Reading the Universal Digital Library

As online teaching grows, we are always looking for good ideas and project partners to help foment the acquisition of knowledge and memes on the internet and in the virtual classroom.

The Universal Digital Library is an ambitious project we fully support:

Up until now, the transmission of our cultural heritage has depended on limited numbers of copies in fragile media. The fires of Alexandria irrevocably severed our access to any of the works of the ancients. In a thousand years, only a few of the paper documents we have today will survive the ravages of deterioration, loss, and outright destruction.

With no more than 10 million unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 100 million since the beginning of recorded history, the task of preservation is much larger. With new digital technology, though, this task is within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort can be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries.

This is an ambitious project that is slowly winning its goal of indexing every printed page in the world and we cannot wait to read every word!

Celebrating Static Pages

There is nothing wrong with creating a plain text, static, non-MySQL webpage that serves as a personal online portal for identification and being.

Information does not need to move and wiggle and have comments in order to be important as the ARClog blog argues:

Arguably, blogs appear to have eclipsed what was once the domain of the published journal article. While I still believe in the viability of the published article as a communication vehicle and as a demonstration of one’s ability to succeed in the venue of traditional disciplinary publishing, for many academic librarians - particularly those new to the profession - that may no longer be the case. And if blogs were ever to replace scholarly journal articles as the gold standard for those on the tenure track, published journal articles would likely languish even more.

The power of the world is in the living expression of thoughts and in the association of meanings -- and the frame around those ideas must never matter.

A cave painting is just as valuable as a hieroglyph as is a crayon drawing as is a printed page in a magazine as is a personal web page that has been indexed by the search spiders, but not updated, for the last five years.

Celebrate the static page by recognizing the value in the reverence for the creation of the human word in any form.

Why We Support the Open Library

The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive and a fresh sort of take as a historical subset of the Wayback Machine:

The Open Library website was created by the Internet Archive to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online. The vision is to create free web access to important book collections from around the world.

Books are scanned and then offered in an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.

The Open Library provides equal access to books that might not otherwise be available to the general public the world over.

If we believe information belongs to all of us -- and we do -- then supporting the means and the memes for equal access to learning must be the preeminent effort for each of us.