calgary donation has a lot of stuff that we totally overlooked (the Saturday Evening Post stuff), or else a lot of foreign language stuff (MITSFS isn't so strong on Japanese science fiction manga, for instance). If anybody is ever up in Cambridge, check the opening times [mit.edu], and stop by.
Patiwat Panurach
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu
Re:Larger than MIT's collection? (Score:2)
Re:Larger than MIT's collection? (Score:2, Insightful)
But when you put large numbers of like minded geeks together, its sorta natural that they accumulate large collections of geek hardware. For that matter, MIT also has the US's largest circulating anime video collection (you don't have to be a student to borrow) as well as the world's largest model railroad.
Oh, yes. Much larger. (Score:2)
If you want their collection to grow, so
would they. Enough students asking and they
might get better office space.
Make it electronic. (Score:3, Insightful)
Photos of the collection, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/unicomm/news/gibson/
with photos of the collection and more. it's really cool, actually.
This will be a boon to SciFi-in-OED researchers (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been helping to research science fiction terms like 'little green men' for the OED [jessesword.com], and I can only gasp and drool and wait for UCalgary's army of cataloging librarians to make the collection accessible to the public.
This will be a great source of information on how and when science fiction words came into use in English, and if I had a sabbatical-type job, I'd have just found what I wanted to do with my next sabbatical.
We still need help, by the way, so please help the Oxford English Dictionary [oed.com] learn more about science fiction and fandom.
copywrite and information fade out (Score:4, Insightful)
My chief worry is that once a work becomes economically uninteresting to a major publisher it will vanish from the public's ability to read it. True there may be a copy stored in an ill backed up database in a dark room under the stairs but this does little to enhance our culture or enrich the lifes of the average reader unwilling to brave the, "beware of the leopard", signs.
Perhaps we need to resurrect the idea of key escrow only this time implementing it for the citizen's benefit. Perhaps as a condition of selling a copyrighted work the publisher should be forced to deposit the work, along with any appropriate keys with an escrow agency. As copyrights lapse the agency would release the works to the public via a website or whatever miraculous technology replaces the web.
If the government is going to be involved in the guardianship of corporate profits via DMCA etc I would like to see it at least attempt the guardianship of fair use of the cultural heritage we are creating now.
Uk Suck (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I wonder... (Score:1)
Light saber duel rages through area until, with a single slice, Luke's hand is chopped off.
Darth Vader: My sword has tasted blood and is sated.
Luke: I can't even commit Seppuko. My honor is tainted.
Darth Vader: Obi Wan lied to you. I am your father.
Luke: Nooooooo.
Darth Vader: Not that I'd admit that to anyone else after your shameful defeat.
Luke jumps off edge.
It would explain Obi Wan. We got the whole ancestral spirit thing going there.
Re:Umm, is this for real? (Score:1, Troll)
Yep.
TWW
Re:Microsoft (Score:1)