Re:A Better Link (Score 1)

Katie Hafner's article is crucial. In the area of mass digitization, the main problem is that most people think paper while dealing with digital files. Gregory Crane calls this "incunabular" and he is right. This question also points toward something a little more fundamental: we should be weary of quick, pracmatic-looking, solutions to digitization because we may end up paying a great deal more down the line. Clifford Lynch, in a short article published in the volume on Open Access edited by Neil Jacobs, argues that we should not think only of open access to digital documents, but also about open computation. I believe he is dead on. Full digitization requires opening up the full computational potential of documents and the OCA knows and wants that. Google, on the contrary, wants to monopolize the computational potential of digital documents it digitizes. Its contracts are non-exclusive because Google relies on the fact that, within an institution, once digitization has been done once, it will be extremely difficult to digitize it again. Especially if people do not understand what is at stake in open computation.