Day: December 14, 2004

I have become fascinated with the Library of Congress series on the digital future. I strongly encourage you to visit this site and view the presentations.

The presentation from Dec. 13 concerned the potential of digitizing everything. One of the examples concerned keeping a record (over time) of the Internet. The presenter, Brewster Kahle, discussed the “Way Back Machine.” This is a fascinating project. I tried it with my original web site and it has my material back to 1997. Not that anyone but me might care about the origins of my web material, but the idea is fascinating when applied to other content.

Google is “going back to the future” (my apologies the movie writer I stole this from) and working with the Harvard libraries to develop technologies to provide access to library holdings. Harvard has about 15 million volumes so it represents a good test site.

The back to the future comment – my way of saying that students may actually rediscover the library.

See my earlier post regarding a similar project at the Library of Congress

I am turning off the comments option on this blog. Too many spammers use this feature to add their messages and links to their sites. You do not see these comments because I must approve comments before they appear. Because nearly all comments have been spam, this review process may not be worth the effort. Maybe I will try the comment option again after some time has passed.